Apocalypse-Grade Permaculture, Part One - introduction

Engineer your landscape to produce food automatically.

Photo by Zane Lee on Unsplash

Part One: The Why. If the grid goes down forever, or global war breaks out, or whatever, wouldn’t it be nice not to starve to death? Yes, you can stock a massive amount of freeze-dried survival rations, but those will run out eventually, and they are very expensive. You could also grow a garden. But it is extremely labor intensive to grow all of your own calories, especially without power. Also, in a totally grid-down scenario, you will probably be under a massive amount of stress. You will have many other demands on your time, besides planting potatoes and pulling weeds. And what if you get sick or injured? What if you have to tend to a hurt family member, or hide out in a bunker for three months? Despite your very best efforts, if you are relying only on garden production, you may find it impossible to grow enough food to keep your belly full.

That is why I gradually evolved the system that I call apocalypse-grade permaculture (Or AGP for short). I call it apocalypse grade, because even if your homestead is hit by a cluster bomb, or wildfire, or tornado, you will still have plenty of food to eat. The way to do this is to build ultra-tough biological systems into your landscape that produce food automatically. The system that I am going to talk about in this series, once established, will produce 100% of the calories that you need to feed yourself and your family, even without further effort on your part, other than harvesting.

This point is so important, that it can hardly be overemphasized. In normal garden production, growing a lot of calories takes a lot of time. Even more so, if store-bought fertilizer is not available, or any of the many other inputs that a garden requires. In gardens, there is direct correlation between how much time you put in, and how much food you get out. Also, they are soft, obvious targets - easy to identify, raid, and wipe out.

The system described in this series is very different. Yes, it does require a significant amount of concentrated effort to set up. But once established, it will produce massively for decades, with very minimal work on your part, other than to harvest. Also it is a dispersed, non-obvious target, made up of hyper-tough, ultra nutrient-dense plants that will survive things that would kill an average cucumber in five seconds. Many of these plants also spread themselves, doing some of your horticulture work for you. None of the plants in this system can be killed a natural disaster such as a tornado, or a man-made disaster such as arson.

But the survivor permaculture is not just plants. I will also talk about features such as mini ponds, and other landscape modifications that can boost the natural baseline food production of your natural surroundings. There will also be a section on low tech tools that will be extremely helpful in any long-term grid-down scenario.

Now I don’t advocate for this system out of laziness. No, I believe in hard work, and I hate idleness. My reasons are that in grid-down situation, you will have so many crises on your hands, that you need to have an automatic food supply, so that you have time to deal with all of your other emergencies.

Thoughtful preppers know that even the best laid preparations can potentially get damaged or wiped out by various catastrophes. And this is what makes apocalypse grade permaculture so special. It is a preparation system that is literally built into the landscape, so it has an extremely high degree of resistance to catastrophic failure.

One last thought: I still love veggie gardens. Nothing in apocalypse-grade permaculture can replace the taste of a carrot, or snap peas, or butterhead lettuce, or beets, or sweet corn. In a catastrophic scenario, I would still plan to grow a garden. But I would never want to be dependent on a garden for survival; and I have systems in place so that even if my garden fails completely, my family and I will still have more that enough food to eat.

Coming next: Part two - the hybrid hazelnut-wildlife component.