Easy Little Garden

If you need garden space, you need it now, and you have remarkably limited abilities to create a garden, here's THE most basic way of making a garden.  Very few steps.  Just ready to go....

1. get a cardboard box, a plain cardboard box.  I used the bottom half of a box some shelves came in for the laundry tomb, it's about 4' x 2' x 6" tall.

2. put the box on the lawn somewhere, pick a place you kinda want to have another garden next year.

3. open several bags of garden soil from the store, mix with bags of compost from the store if you'd like.

4. dump the soil into the box.

5. add seeds or baby plants.  water, or not if it's going to rain that night.

There you go, you've just made a garden.  The cardboard should suppress most of the grass and weeds, allowing them to die off over the summer as the box itself rots away, by next summer, that patch of dirt will be your garden, all ready to go!  As I'm not keen on tilling (and, BTW, second year after no-tilling last year, barely any weeds at all!), don't even bother next year, just move aside the big leftover chunks from last year, and put your baby plants in the dirt as is.  Mulching helps quite a lot, but isn't a total requirement.

This year, we indulged in a $30.00 purchase of a used (and loud) chipper shredder and used it to grind up all our yard waste (and our neighbors, and their neighbors) this spring to make into mulch. Cheap and easy to do, but it does take 2 people to make it really successful.  We have a plethora of earthworms and the soil is easy to manipulate so far.

With no-tilling gardens, I will fill in a couple gaps that were left out in my experience.  As long as you have a heavy coat of mulch, using seeds will be kinds difficult: many like actual dirt to germinate in, so move the mulch aside and make sure it stays moved to one side to get your seeds in.  Baby plants, just move the mulch aside, scratch the soil beneath just a bit and get the baby in, replacing the soil and mulch around it works wonders.  Nobody told us that, we had to figure it out on our own.  With no tilling, too, two days work is broken down into about 3 hours of work, because you just put your plants in; there is no extra work to aerate the soil (it stays pretty fluffy if you can minimize walking on it).  

So, lazy gardeners, listen up! stop tillling, you don't need herbicides if you mulch enough, don't be walking all over the place, and give seeds actual dirt to do their thing in.  You can get a lot done by pretty much doing nothing at all, hear?

Gaining Credibility and Staying Hydrated

The CDC has determined that the ZA may actually occur.  I don’t liken the CDC to the other GOONS, as the CDC actually seems to have its act together and actually helps people, so, in my book, the CDC is exempt from GOONS status.  I like their preparedness statements, but I think that truly, it doesn’t go far enough for preparation.

S.D. and I were discussing what we have, what we need, what is in the pipeline and what our plan will evolve into.  One of the things most immediately is the need for potable water.  As water is a fairly good heat sink, we will likely have water stored in the root cellar, so to ameliorate temperature fluctuations through the seasons.  As the ZA may happen before we get the cistern in, so we will have to take smaller steps prior to it happening.

Your water needs, per person, for consumption only varies between a half and a whole gallon.  As medical services will become scarce, avoiding dehydration at all costs will be paramount.  While the CDC assigns 1 gallon per person per day, that is for all cooking and drinking needs, I will encourage all to have 1 gallon per person per day for drinking only, and extra for cooking and extranea.

As bleach does go bad after six months or so, some people have turned to swimming pool bleach in powder form, which is used in minute amounts to purify long-term stored water.  The formula is basically: one heaping teaspoon of Ca(ClO)2of 78% (granular calcium hypochlorite) for 2 gallons of water.  This is your disinfecting solution (you’ve just made household bleach of sorts).  To then disinfect your drinking water, use one part of the solution you just made to 100 parts water to be treated.  Let the solution rest for at least a half hour before drinking it to let anything solid precipitate out.

The dry granular form of Ca(ClO)2 as in dry form in a sealed container, it will stay good rather indefinitely.  Once mixed into solution, it will degrade quickly (I estimate faster than household bleach), perhaps within a matter of weeks as opposed to months.  Only treat as much water as you would use for a couple weeks at a time.

While the gold standard of water purification is to heat it to 145 degrees for 6-10 minutes, after the ZA, fuel will very likely be in short supply and using it to purify water (instead of cooking pathogens out of what might be questionable food if you have to forage) could be addressed as wasteful.

Keep your health, stay hydrated!  Fight the zombie horde by outsurviving them!

is it going to trip you when the zombies come?

we are in the season of little things and emergence of the new.  If your tank is empty, refill it in the garden, where things are coming up, getting leaves, and becoming what they were meant to become all along.  It's also time to assess what to keep and what to dismiss.

 

Assess what you have, and look at what you need, does what you have further your gain, does it help you get by day to day, or is it just taking up space?  Is it somethong you are hanging on to because someone will make you feel guilty if you send it on its way?  Most importantly, will it help you survive the ZA?  or will it trip you?

 

Now, I come from a long and strong line of vetran crap-hoarders, but I fight against that tendency every day that I can.  There are hoarder months and bulldozing months for me as I fight genetics and learned behavior.  In recent times, I am applying a "use it or toss it" mentality much more than in the past.  It has made my garbage service less than thrilled with our household, but that's what they get paid for.

 

We endeavor to use everything at least twice before discarding it (although SOME things are very strictly one use items and will NOT be used twice.... no matter what), and to stem the tide of frivolous spending when those resources could be better used elsewhere.  Our grandparents lived through the Great Depression, and we can learn a great deal from them as we prepare for the ZA.  Finding the right balance of well-supplied and just having a lot of crap laying about is something each household needs to do for itself.  If I could not sew or fidget with crafty things, my primary form of entertainment would be gone.  For others, reading material is of utmost importance.

 

Learning to live without the television is coming easier and easier to Americans with the HD revolution where the GOONS sold out to the major entertainment corporations.  Non-electric means of making one's mind and hands busy will become more and more important. Discover what you have and what you need to dismiss, lighten the load so you can have a stronger bulwark in other places.  Start looking at what things are now and what they will grow to be: a problem or a solution?

 

Surviving isn't just having a pulse, it's having a life to go with it.