This might be controversial to some, but I think as a prepper you shouldn’t grow your own food. Especially if you live in an urban or suburban area. If you already live on a farm or a homestead, you’ll need to defend your property when the SHTF, but if you live in the city or a suburban neighborhood I can’t think of any redeeming reason to grow your own food in preparation of what’s likely to come.
So much of the prepping genre focuses on homesteading and growing your own food just like folks did in the good old days. It’s easy to understand how people get roped into that belief system, but this thinking is flawed for numerous reasons. Living on a farm makes you very visible towards both the starving masses and also to potential authorities too.
Homesteading Dreams
Believe it or not, I actually want to own a homestead someday. I love nature, I love animals, I love natural food, and I love the way a plum or nectarine tastes right off the tree. One of my aspirations in life is actually to own and live on a farm. That someday will be after we survive what we are likely to go through though. Definitely not before.
I often day dream about how scenic and beautiful my homestead would be. The rustic wooden fence posts and cows grazing on fresh grass with their heads down and pressing apples to make apple cider in October. The amazing eggs that can only come from outdoor chickens on pasture and the creamy delicious raw milk. The way I would plant maple trees that turn red and orange and yellow once a year and the fragrant pines that would dot my property. This is the best way to live in my opinion, but it’s also my opinion that this will not be the ideal scenario in a grid down scenario when people are desperate.
For more about why you shouldn’t own a homestead as a prepper, you can read our post here. I’d like to focus the rest of this post on why growing your own food in the city or suburbs is a waste of your time and a losing proposition as a part of your preps.
If you really enjoy gardening and growing your own food, then that’s great you should do it. The chances of it helping you survive a disaster is slim to none though. For that reason, it is a waste of time and effort in regards to prepping and your attention would be much better suited to more fruitful tasks to ensure your survival. Relying on stored food is definitely the way to go, and I hope I can convince you of that. Growing your own food to survive a grid down disaster scenario is a fool’s errand as far as I’m concerned. It can also bring you problems during a disaster you might not have anticipated.
The Attention You Will Draw
In the suburbs and in the city, not very many people grow a vegetable garden in their day to day life. Not many people have a blueberry bush. If you have these things in a grid down scenario, they will be looted and pillaged within one day. It will happen real fast. That’s unfortunate and sad in a sense, but losing your garden or your blueberries or your apples on your apple tree would honestly be the least of your worries.
When roaming hungry people notice that you have a garden and that you’re growing your own food, your home instantly becomes a target. This is what you want to go to every measure to avoid. If there are goodies available to plunder outside, what might be inside they’ll be thinking. When you consider that your outdoor grown food will be discovered on day one, this really puts you behind the 8 ball for the remainder of the ordeal you’ve done so well to prepare for. The whole time you are hunkering down and trying to survive desperate people will view your home as a means of their own survival. That’s just bad.
If you had relied on storable food, and properly secured your home, the roaming and hungry masses would have likely never paid you any mind. You’d be able to weather the storm totally under the radar. Discreet and totally unnoticed. Having your vegetable garden or greenhouse or fruit tree orchard can totally ruin all of that in a disaster scenario. Totally ruin it.
Timing
It’s important to recognize that most plant based foods are only available to harvest about one month out of the year. Will that timing line up perfectly with the very unpredictable nature of what we’re preparing for? Not likely. Maybe it will happen in May when there are mulberries on the mulberry tree. Mulberries might be tasty and might have an impressive nutrient profile. They don’t fill you up though. They are not calorie dense. Like with most fruits, 45 minutes after you eat them you feel hunger again. This just isn’t sustainable and this could apply to any fruit or vegetable you enjoy growing or plan to grow to tide you over.
I know I hammer this point home numerous times and in numerous posts on this website, but in my opinion it is so important to strategically and mentally prepare for anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months of survival, at the most. The notion of “I’m going to have to learn to live this way and be self sufficient forever” is a very flawed logic. I fell in the trap of that type of thinking before in the past. You’re not going to have to survive “forever”.
What you need to survive what we are likely to go through is nutrient dense, caloric dense stored food. Plant based foods are good in a well rounded diet, but when your imperative is to eat something that keeps you full and provides you with enough energy to get you through the day, food that you grew in a garden is not going to sustain you.
