Survival Garden

Most vegetable gardens feed you handsomely in August and have quietly packed up by January. There is another kind of garden, less photogenic and a good deal more useful, that leaves sacks of potatoes in a cool shed, strings of onions in the light, a shelf of hard-skinned squash and jars of dried beans that rattle when you shake them. It feeds people in February. This book is about that garden. It is a calm, practical guide to growing a real share of your household’s food: the crops grown for calories, protein and keeping quality rather than for looks. It begins with honest questions about how much ground it takes and how to plan by what a family actually eats, then takes the staple crops one by one before turning to the skills that carry one year’s harvest into the next: saving seed, curing, storing, drying, freezing and preserving. What you’ll find inside • What a garden can realistically feed, with the published land and yield figures set side by side so you can judge for yourself • Planning by calories, protein and vitamins, including how to bridge the hungry gap in spring • Soil fertility on a budget, from compost and leaf mould to green manures and a homegrown comfrey feed • Potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, dry beans, broad beans and peas for drying • Maize for meal (flint, dent and flour types), with milling and lime-cooking • Wheat cut by sickle and threshed by hand, plus hulless barley, oats, rye, quinoa, grain amaranth and buckwheat on a garden scale • Sunflowers, peanuts and pumpkin seeds for oil and protein, plus onions, garlic, leeks, storage roots, hardy brassicas and perennial staples • Seed saving explained from first principles, then crop by crop, with isolation distances and a simple germination test • Clamps, pits and root cellars, and how to…