Preppers can reap some big rewards by applying some of the habits of successful market gardeners and small farmers to our home gardens.

See, they have an eye on profit, which means an eye on efficiency. Most preppers aren’t looking at cash income from the garden, and scale matters even in for-profit growing, so there are some common practices we should actively avoid, but there are plenty that can save us time and resources.

That’s precious enough for now, and will be even more so any time our spending power is limited.

Establishing a Market

Before planting, successful market growers tend to have established their markets. It could be farmer’s markets, tailgate sales, roadside stands, restaurants, grocery outlets, or an ag professional who compiles orders for those latter from numerous local farms. Each market requires figuring total produce needed, and working backwards to planting dates so they can be served. The growers who wing it without either step tend to make less profit.

We want to emulate the first group.

We don’t have to worry about diversification or coolers of product that didn’t move because restaurants went under or weather kept the public from shopping, but it’s the same general concept.

We want to start out with an idea of our end goals in types of produce – how much we want for fresh eating and preserving – and from there work backwards to harvest goals, and have an idea of when we’ll be harvesting.

Covers

One thing almost all market growers do, from tiny backyard operations to folks cultivating in excess of 2-5 acres, is invest in row covers.

Usually, there are several in play – a mesh or cloth cover used to prevent insect access, which can also function as frost protection, and plastic sheeting used for cold protection.

Those covers add too much time to the period when a cultivated plot can remain in production for most professional growers to skip the investment. They may start small and add to it incrementally, but they get them.

In addition to plant covers, market gardeners also regularly cover their soil during dormant periods.

That patch we were just growing in is precious. We want to keep as many nutrients and soil amendments in place as possible, and prevent as many weed seeds as possible now that we’ve spent hours a day/week/month weeding and conditioning it. However long it will be between plantings, especially the smaller ag operations get it covered.

Pros are mostly going to go to poly silage tarps sooner or later.

For home growers, anything goes. Baby pools, straw, cardboard, a cover crops, salvaged wall paneling, leaves, heavy-duty curtains, thick blankets, wood chips, newspaper weighted with sticks – anything that doesn’t run away fast enough. Flip the wheelbarrow over a patch, park the mowers at the ends, whatever it takes to cover as much as we can, best as we can.

Really. Whatever it takes.

Hedge Seeding/Planting

Whether they’re direct sowing or transplanting, growers regularly start an extra set of seed to fill in any gaps that appear. It gives a uniform harvest and makes the best use of space.

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyNacaaUWsI demonstrates market garden practices for beets that applies to preppers, to include extra seed sets. The indicator crop demo’d with radishes is also a biggie – and on most home scales can be harvested for spicy sprouts or spaced out more for the roots.

Exceptions also apply here.

For a super small gardens and those feeding even 5-8 people, the predictable, consistent yields and turns from a whole vegetable bed at once isn’t as vital. Having a 2’x3’ or even a 30”x25’ patch at different stages of development doesn’t affecting our harvest efficiency or totals that much.

There are also plants that will basically catch back up, especially if we have more than 100 days to our growing seasons. Indeterminate squash and pole or bush beans are examples where even if they don’t reach the same total yield, replacing a non-starter with seed with a 10-21 day gap instead of having same-age transplants doesn’t greatly affect our harvest or space use.

There are also cases where, due to stronger light and warmer soils, fill-in-the-gap direct-sown seeds will catch up to buddies that were started under cold frames or planted as soon as the soil was warm enough.

It’s typically the crops like salads and small tubers and roots, that are both densely planted and faster-growing (35-65-day harvest ranges), where we’ll want to have backups to transplant if there are holes. Otherwise, we’re potentially “losing” the yields that empty space would have produced.

Big-time commercial growers will accept losses – like expecting a certain ratio of blanks in a corn field. Smaller growers, even the professionals, can’t afford it.

Avoid Thinning

Now, there are absolutely exceptions and scale totally matters on this one, but… Thinning is wasteful. Market growers and preppers in a busy world or in a world with reduced or nonexistent outside resource and are in lockstep on waste – we want to minimize loss wherever we can.

Both daily hours and seed are finite resources. For most of us, so is both growing space and growing season.

If we’re thinning, we’ve spent time and resources planting unnecessary amounts. Then we spent more time (and possibly additional resources) pulling them out to avoid overcrowding.

We also “spent” soil fertility on them (we’re moving homemade compost or manure around, or are buying and spreading fertilizers, which those seedlings may have started sucking up). We may have pumped extra water for them. That’s additional time and resources used for something we’re pulling out at 1-12”.

Especially if the trimmings are laying in a field, hitting compost, or represent such a low fresh feed amount we’re not adjusting anything for livestock … that’s not making use of a byproduct. It’s just extra work and resource waste.

There are exceptions. Planting schemes that make it fast and easy to harvest edible seedlings for human or livestock consumption works for most small-scale growers. Gardeners with truly limited growing season and who are super-crunched on space but have the time and copious seed are also exceptions.

High seeding rates for plants with low germination is a given – that’s not waste at all. If they’re doing the job of a cover, where having denser plantings actually lets us save time and improves our harvest because it limits weed competition, that’s different, too.

Business Analysis

Any good organization tracks expenditures and results, sports teams to charities to production and services. It’s easier for us than market growers, here, too, though. We’re just going to cruise our pantry stocks and make notes (actual notes).

If we ran out of tomatoes, we want to plant more and-or trial some alternatives and-or increase types to avoid a big shortage if it’s a bad season. If we have more left from the previous season than we want when we start canning/drying again, we assess how many extras we have, and decrease.

 (If I want to reduce pantry stock by 30% next year, I’d only decrease planting for a 20-25% reduction in case it’s a bad year. I’d rather decrease again the year after than run short.)

If we still have a few as we’re canning/drying more, we’re on the money and trials will be solely about increasing variety, efficiency, or productivity.

Professional growers must spend additional time tracking and crunching numbers on whether a crop type is worth growing or not, outlay in pest control and fertilizer and water, labor hours, and planning ahead for infrastructure maintenance.

Ideally we’d do the same there, as well. We just have a different baseline for profitability.

Seed is a cost they factor as well, especially since the pros aren’t keeping back their own seed. Yields by variety and finding the ideal seeding rate can hugely affect their business. That’s one we want to dial in, too, as much as possible.

We also both consider packing and packaging, just differently. Our other infrastructure and skills will affect where we most want to concentrate on post-harvest processing and storage.

Ask For Help

It’s a great time to be a market grower. Small urban and suburban farming is exploding right now. Those growers have a lot riding on their success. Since they can’t risk repeatedly failing, they ask for help.

And, the climate being what it is, usually they find it. Like us, they have to cull through a lot of information, find answers from people growing in the same environmental conditions and styles they are, but it’s largely a supportive community.

Small-Farm Market Grower Strategies

In this golden internet age, we can easily find blogs, Facebook groups, and YouTube channels produced by market gardeners. Some of them are especially useful for preppers with tight land limits as urban and suburban ag continue to enjoy increased attention.

Remember, though, that while many of the tricks of the trade apply to balconies and backyards, our bottom line is different – they need dollars and cents, and we’re trying to maximize food value. That means that especially what we grow, and how much of it, is going to be significantly different.

Also bear in mind there are also planting styles, medias, and schemes that can be very efficient and profitable at a small scale that wouldn’t work for market growers.

Mostly, though, we share a focus on making our efforts profitable. That makes professional-level strategies an excellent study while practicing our survival gardens.

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In the prepper world, we hear “two is one, one is none”. We don’t want to get carried away with it when we’re packing a rucksack, but it provides positive redundancy for our preparations. If something happens to the primary – from a plan to a tangible item – we have a backup right there, already on hand.

There’s a difference between an alternative and a backup, though. It’s subtle, but significant enough to hugely affect how well we navigate upsets.

We see backups in all areas of preparedness and the self-reliant lifestyles many try to cultivate.

If our pressure canner uses rubber rings, we try to keep an extra on hand.

We stock seeds in case we can’t buy more or buy food in a supermarket, and if we’re frugal we stock multiple years’ seeds separately in case there’s a problem with the last-purchased or last-harvested seed supply.

We map out multiple routes for our vehicles, in case one is blocked.

We keep a light and a speed loader, stripper clip, or spare mag with our EDC or creak-in-the-night firearms.

If we’re into tactical load outs, we carry a primary rifle or carbine, with reloads, and have a sidearm on our waist, leg, or chest where it’s handy if our primary runs dry or goes down at a really bad time. I might even have backups for both primary and sidearm back home.

Right There with Backups, is Having alternates

Alternates are somewhat different from “just” a backup. A backup is the same thing, or nearly the same thing, which functions the same way. An alternate is different, largely or entirely.

Following the examples above…

In addition to my pressure canner – and grid-down ways to bring it to and keep it at pressure – I might also make plans to preserve foods by dehydrating, cold smoking, or salt packing.

I might not only have backup seeds, I might have alternates – faster-growing hybrids of the same type, as well as foreign domesticated crops and-or wild edibles.

I might maintain lists of bus and subway/train schedules, stations, and stops, and cash/tokens for them, a bike, and an ATV to get around suburban and rural obstacles. I might also have packs or small carts for my animals and myself so we can flee on foot.

Instead of planning to repel all borders with direct confrontation if our retreat is noticed, we might have made plans to make the house look already-hit, create passive discomforts, make it difficult to reach, and have actual booby traps as our last line.

Instead of a rifle/carbine, some situations might call for me or a partner to carry a shotgun – which are themselves loaded with alternate options.

I might also keep one specifically loaded with rubber shot, rock salt, bean bags, net, or some other less-than-lethal option for chasing pests out of my garden or breaking up a dog fight.

Instead of or with a gun, I might have a souped-up flashlight that functions like a mini baseball bat.  Other alternatives to an EDC pistol might be a taser bug, retractable asp, or a coin roll in a hanky.

Alternatives as Well as Backups Apply Across all of Preparedness

If we flip the switch and there’s no power, we might have solar-charged and standard battery lamps to go with candles and oil lamps for light. We might augment solar and standard batteries with hand-cranked radios or lanterns, which can also function as chargers for other battery devices, or have a generator – and, upping the game of alternatives, a gennie that runs on multiple fuels.

We might have squeeze-activated ice packs we can blow a battery-operated fan across to combat heat stress, and plan for canopy beds and grown-up blanket forts to help reduce the amount of heat we need to stay warm.

We might have dark bags and solar ovens, propane stoves and grills, and various candle stoves for cooking.

We might have Pepto for whatever our water and food storage does to our guts, Imodium and Dulcolax as a backup, as well as some alternative maintenance and treatments for minor cases like prunes, tea/coffee, and dates, and mild farina/rice cereals, applesauce, and protein drink mix.

In our bags, vehicles, and homes we store not only water that’s ready to consume, but also chemical treatments and filters, and vessels we can fill if our primary springs a leak.

Super Sources

Hunting is one area ripe with alternatives for our plans and supplies. There’s already wide evidence and experience for us to weigh according to our own priorities, with gear and techniques full of alternatives just waiting to redeploy by preppers.

There’s that trusty standard shotgun, and all its options, but many hunters have a deer or pig rifle – sometimes instead, but regularly in addition to that shotgun.

Some have both a short, heavy-hitting, stable-flight brush gun and something designed to reach out across ridges, prairies, desert, or pasture. Others choose middle-road calibers that offer cartridge variety to cover multiple bases.

Some have a bow or crossbow for archery seasons. Others hunt very effectively with rim fires and airguns.

Some of those give us alternatives to big booms with a silent, effective killer and all the benefits they can have for a homesteader, hunter, and anyone else trying to avoid attention. Some give us alternatives to a shoulder-thumping Recoil Beast or expensive-ammo eater, giving us options for training and limited shooters.

Some use a handgun as primary for hunts, scoped or iron sights, both small game and large. Some carry a finishing gun along with their primary hunting tool.

Others carry close-range handguns or super-shorty shotguns for bears or self-defense – to include other outdoors-men like fishermen, bikers, hikers, and campers.

Those Outdoors Hobbyists, too, Give us Backups and Alternatives we can Apply

Some gear serves as-is, not only for wilderness bug-outs and survival, but any power-outage and grid-down or off-grid situation. Some gear is seen re-purposed by other interest groups as often as it is in its original field, or is used as an alternative until a field catches up to the interest.

BMX elbow and knee pads, rappelling helmets, and motorcycle knuckle-guard gloves improved tactical load outs, with official military gear catching up, not leading the way. It’s not singular (sadly). Personally acquired “other” gear and tactics are pretty commonly deployed long before it becomes regular issue.

We also see a lot of crossover in foods. Military to camping/backpacking to endurance athletes, one innovates and the others apply it. Then they’re catching up and expanding, or innovating anew, and it goes back the other way.

Preppers with crossover interests apply them, and they gain increased attention within that fold, further increasing the backups and alternatives we can apply. (Fad foods, too.)

It goes far beyond gunners and rations, though.

Bivy sleepers of both the sleeping bag and mini pup-tent types can offer us an alternative to more common tents and tarps shelters, or create additional layers of insulation and moisture protection when combined with them – or create even more layers of insulation and warmth indoors.

Netted hammocks and bug net around our hats help keep mosquitoes and biting flies at bay – in the garden and for front-porch sleeping in hot weather as well as out on the water or trails. Those mesh shields crossover with hunters’ turkey and duck mesh for the face and head.

Hunter’s camo options give us an alternative to military patterns, sweltering heat or frigid cold, across a wide variety of terrains.

Increased interest from outdoors types means pack rafts and inflatable kayaks (it’s a canoe) are much more compact, reliable, and affordable now.

They give us vehicle and home options for all sorts of things, be it a fishing platform, icy-pond and deep-mud rescue platform, dryer (-er, not dry) crossing of waterways, and options if we’re caught in high water from a hurricane, main break, dam spillway, or some other flood.

That gives us one more way to keep loved ones safe and get them out of harm’s way across a wide array of emergencies.

Rain gear, protective gear for bikes and ATV’ers, lightweight and compact tools of all sorts, off-roading vehicle upgrades, compact fishing kits, big-wheeled bikes and lightweight tow carts, eating habits, backwoods wheelchairs, speedy-refuel cans, comms devices and chargers – many apply to preppers, whether they’re urban or rural, whether they’re inclined toward either shelter-in-place or bugout survival.

Good-Better-Best

We regularly want a backup – specifically a backup, one that does the same job exactly or nearly the same way. Conditions ebb and flow, though, especially at crunch times. Alternatives that provide entirely different options add to our resilience and self-reliance in times of need.

Having both is the best of all worlds, making for more well-rounded preps all around. Happily, we have whole realms of possibilities that makes it pretty easy to accomplish both backups and alternatives.

Outdoor pursuits may have a lion’s share to offer, but we can find alternatives and backups pretty much anywhere. Sports of all types, permaculture, the re-purpose/up-cycle/re-use-it crowds, bio-mimicry in urban planning, and emergency response techs, shelters, and CnC cells are particular goldmines for techniques and tools.

History and the rest of the world are also excellent sources to apply to all arms of preparedness, both in terms of things that could derail our primary and backup plans, and coping mechanisms for when “normal” has left the building.

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Editor’s Comment: Another guest submission from Scott Huntington to The Prepper Journal. A subject we have talked about in the past and with the Summer break coming some food for thought.

We all love the great outdoors, and it’s a great way to spend time bonding with your family. If you go out hiking as a family, do your kids know what to do if they get separated from the group? What about other survival situations — would your little ones know how to stay alive until help arrives? Everyone should know some basic survival skills, regardless of their age. Here are some easy ways to teach your children about survival skills.

Be Stealth About It

This is the best tip we can probably offer you. Be sneaky about teaching them survival skills, the “wax on, wax off” method per say. Don’t walk up to your kids — especially younger ones — all doom and gloom and tell them that you’re teaching them how to survive in case the world ends.

All you’ll manage to do is scare them to death, and they won’t remember anything you try to teach. Instead, be sneaky about it. Take notice of what interests your kids and play into their interests. Approach it as a game, if it helps.

Don’t — “Hey, let’s learn how to build a fire in case you’re stranded in the woods all alone.”

Do — “Hey, wanna learn how to build a fire?”

Don’t put the focus on survival. Instead, shift the focus to learning new skills. If your kids are ever alone in a survival situation, they’ll thank you for these comprehensive lessons.

Focus on the Rule of 3

This isn’t some mystical voodoo — just a simple rule to help your kids remember what they need to focus on in a survival situation.

Remind them that they can live:

Three weeks without food Three days without water Three minutes without air Three seconds without the right mindset.

From there, know your priorities — first, don’t panic. If you’re not swimming, you can skip the second one, focusing on water and food.

These aren’t the only things you need in the wilderness — fire, and shelter being among the most important — but reciting the rule a few times can help you get into a survival mindset.

One rule you should reinforce as often as possible is the Lost rule — if you get lost, you don’t move. You stay put and wait for someone to find you. Staying in one place makes it easier for search and rescue teams to find you, and could potentially save your life.

Get Out There

Kids aren’t going to learn how to survive in the wilderness if they spend all of their time sitting in front of video game consoles or televisions.

GET OUT THERE!

Take the family hiking or camping, and give your kids a practical application for all the skills they’ve learned. You should be there to supervise, especially if they’re trying their hands at foraging or fire building, but having a possible outlet for these new skills can help reinforce them in their young brains.

Make sure you have plenty of supplies on hand for these excursions, especially if you have younger children who aren’t up to building a fire or fishing for their dinner — or if the kid’s attempt to catch dinner falls through. Children of any age can benefit from regular camping excursions. Getting them used to the woods helps make it familiar territory and prevents panic if they ever end up out there alone.

Skills They Should Know

What survival skill should your kids know? That depends on their age — you don’t want to trust that a toddler can tell the difference between nightshade and blueberries — but most older children should know these basic skills.

How to build a shelter — This is vital in areas where it gets cold at night. Even a basic shelter could mean the difference between a successful night vs. the wild and/or hypothermia. How to build a fire — You need a fire to cook food, boil water and stay warm in cold climates. In addition to creating a fire, your kids should know how to protect it for the night and how to keep it contained, so they don’t accidentally start a wildfire. How to purify natural water sources — Rivers and streams might look clean, but they could hide dangerous bacteria that could make you ill. Boiling or otherwise purifying water could save your life. How to forage for food — While you can survive for three weeks without food, a lack of calories makes it harder to sustain because you won’t have the energy to continue moving forward. This is a tricky lesson because there are so many plants that look edible and are fatal — a handful of pokeberries could easily kill an adult, even though they look edible. Learning how to set snares can also help them stay full in the woods. How to defend themselves — Self-defense is as much a survival skill as anything else listed. Even if they never need to use it, self-defense classes can be life-saving. Learning how to create makeshift weapons can also be a valuable skill. How to perform first aid — Take a family trip to your local Red Cross or fire station and take a first aid class. It’s a lot harder to deal with a skinned knee or a broken bone if you can’t holler for mom or dad’s help. How to navigate — A cell phone with GPS won’t always work if you’re out in the wilderness. Teach your children how to read a map and navigate using a compass. This can be a fun skill to learn — set up a scavenger hunt with prizes at specific coordinates.

There are plenty of other skills they’ll pick up along the way, but these seven can save their lives if they’re ever alone in a survival situation.

Closing Thoughts — Don’t Scare Them

While learning survival skills is important, your kids won’t learn anything if you scare them instead of teaching. Children will learn from everything you do, so show them the basics and let them run it with them. You’ll be surprised how quickly they pick them up!

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