Feed Your Family On 1/50th of an Acre

Instructions for Growing The Sustainable Family Garden Heirloom Bugout Seed Bag

 By Following The Recipe Below, You’ll Eat Healthier, Save Money, And Maybe Even Save Your Life!

 

Our bodies were designed to be herbivores, and as you eat primarily a whole food, plant-based diet you will be healthier, need less volume of food, avoid many chronic health problems, and live a longer, happier life!

Follow the Sample Garden Plan included at the link at the end of this article and you can eat fresh, healthy and tasty vegetables from your own garden – even one as small as 1/50th of an acre.

By planting a spring garden, a summer garden, and a fall garden (using the same beds over again) you can harvest as much as 1,600# of 24 different vegetables. That’s 4 1/3# per day of fresh home-grown food!!

You will make a very wise choice by starting with fresh seeds with a high germination rate. Good seeds are very inexpensive but SO important! We suggest you consider a multi-year storage pouch containing over 22,000 of the best Heirloom Seeds you can buy. True Leaf Market calls it the Emergency Heirloom Bugout Seed Bag, and you can get it here:

https://www.trueleafmarket.com/products/bug-out-seed-bag

The Sample Garden Plan shows that your spring garden has only 7 plant varieties, with only 101 seeds that need to be grown beforehand and transplanted into the garden. Of the 1,104 seeds to plant 1,003 can be planted directly into the garden!  Follow the Garden Planting Details Schedule at the link below for pretty much everything you need to know about when, where, and how to plant everything in your garden.

Growing your own seedlings is simple and straight forward. If you don’t know how to do this, consider getting the complete Mittleider Gardening Course book (www.growfood.com/shop), and just follow the instructions in Lesson 22. We’re only talking about 7 plant varieties, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, kale, and the two lettuce, and most of them grow at about the same rate, so they can all be grown in a single 10″ X 20″ or 18″ X 18″ seedling flat, Place the celery on an outside row, as it is slower growing.

And for the plants you’ll put directly into the garden maximize yield and minimize thinning by mixing 1 part seeds with 100 parts sand, and distribute that mixture to give  seeds the separation desired. Then give your plants protection in cold weather with PVC “mini a-frames” covered with 6 mil plastic, and a little heat on cold nights.  Lesson 23 of the Mittleider gardening course book includes detailed instructions for this as well.  

For your summer garden 151 seeds go directly into the garden, and only 52 seeds, including broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes are best transplanted as seedlings into the garden.

Again, one seedling flat is ample. Just start your tomatoes and peppers about 8 weeks before you expect to put them in the garden, and the others – broccoli, cabbage and cucumbers – start 3-4 weeks before they go into the garden.

For the fall garden carrots and potatoes are planted directly in the garden. That’s 368 seeds, and 168 seeds of 5 others we recommend transplanting.  Broccoli, cabbage and lettuce are best transplanted, and onions and turnips benefit from an early start in the seedling flat to allow them time to mature in the garden

Prune your plant leaves at least weekly, and EAT the edible leaves daily (listed as R/T)!  Eating the outer leaves and celery stalks regularly keeps your plants producing for MANY MONTHS, increases your harvest substantially, and keeps them from going to seed.  Notice that Kale, chard, and celery only need one planting for the entire growing season!

You are now on your way to getting more than 3/4 of a TON of vegetables, pretty much every variety you need and want, in order  to sustain a healthy eating lifestyle.

https://growfood.com/SampleGardenPlan-50th-Acre

https://growfood.com/GardenPlantingDetails

 www.growfood.com

Hybrid Seeds – Good Or Bad?

Many people are fearful of using hybrid seeds. Some confuse them with GMO seeds, and the two are entirely different! Some folks feel they should always be able to use the seeds from the plants they grow for their next crop, and that because seeds from hybrid plants do not produce the same as the parent they are being robbed of that on-going benefit. I submit that hybrid seeds are well worth using, and following are a few reasons why.

We are all hybrids! And most of us can reproduce, just as plants from hybrid seeds can reproduce. But our progeny will be different than we are, just as the progeny from hybrid plants’ seeds will be different from their parents.

In humans it makes for uniqueness and diversity and is wonderful. In vegetables and fruits it isn’t always so great, but hybrids ARE a great blessing by providing greater yields, better appearance and taste, and better disease resistence, among other benefits.

Honorable dedicated growers spend their lives painstakingly cross-breeding multiplied thousands of plants, in order to find the parental match that gives you and me the tastiest, healthiest, fastest growing, and most disease resistant fruits and vegetables possible.

And even after they have found that match they must work HARD and CAREFULLY to assure that each desirable female blossom is pollinated with the exact desired male pollen. Imagine the work involved with tomatoes, for example, where the blossom is tiny and EACH BLOSSOM CONTAINS BOTH MALE AND FEMALE PARTS!

That means they have to use tiny tweezers and magnifying classes to REMOVE the male anther BEFORE it is mature, and then introduce the CORRECT male anther to the female pistil at the exact time they both are mature, and hope pollination occurs – all the while making certain that no OUTSIDE pollinators, such as bees, get to the blossom.

The cost of producing great hybrid seeds is tremendous, and what do the seeds cost you and me? Let’s compare the best hybrid seed with a well known heirloom seed and see what it means in your garden.

Ace tomato seeds can be purchased from MVSeeds.com for $4.50 per ounce. That’s 10,000 seeds for next to nothing! How many will you plant in your garden – 10? 50? Either way the seed cost is nothing. What will it produce? Probably a few pounds per plant, but the size, taste, and other qualities we want in a great tomato may not be the best, or just what you want.

Big Beef tomato seeds, on the other hand, cost $582 per ounce! The smallest quantity MVSeeds.com sells is 10 seeds, and they cost $2.99. So, each seed costs 30 cents. That’s terrible, isn’t it!?

Or is it, really. Let’s compare what you get for your 30 cents with what you get from your virtually free Ace seed.

The Ace is a determinate plant and produces a crop of medium small tomatoes for 3-4 weeks, whereas Big Beef is an indeterminate plant and produces great yields of large, juicy, tasty tomatoes for MANY months – even longer than a year in the tropics – until frost kills it.

Big Beef also has the best disease resistance of almost any tomato variety known to man. That single fact often means the difference between great success and total failure in your garden. How many times have you lavished MONTHS of time, energy, and money on your tomato plants only to have some disease wipe them all out about the time you finally started to harvest a crop. It’s common. Just last year disease wiped out a substantial part of the tomato crop in the entire USA!

I figure that each tomato plant in my garden produces between $30 and $60 in tomatoes. If I grew Ace tomatoes each plant would produce between $10 and $20 in tomatoes that are not as juicy and tasty. How important is the cost of seed?

For my very limited budget Big Beef, and the other hybrids I use, are worth their cost MANY TIMES OVER!