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Bake some cookies or bread, and take them over to your neighbors on both side. Get to know them. Sounds like they *might* be good allies if it came to that.
interested in aquaponics? Go here to grow up to 10 times the plants, in half the time, while the "fish" do all the work! thelocalwebsolution.com... -End of Ad See below.
Growing power seems to have a winning combo going. I underestimated what they are doing. Based on the information in these videos, IF true, then on 3 acres they are producing 1,000,000 pounds of food each year! How are they doing this? Well, based on the information given in the video...
10,000 fish
300-500 yards worm compost
3 acres of land in green houses
Grow all year using heat from compost piles.
Using vertical space
A packed greenhouse produces a crop value of $5 Square Foot! ($200,000/acre).
Now, just to be clear I am not growing power or will allen. Also, a pound of plant or fish product is not the same thing as eatable food unless you process all parts of them for food. i.e. eating the fish bones and using plant stalks in stews. Generally, nations that are well fed throw away most of the plant and eat only the best parts thus lowing the yield of food.
Growing power depends on and runs on the HUGE amounts of compost they make from food waste that is taken from the city. With out this compost there would be no heat for the greenhouses and no fuel for the plants to grow. Its a great thing to divert this from the landfill and provide cheap food for the community.
My personal experience is that growing 7 pounds of food per square foot in a year is not that hard to do especially if you grow year around. You have to select plants that produce a lot of food in a small space which means you may not get a nutritionally complete diet if thats all you grow. Also layering of growth to use all space is important.
I personally use a 12 foot round pond 2.5 feet deep to grow 300+ pounds of fish in an aquaponic system and the bulk of my produce is grow using the biointensive method, in the ground, which is watered from the nitrogen rich fish water. My typical yield is between 6 and 9 pounds of food per square foot per year. This does require that I grow over winter which most people do not do. I find that growing in fall and winter months I actually get more production over fall and winter because there is NO bug problems! The crops do mature much slower, but they will mature! Think of it this way, the standard planted row may have 2 or 3 rows of veggies. Bio intensive will plant 12 rows; thats already 4 times the produce. Now add in onions, for example, that grow vertically above sweet potato vines, this increases production a lot. Now add to that 4 harvest per year vs the standard one season growing season. Now you have X4 more productivity. This brings us to X4X4 or 16 times the productivity of the standard growing methods. If you add to that hanging pot or what ever to add more growing space you have again increased productivity again. I personally have not used vertical space in that way. An snap shot of my experience is growing one sweat potato per 1.5' x 1.5' area (2.25 square feet) this one plant produces on average 12 pounds of root per plant and in that space I grow 4 to 6 leeks adding a pond of produce. Now, the vines grow all over the place, and I tie some up, are not confined to that 2.25 square feet of soil space. From each plant you can easily average 3 pounds of eatable leaves as you pick them over the growing season. At this point alone I am averaging 16 pounds of eatable food in 2.25 square feet or 16/2.5=7 pounds of food per square foot. Now that is in ONE GROWING SEASON. As I also grow fava beans, wheat, and fodder greens for two more seasons so my yelid is averaging 8 to 10 pounds in a year. IF I did this on 3 acres of growing space, excluding foot paths and green house walls ect then my production would be 8 pounds per square foot * 43560 feet acre * 3 = 1,045,440 pounds of food. It is possible to get even more by choosing the right crops and getting 4 harvest per year. I have settled on 4000 square feet of growing space per person for providing pretty much all the food a person needs. I suggest anyone starting this start with a very small garden and do it well. Something like a 5' by 20' growing bed would be the most you would start with.
SUGGESTED READING:
backyardaquaponics [dot] com/forum
Food Now by bountiful gardens
One Mexican Diet by bountiful gardens
Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman
Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman
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MiiU is the resilient community wiki. A resilient community is a place that produces most of what it needs locally and connects virtually for everything else. That means it is nearly immune to many of the negative effects of disasters and global breakdowns.
MiiU is a collection of all the resources and places that make personal, family, and community resilience possible. Resilience isn't only about surviving global failures, it's about building a better life for you and everyone around you.
Originally posted by DJM8507
I am pretty much completely unprepared beyond a few weeks of canned goods. I live on 3 acres of land, 2 of which are somewhat cleared with trees in Northwest, Florida. I have a neighbor that is about 300 feet from my home visible, and another about 300 feet through the woods no visible. Both are rednecks with many weapons and dogs. I have a 300ft freshwater well with an electric pump. The structure is an older house, stick built, vinyl. I have no weapons, or medical, or survival equipment with only a few weeks of food and water.
I have 3 adults in my household (1 male, 2 females) and 1 infant.
I want to get prepared. Please tell me what things I should buy first and so on, as i want to do everything i can to prepare and have some cash saved up to do so.
Maybe it is too late, but I'd like to at least try...edit on 23-1-2012 by DJM8507 because: (no reason given)
I wouldn't focus on weapons. You can't treat a head wound with a gun.