How Does My (Survival) Garden Grow?

Survival Garden

Watering Can by michaelaw on sxc.hu

I started my vegetable garden this year… or at least, I tried to. I tried to start some seeds indoors, but it’s been about a month since I planted them and so far there’s not so much as a single sprout. Part of the problem, or possibly THE problem, is that the only south-facing window that isn’t shaded from the sun is in my husband’s office, and by keeping them in there I keep forgetting to water them as regularly as I should. I also didn’t use heirloom seeds—I’ve read a lot about the importance of keeping heirloom seeds for your survival garden, but I’m not really clear as to why that’s important. But we didn’t find any at Home Depot when we went to stock up on seeds, and we decided to take our chances with some Burpee organic seeds instead.

Otherwise, I went by this planting chart for my zone, and planted peas, broccoli, arugula (I was going to plant kale, but I couldn’t find any seeds at Home Depot, so we decided to try arugula instead), spinach, red and green cabbage, and some herbs including chives, sweet basil, curled parsley and cilantro.

The herb seeds are a few years old—I bought this mini greenhouse herb garden starter kit when we first moved into our house and then never got around to planting it. So I thought I’d try using it to start my garden seeds this year, and try out the herb seeds that came with it as well. They’re old enough that I didn’t really expect them to grow, but I’m dismayed that none of the veggies are sprouting. I guess once they’re sure we’re not going to have another freeze I’ll try planting some outdoors instead (and come up with a system to make sure I remember to water them) and see if I have better luck. But this is a good reason as to why you should practice these things, and not just buy a can of “survival seeds” and assume you’ll be able to grow your own food in a disaster without ever having tried your hand at gardening.

I’m having better luck with growing some green onions on my kitchen windowsill. I saw a tip on Pinterest that said to cut the bulbs off of store-bought green onions and put them in water, and they’ll grow. I started trying this last week, and I’ve already got several onions sprouting new stalks. This way I’m going to have an endless supply of onions, at least. I also saw another tip that you could do the same with the stumps of celery and Romaine, so I’m going to try those next. If all else fails, maybe I can just use this method to grow my survival garden in my kitchen window.