Food for Survival V

I now live in the country on five acres of land. Most of the land is woods, but there is enough for a large garden and anything else I need to grow such as berries, dwarf fruit trees, etc. As we live in a mobile home which is on a foundation, we do not have a lot of storage room. I grow many root crops, as these store easily. Many can be left in the ground well into the winter, especially if covered with a foot or so of hay. We can some of our produce and keep quite a bit in freezers. Having food in a freezer is a great idea unless you have a power failure. Food will keep for several days in a freezer with no power if the door is not opened. The best idea for people such as myself with freezers is to can what is in the freezer should power go off for a lengthy period of time. We have a large enough stock of canning jars and canning equipment on hand that we could can everything in the freezer. One thing to remember is to have a heat source. When we lived at our last home we had an electric stove so I had two large camp stoves as backup for emergency usage. I also now have a kerosene stove like our grandmothers used to can on when the heat of the summer made using the wood stove to hot. Actually, where I live now I do not really need it as we have a gas stove in the kitchen run on propane with a 500 gallon propane tank. The first thing to remember is to raise what the family likes to eat. Some people may be allergic to tomatoes, so why would you want to raise a lot of tomatoes? If you hate eggplant, do not raise eggplant. If no one in your house will eat beets, do not raise beets. Raise what you enjoy eating and what you know you can store. Those of you without yards and other places to grow a garden may opt to raise salad fixings in the house or on a porch or anywhere they can. If you have the space and like squash, this is an excellent keeping vegetable. I have kept squash from one season right up until the next crop was ready. Cabbage is another excellent keeper. They take a little more room than squash, but can be worth it. My advice is that you study a couple of good books or web sites on gardening and food storage and see just howe much effort you want to put into growing your own survival garden. If you have the room, fruit is great to grow for survival. Most fruits are perennial, that is you plant them and they just keep coming back year after year and they keep on producing. If no one in your family is allergic to them, strawberries are my first choice of fruit. They do not take up much room, they can be eaten fresh, frozen, made into jams and jellies or dried. My next choice, if you have the room is apples. If you have a small yard a dwarf tree is all you really need. Here again they store well, can be used in various ways and most people like them. Other fruits to think about are grapes, raspberries, blackberries, currants, and rhubarb. Most of these thing will start to produce in about a year and will keep producing for many years if taken care of. Nut trees are the one thing that I wish could be grown but take so long to get started that I am not sure if they are worth it. I have located both black walnut and hickory nut trees in the wild and will make do with them.