Originally published at: How to grow crops | Boing Boing
…
5 Likes
Excellent. I have it bookmarked now so it will be right there when civilization collapses
7 Likes
Classic case of over cultivation. You need to rotate crops.
8 Likes
11 Likes
Boomshanka!
3 Likes
Great idea, but there seems to be no curation or quality control happening on the content. It’s a lot of incomplete stubs, duplicate garbage, and rando opinions from specific corners of the planet. I think you’re better off buying some local gardening books.
11 Likes
And in addition to what VeronicaConnor said, growing crops is really only half the battle (if you are doing it outside). Once you have a plant that bears something edible your outside wildlife will also want to sample your tasty hard work. Netting, chicken wire, and even solar powered electric fencing come in to play if you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
3 Likes
I thought this headline said “How to grow COPS” and somehow now I’m both disappointed or relieved.
7 Likes
And when you do all that, some little insect shows up and destroys everything anyway. RIP strawberries. Rot in hell stinkbugs 
6 Likes
And if we’re talking about the collapse of civilization, that outside wildlife will include humans. So you’ll need to grow extra food to grow your population so that you can have an army to defend your food. From there it’ll be helpful to have some kind of organizing principle to regulate the army, as well as the food-growers. Someone or some group needs to be able to make decisions efficiently. You’ll also need a group of people capable of procuring the raw materials for, and then forging, the tools need to farm efficiently.
Or, say “fuck it” and go back to hunting and gathering and declare that whole twelve-thousand year “grow your own food” experiment to be a really bad idea.
3 Likes
Three sisters method is always reliable, it’s even used in the American Southwest by some tribes, so that speaks volumes as to how effective the approach is. Also, don’t copy modern monoculture crop methods as they depend on the subsidies that allow them to function (ex. MPCI).
6 Likes
For a long time we had a garden growing up. During the 80s recession it was damn large, and even tilled up a bloc, of the back yard for potatoes. I don’t miss the work, but I did like the produce.
It also made me aware MOST food doesn’t look like what is in the super market. Like getting a good looking carrot was pretty rare.
5 Likes
Or, stop doing things the same old land and water-wasting way and try something newer and more sustainable:
5 Likes
But sadly, thanks to climate change, crop growing will be highly unpredictable. I’m already seeing it happening - thanks to even slightly odd weather and temperatures at key times in the last few years, growing seasons are truncated, yields are reduced, trees that produced reliably for 50 years suddenly have nothing at all.
Our civilizational collapse will likely be due to our inability to reliably grow crops any more…
When people seriously suggest this, I always wonder: Hunt what? A healthy Earth could feed less than a billion hunter-gatherers. Given that we’ve pretty well collapsed ecosystems already, what happens when 8+ billion people suddenly need wild food to survive? Most vertebrates would be extinct pretty quickly. Even after most of us starve, the survivors will be fighting over handfuls of insects and semi-edible grass seeds.
6 Likes
Stop trying to make me feel good.
5 Likes
Well, things are shifting at least. I live in an agricultural region in Canada with a traditionally short growing season. The provincial agriculture group here just put out a study that shows our growing season is getting consistently longer and have plotted out opportunities for new things that will grow here that previously wouldn’t. They’re even talking about bananas and such now.
Of course all that is moot if everything is on fire, which it is every summer all summer now. 
The vineyards here this year had to figure out how to work “smokiness” into their blends because the grapes literally had forest fire smoke residue on them that they couldn’t get rid of.
3 Likes
The whole concept is FROM those tribes. That’s where the colonizers learned it from.
4 Likes
I’m just a constant ray of fuckin’ sunshine, me.
Not to mention potential floods, droughts, mega-hailstorms, tornadoes… all the things that also “don’t happen here”… or at least didn’t used to.
I’m sitting here in California watching things not grow because it got a bit too cold at the wrong time. (Of course, temperatures are also consistently too warm to grow certain fruit the area used to be famous for, at the same time.)
4 Likes
I like community efforts in general, mostly because of…the community. That said, I believe every US State has a state university, and they all have a thing called the Agricultural Extension Agency. Which is a giant, local resource for grow crops (and preparing soil, and pest management, and, and, and). These were set up because, well, food is important.
Here a finder:
It’s set up to help farmers, but most of them also have community resources. Here’s the one for my county:
5 Likes
I should also note that, especially in ag states like California, the offices drill down extremely locally. There is a different resource for every county.
1 Like
