Doomsday Challenge

[johno]

Will the world end in 2012? Who knows? But it's as good a year as any to be prepared for self-sufficiency. I thought it would be fun to see how many of us can prepare for the worst next year. The goal: be able to feed yourself from December 21, 2012 through the winter to, say April 21, 2013. Thoughts? Should it be 3 months instead of four?

Anything goes. While I think the focus should be on growing plants, hunting and raising livestock would also count. Stocking up would count - we want the city folks to have a shot! What about water?

Help me set up some guidelines...

[robertb]

I could do it, but it would take a disproportionate amount of ground, and it would be a boring diet. Mainly potatoes and cabbages at that time of year. If I really went at it, I could catch enough fish to provide protein, as long as everyone else didn't have the same idea.

Trouble is, that situation in the middle of a large city doesn't bear thinking of. I've seen the mayhem and looting a power cut can lead to, let alone long-term breakdown.

[spacecase0]

my personal goal is to have a way to grow all my food,
and do it without electricity.
the grid is the most likely thing to fail in the future, the sun is flaring up and is more likely than not to cause another Carrington event within the next year or maybe 2, past 2 years we are ok.
and getting water out of the well for all the plants is the big challenge in my area.
the rest of living without electricity I already have worked out already.

my garden is 200 miles from current home, so unless I loose my job,
I have to also convince others to do all this for me...
I will show up and plant it all, but then I have to go back to work

also being that I am not there, unless I travel lots like I use to (and gas is pricey lately),
I will end up feeding the people that live there and not me,
I can drag dried corn home, and potatoes, but none of the fresh things on a regular basis
sadly I am still testing plants that grow food in the winter there (when it is wet and things don't need watered), so it will take me a few more years to figure out and have production of the grains that grow without using ground water.

in my previous tests I eat for as long as I can before going to the store or tapping into my stored food, and that way I just get a time I succeeded out of my test,
also I know what I was craving when I did not go to the store, and
that shows me what else I need to be growing to have a better diet.
but maybe setting a number of months will get me to try harder...
but I am growing things that I would have never thought of till I tried not going to the store for 6 months in a row (but that was a test of my long term stored food that I have in case we get another year without a summer).

[12540dumont]

Johnno,
In a scenario, I could feed my immediate family from now until March. I suspect by then some of what I've planted would be coming on.

In real life, my mother and the rest of the family (the one's who think it's a waste of a college education for me to be a farmer) would turn up at the door and want to be the first one's fed. I don't have enough to feed all of them. They would be the first ones to want to eat the seeds in the bank.

In real life, if it were summer, we could not do it. We couldn't get water out of the well. (I have a couple of hundred gallons in a tank, but the garden would have that for breakfast!). In winter, we would at least have water.

If it were winter, the wood burner in the barn is well supplied and once the house got too cold, well we could move in there. My son was born there, so we've had to do it before!

We are too close to town to have any real hope of surviving. The town folks would be here and beg for what they could, and then take the rest.

We've managed through a heck-of-an earthquake here. We were several days without power. I sure would miss all of you guys if the power went out. I would miss not being able to look up the things I need to think about and learn.

I'm not prepared to be a cannibal. I'm not sure I could be a looter, and I'd miss my Chianti to go with those favas. I also don't think I could let anyone go hungry as long as we had food. I saw a very sleek and fat gopher today, a golden back. He was eating walnuts. Now gopher stuffed with walnuts sounds almost edible. Almost as good as stewed rooster! I think I'd fish too, but I'm not above poaching deer. It's a shame we are too far south for reindeer. Now that's a yummy critter. Caribou stew?

[MikeH]

An interesting challenge and one that we've been looking at although not for any doomsday reasons. After some noodling, we framed the problem as needing to eat from one harvest to the next while having the maximum calories for the least calories expended. Livestock is out since we'd have to cultivate land to feed them through the winter. (Having said that maybe chickens, rabbits or dwarf goats.)

The core diet would have to be root vegetables - potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, sunchokes; squashes; cabbage. Also onions, beans, soybeans and hulless grains such as barley and oats which store well. We're actually going to have a go at a week's worth of dinners only using root vegetables. We have canned tomatoes, pickled beets, dilly beans from the garden, sweet apple cider (frozen since it is not pasteurized) and a supply of dried basil, oregano, cilantro, lovage, garlic, apples, peppermint, and chocolate mint. But even the pickled beets and beans are problematic since they use pickling spice. We have seed that we produced just for sprouts. We have or will have honey from our hives. We also have lots of fruit preserves and fruit leathers. Our first attempt at sauerkraut is still fermenting. And we have homemade apple cider vinegar. I suspect that we're going to need a large dose of imagination to make this work. Then we'll have a look at the other two meals of the day. I suspect that breakfast is going to be oatmeal with various preserve toppings. Also soy yoghurt which we've been able to make and is quite tasty. It doesn't have the tartness of milk-based yoghurt. Possibly flatbreads using soy/barley/oat flour. Lunch? Leftovers? Hearty soups?

A week may sound wussy but the basics are pretty thin unless the imagination really kicks in.

Good luck on your three or four months. I'll be very interested to see how it goes.

Regards,
Mike

[greltam]

This is a challenge I probably won't be able to accomplish next year. I'll try though. I didn't get any root vegetables out my first garden, nor much of anything else. I hope to get the soil a bit healthier and mulch this time as I believe the weed competition/drying out was the main problem.

My plan is to experiment with grains for breakfast/porridge. I like oatmeal and popped amaranth. Wheat is good as toast. For lunch I usually eat yesterdays supper leftovers. For Supper there's usually a mixture containing some or all of pasta, rice, beans/lentils, peas/green beans, carrots, onions, parsnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes.

I think I need to prove I can grow the food first, before I estimate what I can do. But if I do get my small plot to produce I might get a month tops..

[steev]

One of the things I see as needful for me to be really self-sufficient is pigs, very undo-able at this time, but part of my long game, long pigs. Smoked and salted pork products, lard and salumi. I'm already working on grains, legumes for fertility and protein, grapes possibly for wine ( no chianti, but we're talking Doomsday, so one must make do with one's favas as best one can; must remember not to serve valued guests Amanita phalloides, makes the charcuterie undesireable ). The well-pump is solar, the farm is remote, and all the neighbors are armed. Any marauding urban mobs will be severely pruned before they get to my pantry. Y'all come for dinner, too, hear?

[steev]

On a less anthropocentric note, the only significant difference I see between elk, deer, rabbits, ground squirrels, gophers and voles is size; they have all fattened at my expense and push come to shove, I think they owe me.

[12540dumont]

And please, if you get an Elk, call me...Ohhh I love elk. Makes a really good jerky too.

Hey this year I actually made my first jerky.

I took left over round steak and marinated it in teriyaki and then put it in the dehydrator. I think it must have been good, because the kiddos ate it straight from the dehydrator...none made it into jars.

Salumi is my ultimate goal. I'm planning on buying a big hunk o' pig at Costco. I just checked the prices and a big box is within reach. So, I'm thinking sausage. If I could swing a big hunk of beef I would do Salumi. Punk Domestics has a great section on Salumi and Charcuterie. Leo has a little smoker and I did salmon, so now I'm really jazzed.

The farm (the actual farming has taken up all of my time as I've had almost no help this year), has prevented me from doing as much as I normally do cooking, baking, canning and preserving.

I'm really looking forward to the end of these last weeks of planting so I can get on with the rest.

I made a fine batch of strawberry eau de vie this year. My son thinks it's the best liquour I've every made. Of course I made quiet a bit of mulberry and lemoncello (they're all gone).

I wish I wasn't so old, I'd love my own mini-orchard so I could make cyser and other things. I'm starting with persimmons and french prunes, apples and pears. I hope the end of the world waits a few more years. ;D I still have things to do.

[atash]

Folks, the key to survival in a crisis situation is to realize that they inevitably happen from time to time.

The Carrington Event that Spacecase mentioned is not a "maybe" it's an "eventuality". We know they happen from time to time--an astronomer (named Carrington) was looking at the sun when it happened, and got a big surprise when "something" (a coronal mass ejection) happened while he was watching and trying to sketch sunspots.

(that's another thing that goes wrong: sometimes sunspots disappear, triggering Maunder Minimum type events...at the moment I think that is rather more likely given that sunspot activity is much lower than NASA predicted)

That was in the 19th century; all that happened was some telegraph operators got a bad scare. Nowadays we have satellites that would be taken out (possibly astronauts killed if they were out of their craft at the time it hit, though mission control would hopefully notice it coming and warn them to take cover), and an electrical grid that would be blown out worldwide when all the transformers overloaded.

If it makes you feel better, they don't happen very often. The Carrington event was the biggest by a factor of two in 500 years.

Some other doomsday scenarios:

* banking system meltdown. The banking system is the remittance system; nobody gets paid if it fails. A derivatives event could take it down.
* EMP attack would also take it down, not to mention crash airplanes and take out the electronics controlling nuclear power plants.
* bio attack; this could trigger a panic that would cause systems to malfunction
* hyperinflation. Money becomes worthless in a matter of months. That, too, effectively cripples the remittance system and therefor the division of labor.
* Solar minimum coincides with volcanic mass ejection ala 1816 (Mt. Tambora...Dalton Minimum...snow in the summer...). Massive famine. These events, like CME, happen regularly. Did your history teacher forget to tell you that?

etc

The way to survive these events is to have food and water already in long-term storage BEFORE they happen. Have a year's supply of dry foodstuffs on hand in airtight sealed containers, preferably flushed with some gas other than oxygen or vacuum-packed, in a temperature-stable environment.

Have enough for kith and kin, and keep it quiet.

[steev]

The elk are verboten to shoot, so they must wait until the collapse of civil society, when the phone system will be down, so I can't call.

I've made a lot of jerky, though none for several years; too many irons in the fire, not enough fire in the belly. You've not been old until you've seen the wrong side of sixty. I didn't start my orchard before sixty-one. I've only got three more years on my obligatory sentence to gainful employment. I relish the thought of retiring to work my ass off daily on the farm. Really. I need a wife half my age.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

We have a food storage here. I'm not sure how long it would last though. I'd like to say 6 months, but depending on the circumstances maybe less or maybe more. Growing enough food to fill a food storage that would last 6 months is probably a lot harder though. I will be planting more peas and several rows of beans next spring along with a new kind of squash. Not sure what else, but I'm slowly learning which foods grow better and produce the largest payoff here in my climate. So far I'm thinking sunflowers, beans, and peas are the three kinds that would probably do best.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

It's hard to do all the farming and all the preserving at the same time... I grow plenty of food, it's keeping it in edible form until used that's my problem. I guess I could do it the same way I do market: To say, "Friday is my preserving day". Too bad all my family that I might preserve food for is so intent on working their 9-5 jobs that they can't be bothered to help me feed them. That could change at any moment, so if the need ever arose they'd be eager to help.

I live in the center of food storage mania. For as long as I can remember the people around me have been storing food, and not just a little. I visited a stranger the other day and they must have had 50,000 pounds of dehydrated food stored in their garage. I don't know if that's the best operational security to allow people to know about what's stored in your garage... But I figure based on where it's at that security comes from community, and not from commodities.

Winter squash, carrots, and sunroots work best for me to store. Dry corn is easy to grow, but who would eat it other than as popcorn? My potatoes have so many bug problems in my garden that I don't know why I keep trying. I don't know how I would use sunflowers as a human food: Feed them to sparrows and eat the birds?

I sure like growing onions, they do well for me, and store great, I don't know that they would keep my family alive though: But we'd die happy. Tomato sauces, pastes, and etc sure are easy to cook with and easy to bottle.

[MikeH]

Nov 7, 2011 22:33:57 GMT -5 atash said:

Have a year's supply of dry foodstuffs on hand

Why a year? WADR, it seems to me that this is an arbitrary timeframe. Why not 6 months? Why not 2 years? The EOTWAWKI scenario is impossibly difficult to plan for unless you have the deep pockets of a Richard Raintree. ISTM that this is the old nuclear attack bomb shelter scenario updated to the present. I'm not saying that it's not going to happen only that you can't easily plan for it without making some arbitrary decisions that have built in assumptions that are entirely pulled out of thin air.

Since all life comes down to food & water (depending on where you live, shelter and clothing can be minimal or even optional), we've decided to grow vegetables using low tech and manpower instead of machine or horse power , ie, subsistence farming. We think we've more or less figured out what to grow for our lat/long and how to grow it. Now comes the interesting exercise of figuring out how far it will take us. To do that, we have decided to try eating, for a week, only what we grew this year. That's going to be an incredible challenge requiring an incredible amount of imagination because there are a lot of food ingredients that we use that we don't even think about.

Regards,
Mike

[oxbowfarm]

It would be really really hard although some amount of food self reliance is one of our big goals, we are not even close really. I am hoping to grow a lot more corn next year, so if we were lucky we'd have a fullish corn crib to fall back on, have a grain grinder that will do corn. Potatoes are a big priority for next year as well.

Would probably downsize the chicken flock drastically to a more sustainable number to raise without purchased feed.

Water is a problem although we have the creek and we could boil it in a pinch, our well is actually fairly shallow and a quality hand pump is a goal but they are expensive. We would not have that in place by 2012.

We have a steer and a yearling bull, the steer could easily be converted to meat, need a lot more salt than we have on hand to really convert one into long term food though. Probably just share him with the neighbors

One saving grace would be our cow, she is a great producer on grass alone and we would probably depend a lot more on milk for protein in that case. We mostly use electric fencing to control the cows, I need to get on the stick and have a stake and tether rig for emergencies.