May 11, 2022
Self reliance means knowing how to grow your own food. This book is essential reading about sourcing seeds and planting, increasing yields and harvesting.
Where to get this gardening book
Get Grow Food for Free by Huw Richards on Amazon.
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Why we like it
This book is filled with practical ideas at little-to-no cost. In also includes lots of pictures to guide you through each idea.:
Setting up grow boxes.
Planting a variety of specific plants.
Preparing the soul and encouraging a good harvest.
It also dives deep into planting, transplanting, and harvesting individual vegetable and fruit plants and to optimize growth for each. We found it particularly helpful in getting our rhubarb and sunchokes off to a good start. It's also helped us know how to get seeds going earlier and stronger.
How Grow Food for Free impacts our prepping efforts
We've taken several ideas from this gardening book and incorporated them into our efforts to simplify and improve our harvest, including:
Recycling common items into seed starters, planters, watering cans, etc.
Sourcing seeds from the food we eat or people we know.
Using compost/soil suggestions to promote better plant growth.
Transplanting specific plants to encourage optimal yield.
Specs
Grow Food for Free is 224 pages and was published in 2020. It's very organized and broken down into several sections to make it easier to find what you're looking for:
Set up your vegetable patch
Produce your own compost
Source seeds and plants for free
How to grow perennials
How to grow annuals
Fight pests and disease
Looking ahead
Huw's journal
Get Grow Food for Free by Huw Richards on Amazon.
Be sure you have the other gear you need for gardening as well. We love our Barebones gardening trowel and have had success organizing our seeds in a plastic photo box. And, if SHTF, you want to make sure you know how to find food anywhere, which is why we recommend foraging. Read our review of our favorite foraging books.