Peak Oil Gardening 1.
In future posts I will talk about some of the tips and tricks for gardening in your back yard, but in this post I want to talk about the most important step: Plan your garden for the future – have a “Post Peak” strategy.
I started my garden a year ago, and my plan was to have crops for personal consumption, and other crops for trading. I think that I will probably be able to sell any food crop post peak, but to really maximise value it would be good if my “trade crops” are different from everybody else’s. And even better if it was something that everybody wants.
My theory about Peak Oil is that once people realise that things aren’t going to get better, everybody will plant a vegetable garden. If I only plant peas and beans and tomatoes and carrots in my garden, then I have exactly the same stuff as everybody else.
I talk in my blog entry on “Being a Member of a Survivor Community” (
http://aeldric.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A859FF3D2F2384E4!118.entry ) about my plan to be a contributing member of a trading community. I only have my back yard to grow things in, so I need to maximise the value of my trade goods. I needed to figure out what I can offer that everybody wants and not enough people will grow.
The average vegetable patch has peas, tomatoes, beans, lettuce, etc. For non gardeners - these are known as “annual” crops. You plant them, water them and then harvest them a few months later. Then you have to plant again next year. This is great if you need a quick harvest, but since everybody concentrates on these quick-yielding crops, it means that everybody has similar stuff in their vegetable patches.
The perennial crops, on the other hand, are pretty rare in the suburbs. This is strange, as perennial crops need much less work than annuals, because you plant them and they yield a new crop every year. Fruit trees are an example.
It takes 3-5 years to get fruit from a fruit tree and almost that long to get a yield from most other perennials. When things get critical, people aren’t going to plant crops that yield in 3-5 years, they are going to plant crops that give an immediate result. So I figured that perennials aren’t just less work, they will give me crops that are different from everybody else.
So I went down to the nursery a year ago and bought 25 fruit trees and vines. Even discounted to $1,000 because it was a bulk purchase, that purchase hurt – but not as much as the $4,000 that I spent on water the tanks and drip irrigation system that keeps them alive!
All of the fruit trees were at least 1 year old when I bought them – you can get them older, but you will pay more. Mine are two years old now and some of them are yielding tiny amounts of fruit already. Next year will be a little better, and three years from now, I should have fruit by the bushel.
In addition to fruit, people like herbs and spices. So I have mint, parsley, chilli bushes, curry plants, wild ginger, and a bay tree - none of these are annuals. I also have other perennials such as an almond, perennial runner beans, artichokes, asparagus and some bell peppers.
Sure, I have a permaculture garden with annuals (peas, beans etc), but that is for eating, not for trade.
Focussing on perennials rather than annuals is not the only thing I did to ensure maximum return when I traded the crop. History shows that prior to green houses and air-freighted foodstuffs, people were always interested in two types of food:
- Food in winter, particularly tasty and varied food
- Alcohol
So my strategy is to do a little value-adding as well. I will:
- Ensure that some of my crop can be fermented. I am growing apples and pears (four trees - two trees of each) for cider - and grapes (5 vines) for wine. I have fermentation vats, yeast and some sugar to give it a little extra alcoholic kick.
- Grow food that can be dried, or turned into jam for winter. I have a hundred kilos of sugar and a couple of packets of pectin for jam, and I have a solar drier. Any excess fruit that doesn’t end up as alcohol will end up in jam, or as dried fruit strips.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I also breed fish (the big, edible kind) in an aquaponics setup (aquaponics is a system that uses the fish wastes to feed the vegetables) and I’m hoping to breed Guinea Pigs. In my youth I was pretty good at smoking meat – I could definitely smoke Guinea Pigs to produce a very nice meat. I’m not sure that I would dare smoke fish (too easy to kill someone if I make a mistake), so I might sell live fish.
So there it is. I have about 300 square meters of back yard (large but not uncommonly so).
In it I have:
- A vegetable patch big enough to give us all the annual vegetables we need
- A vegetable patch for perennial vegetables, herbs and spices
- 25 fruits (trees and vines)
- A 3,000 litre fish tank
- A composter and worm farm
A
nd there is still room for a BBQ, an outdoor entertainment area, and a flower garden (granted, most of the flowers are edible).
Some lessons I have learned:
- Have a post-peak strategy. Will you try to be entirely self-sufficient, or will you use your garden for trade?
- You will need to find ways to pack a lot of diverse plants into the smallest possible area - research permaculture and bio-intensive gardening.
- If you want to be self sufficient, you will probably need to pack a lot of calories into a small area. Check out potatoes and sweet potatoes – as they are very good in terms of calories per square meter. Also check out PeakProphet on the subject of potatoes.
- It you are aiming to trade and you want to get some fruit trees in, you can cheat by buying mature trees from the nursery – you will get your first crop soon after you buy them.
- Buy compost, manure, organic pellets, blood and bone fertilizer, and anything else you can think of now. A bag of fertilizer now is a year of rich crops later.
I will enlarge on all of these thoughts later, but right now it is time to go to work.
Herramientas 
