Prepping your doomsday vault5/22/2023 Having more than one variety of any given crop means you’ve got a backup plan. Beyond that, one variety may do better in your soil or with the pests in your area. Sauce tomatoes are very different from canning tomatoes, and the best tomatoes for canning are not the best tomatoes for slicing. So why do you need 5 different varieties of any crop? Varieties were developed for a reason, and they have key differences. In Vermont, with a 100 day long growing season, long season varieties with 120+ days to maturity won’t do us any good. Most try to be a one size fits all that works for most regions, but make sure that you’re conscious of your growing conditions. If you live in an extreme zone, either cold or hot, it may be hard to find a seed bank that meets your needs. It’s hard to include varieties that are appropriate for every growing zone. First, let’s start with some evaluation criteria: Appropriate to your Area I’m going to discuss some of the more common commercially prepared banks, along with the pros and cons of each. There are a lot of options out there in survival seed banks. If you’re hoping to live off of your own produce, or at least supplement your food supply in hard times, you should be practicing growing from your seed bank. There’s an old preparedness adage for food storage that says, “Eat what you store and store what you eat.” The same goes for a seed bank. Survival seed banks offer a turn-key solution to get you started because their premise is that they have everything included. If you’ve never grown anything, seed catalogs can be pretty intimidating. That said, a survival seed bank can actually be a great tool for learning how to grow your own food. When I talk about survival seed banks, I’m talking about a tool for those that already know how to, or are learning how to grow much of their own food. I’ve similarly reviewed literally dozens of options, and written up a separate article on the best and worst survival food kits.) Seed Banks as a Tool For Beginning Gardeners (If you’re being realistic, beyond a basic seed kit, you’ll also need some type of freeze-dried survival food kit to provide calories until your crops come in, and in the event of a crop failure. If you’re just learning to provide for yourself, a seed bank is a great place to start. Even if you do know how to grow your own food, likely you don’t have all the seeds on hand to supply yourself if you really needed to. A seed bank ensures that you have a large variety of seed on hand, with a bit of everything to get you growing when you need to. While a seed bank isn’t going to be a magic bullet to help you survive, it is a very useful tool. There’s no “bug out bag” that’s going to solve your problem. The whole premise was just to create a backpack that functioned as a security blanket for those with no knowledge of survival. They could make it on wild game and foraged food perhaps if they really knew their stuff, but the idea was that they didn’t know anything. There’s no way someone with no knowledge or experience could take the content of a backpack to virgin land in the mountains and expect to survive on agricultural crops they grew. We grow much of our own food, but I have this nagging fear that someday we’ll really need that knowledge and ability, and I won’t have the seeds at hand.Ī while back a big survivalist blog wanted me to write a post about a “survival garden backpack.” The idea was that in a serious crisis, someone could grab this backpack, and go up into the mountains and immediately begin growing their own food. Short of an actual nuclear apocalypse, there are plenty of disasters, natural or man-made, that could be resolved by having a bit of seed-based resilience on hand. Every time nuclear proliferation comes up in the news, I start thinking “I need more seeds.” Really, in a nuclear war, seeds aren’t really going to help anyone.
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