Restaurants Running Low On Food?

I’ve been worried about a food shortage for a while now, but it seems things are a bit more serious than I thought they’d be.

You see, part of the problem has been the supply chains for restaurants and grocery stores aren’t the same chain. Farms growing for one chain don’t shift easily to the other. With so many restaurants out of business for the moment, suppliers are all kinds of screwed.

Meanwhile, there’s more demand at grocery stores since people can’t go out every night, thus creating shortages of key items.

However, you’d think that those who are still serving folks would have their pick of available supplies.

You’d be wrong.

Threat To Food Supply Continues

The last week or so has been pretty busy and, well, money’s been tight. It always gets that way around this time of the month as I want for my monthly paycheck (yay freelance life!), so I’ve been a little quiet.

However, an order from the grocery store made me wonder if maybe things were starting to normalize just a bit. After all, everything was there and there wasn’t any rationing going on. Maybe we were getting back to the old usual.

Well, probably not.

Sprouts Of Survival

I’ve always been excited when a seed I plant sprouts. Each new sprout represents new hope, a new chance to produce something that will feed my family and reduce our dependence on the food supply system.

Most gardeners look at sprouts somewhat similarly. After all, I suspect the excitement for new life is encoded on our DNA or something.

However, right now, I have black bean and tomato sprouts that have just popped up and they mean so much more to me.

Why I’m NOT Gardening Organically

I don’t know this is for sure today, but back in the day, most preppers gardened organically. They composted and used organic methods of pest control. Their reasoning, that these would be available to them when everything else collapsed, makes a great deal of sense.

Despite it making sense, though, I ain’t doing it, and I figured I’d talk a bit about why.

More Data Pointing Toward Food Shortages

I know, I know, I’m beating this particular drum pretty hard lately. If you read this blog much, you already know how I feel about our food supply.  I’ve already talked about it.

Yet those were just a couple of data points that might suggest we’re looking at food shortages.

It seems today I’ve come across a couple more.

The Challenge Of Prepping In A Pandemic

In a perfect world, there would never be a need to prep. Everything would run along smoothly forever. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, we live in this one.

In this one, I knew I needed to prep, but it kinda fizzled out a bit. Now we need to prep, and it’s challenging, to say the least.

After all, it’s not just every day you’re trying to prep as the shit is hitting the fan.

Veggies In The Ground

Beggars can’t be choosers. When it seems like every seed store on the internet is sold out of pretty much everything, you become something of a beggar.

Even if you’re not really begging.

Luckily, I have good friends. One of them sent me a seed vault by My Patriot Supply. It seems they don’t sell this particular one anymore (here’s a similar one that is, alas, sold out), but it’s a useful canister full of all kinds of seeds, and lots of them.

When I mentioned I was digging a garden bed to some friends due to my concerns about the food supply, she offered to send these and pay her back for them whenever I could. Since I get paid monthly, that was huge for me.

The canister arrived yesterday, which meant they went in the ground today.

My Food Inventory

As we find ourselves in the midst of the shit hitting the proverbial fan, it’s generally a bad time to start adding to food storage. Yet, as noted previously, I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. I should have done it sooner, I didn’t, so here I am.

What we’ve been doing is buying a little extra on each grocery trip out. Not enough to completely deplete the shelves, but enough to make sure we’re covered for a bit longer than the grocery trip was originally meant to cover.

Yet the problem was, I didn’t have a damn clue what the hell we’d managed to put aside.

So, I took a quick inventory.

I Dig It: Another Foray Into Gardening

I grew up with vegetable gardens. Off and on, my parents would dig up a swath of the back yard and drop some plants into it. They rarely grew anything from seed, but they grew plenty of food off and on through the years.

Truth be told, I don’t think they were ever all that picky about where they planted. Regardless, we had some decent harvests, including the year our tomato plants were properly classified as “trees.”

Yet on my own, I haven’t had a lot of luck.

When Mom was still alive, we tried it in her backyard in raised beds I built and they worked great. The problem was that when I lived next door, I couldn’t replicate it to save my life. Then again, I wasn’t using actual raised beds.

There’s a reason that matters.

Seeds Almost Here!

I just checked the tracking on my seeds from MyPatriotSupply.com, and they’re out for delivery!  WOOHOO!

Yes, I’m excited.  Why?  Well, let’s just say that I love eating fresh vegetables out of the garden, and I like the idea of growing enough food for my family to take care of many of our food needs for the next year.

Theoretically, anyway.

You see, I’ve never had nearly that much luck for whatever reason.  With squash — something that’s getting planted in the next week or so — I’ve not yet yielded a single squash.  Not one.  They bloom, they grow, but nothing.

So, I’m going to try again.  Squash and onions will go in the ground fast.  Yes, it’s hot, which worries me, but I’ll get some hay to use as mulch and hopefully it’ll keep it cool enough to let stuff grow.

So what else is on the agenda?

Well, green beans is a big part of our diet, so I’ll be growing a lot of those. In this case, I’ll be growing Blue Lake pole beans, rather than the bush variety I have more experience with.  My reasoning is that my reading indicates that pole varieties will keep putting out pods throughout the season, so long as you keep harvesting them.  Obviously, this translated to more beans (DUH!).

Bush varieties, by contrast, only produce for a couple of weeks no matter how much you harvest.  This, I’ve seen first hand.  As a result, if you plant a like number of pole beans, you’ll get a much greater harvest.  This is kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it?

Additionally, I’ve got carrots and lettuce in route as well.  Still needing to be ordered are spinach (research is needed to determine what kind I want to grow), potatoes, and sweet potatoes.

With the help of succession planting, I’m hoping I can get most of these grown and harvest enough to cover our needs.  Maybe.

However, if these are successful, I’ll be growing in more beds, and hopefully add in a few other vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and corn (maybe).  We’ll see how things work out.

Now I just need this heel injury — the one I haven’t told you about — to heal so I can get outside and start digging out the beds.  I think I’ll be ready to roll by tomorrow, at least in part.  I hope to have everything ready for seeds to roll starting next Monday.

I do plan on documenting what works and what doesn’t work here, including my experiments in vertical gardening.

So, if you have questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions for varieties of spinach I can grow, please leave a comment. 🙂