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Comment by thekevan | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has a backyard hobby garden, don't forget about failures.

This year something ate the leaves off all my cucumber plants and they stopped producing after about 3 weeks. In 6 or 7 years of having them, that has never happened before.

One year squirrels overran the neighborhood and did the same to tomatoes. (The little f-ers take one bite of a tomato and drop it. It's so frustrating.)

One year I had to go out of town unexpectedly for 2 weeks and we happened to have a dry few weeks. Most of my plants died or were in bad shape.

Just off the cuff, if I were planning to do this, I would personally immediately almost double the size of garden I was told I needed just because I expect there would be a lot of loss.

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Exactly, if this is for survival you'll need fencing to keep small animals out, and possibly something like a pellet gun to remove pests like squirrels from existence.

Then you have the effort of preserving all the food. The modern house isn't a great place to store potatoes. You'll probably want to can/jar most of it. I mean you could freeze it, but in a survival situation you probably don't have reliable power. Oh, and like you said with a dry spell, where are you storing enough water for the dry season? We just got over a 60 day spell with no rain. Wouldn't want to try and survive here.

I have seven raised garden beds in a typical suburban block, plus espaliered fruit trees. If I had to revamp to make a more concerted effort to feed us rather than just a hobby, I would build in a few things from the start. Probably at serious expense too.

Things like: permanent wiring and netting to keep out possums and rats, a bordering method to deter as many slugs as possible, frameworks such as tubes and hooks to convert beds to polyhouses or add shade for winter and summer. I have a couple of these things now, but they're a bit of a mishmash.

It's too easy to put in a lot of effort and end up with scraps because a pest cleaned you out.

I have tried two years in a row to have garden boxes in SF, and I’m now giving up. The rats are an absolute force. I have ~4 ft high boxes and they have easily emptied literal tons of soil from them with their tunneling. They love to burrow through the roots of every plant, killing all but the most resilient. There is also no stopping them. I won’t do poison, due to having a dog + environmental concerns, but even orthodox traps I can catch 3-4 a night, night after night, and they just never stop coming.

Could you have tried wicking beds? They might discourage the burrowing?

I'm also limited in poisoning because the neighbour has a dog. Rats live in our compost bin and are tough to keep out. Possums here in South Australia are protected so we can't trap them and they cause trouble as well. Lost all my garlic and chives this year to black aphids. Virtually no stone fruit lasted until picking last year. Too hot through summer or not enough bees for zucchinis to set fruit.

The things that did well are mostly herbs/chillis/etc that aren't exactly the bulk you live off!

Sometimes I wonder if the best home approach is growing herbs so you don't get stuck paying a premium at the shop, and maybe 1-2 other things for the experience and to share with family/friends.

Not sure if it is effective, but supposedly cat urine naturally deters rodents. If you could secure some used cat litter, sprinkle it around your garden perimeter.

I, uh, might just deal with the rats in that case :)

There are environmentally safe rodent poisons. You can even make them yourself, from stuff in your pantry:

http://www.ratpoisonfacts.org/low-toxicity-rodenticides/

You can have a cellar by/under a modern house just fine. If we're all doomsday prepping, serious solar and a deep freezing rig is a must, same with water storage/filtering.

> You can have a cellar by/under a modern house just fine

The ease of that depends on where you live. I live in the southern US, so we don't have a frost line in the soil. Accordingly, most homes are built on post-tensioned slabs (newer) or conventional (older) foundations. There's also shrink-swell soil, so a poured concrete basement would crack (the slab floats on this, but walls would be harder to do). Just because of the topography of my lot, it would be hard to have an external cellar (and it definitely would not be as cool as those found in more northern climates).

> something like a pellet gun to remove pests like squirrels from existence.

Despite living in the city, this probably wouldn't do much. They always come back. I have chipmunks that I have not seen in over a year and yet I hear them bark a warning call when I am apparently approaching their vicinity. I bet they have been at some of my tomatoes this year.

I have regular rabbits and this year, one or more racoons have moved into the neighborhood. I have seen skunks and wild turkey in my yard in the past. We have deer but they don't jump my fence since we installed the 6 footers.

The rabbits definitely do some damage, but one of them is my bud. He hangs out about 6 feet from me and eats clover while I weed my garden.

Living in London, foxes tore apart our hens, not once, nor twice, but thrice. Clever, vicious little things they are, and they are literally everywhere - screaming like devils in the night, whilst no one bats an eye.

Don't squirrels taste good?

I heard they were high in cholesterol.

Yes, they do.

This was a survivalist meme a few years ago. Bosnian guy posted something about his experience during the Siege of Sarajevo, and one of his points was essentially "you need more buckets."

Like, lots of buckets. Food storage, food preservation, cooking, water storage (drinking, washing, utility), and sewage. And in most cases you won't want a lot of overlap with those; your poop bucket stays a poop bucket.

Also jars, bottles, sacks, bags, wraps, blankets, etc. Unsexy stuff, but often critical.

> Then you have the effort of preserving all the food. The modern house isn't a great place to store potatoes. You'll probably want to can/jar most of it.

My my area of expertise, but can you preserve most foods without a significant bulk of salt or sugar? Especially if you're talking about a significant portion of a year's worth of calories.

That means you'd also need a salt mine, a sugar crop, or tons of honey or maple syrup you make on site.

So much of "live off the grid to" me seems like fantasy. Or quietly ignoring all the ingredients you still get from the grid. Fundamentally, any western standard of life from the past few hundred years requires local and long distance trade, which means interdependence and a large community. This go it alone fantasy just isn't possible.

I concur. This year we had a biblical plague of grasshoppers year through our area and eat everything.

And the climate.

In southern Spain you could have fresh veg all year round. In the UK you're going to be struggling in January and would need much more land area.

That's probably why we like jams, preserves and tinned food so much. It'll be good for 10 years in some cases.

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