- Joined
- Nov 29, 2005
- Messages
- 887
Along the lines of this thread, a couple of years back I admitted to myself that my survival-prep was sorely lacking in the long-term area, and I began taking at least the basic steps toward improving my basic knowledge and skill base in that direction, too. Began reading basic books on animal-farming--starting, say, with Barnyard in Your Backyard (very basic stuff on chickens, goats, etc.) In a more hands-on direction, I researched what crops had evolved over millennia of association with the local natives, and for the last two years have been farming tiny plots of mixed corn, beans, and squash in the manner of the local tribes. With a good deal of trial and error--but also the benefit of modern information technology, cutting down drastically on the amount of error--I'm teaching myself (and my kids) at least the rudiments of growing desert-adapted crops whose existence has almost fallen out of anyone's knowledge. Though a lot of the seeds one sees in stores nowadays are hybrids--specifically designed by the seed companies so that they will not bear viable seed for more than a generation or so--I've focused on what are now called "heirloom" seeds--seeds that have been successfully reproduced for indefinite numbers of generations. Especially helpful in this, in my area, has been an organization called Native Seeds / SEARCH, whose website is www.nativeseeds.org . (They sell seeds for a pretty-low price--a big part of their mission is getting people growing these things in as many places as possible, to decrease the likelihood that the various varieties will go extinct.) Their scientists have been poking around isolated villages and tiny farm-plots for decades, seeking out the dwindling number of old folks who still do their farming in what are sometimes close to pre-Columbian ways, and they have assembled quite an impressive collection of seed varieties that would likely have died out but for their work. (One example: tepary beans, Phaseolus acutifolius, are a very hardy, desert-adapted bean, formerly a staple of the Papago and Pima tribes of Arizona and northern Mexico. The beans have lots of protein, are insect-resistant, and they thrive in low-water situations, reproducing in an extremely-short time after the brief summer rainy season. Downsides are that the beans are tiny, the pods tend to break open easily, dropping the seeds on the ground. Pinto beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) are larger, easier to harvest with mechanical means, everyone knows how to use them, so they have largely displaced tepary beans even on native American farms. Tepary beans actually produce more under drought-like conditions than under ordinary irrigation, and will produce under conditions that will cause near-total failure of a pinto-bean crop. The natives grew them, usually in mixed plots with corn (which served as supporting poles for the bean vines) and squash (whose broad leaves helped shade the ground, retaining moisture). I now have my second year's corn/bean/squash crop coming up in a tiny side-yard of my home, and my two-year-old daughter and four- and six-year-old sons are learning every step as I do. Kind of fun, and I commend it to all of you. Though I have no illusions that it would be easy to survive if we suddenly had to depend on this for survival, I see it as a prudent step in the right direction.
