LOL OK, This for you city slickers as well as the country folks. Do you want an emergency fall back food supply that will be there for years and keep expanding without any cost or effort?

It is really simple. I thought I'd share this with you folks. I have couple of these stashed so to speak.

Took my troy built tiller to a couple of places that I am allowed to be. I tilled several rows. I then planted red potatoes, beets, onions, ramps, strawberry's and carrots. I go back once a year or so and check on them.

Did you know they will stay there and keep producing each year and expanding? Planted 5 red raspberry plants at the same time. The berry patch is now 20 feet across and expanding.

That is my idea of a food bank. I never weed it or hoe it. It is own it's own. We have no wild bore here so it is safe underground. Weeded up and brushed up as well and still growing.

5.56

I like the way you think.

All the neighbors clean out their fence rows. Mine are overgrown with thorny berry bushes. Food and security at the same time. Lots of ways to make multiple uses from many things. Need a shade tree? Plant numerous fruit trees instead.

Every survival location that I have seen developed by people who actually had any foresight at all involved planting fruit trees that were relevant to whatever area the location was at. One thing to look out for with northern type trees is the pruning styles will have a major impact on fruit yields later on, and then will have a major impact on how long the tree could possibly last without pruning.

Pruning the apple trees for example is an art form. Orchards doing them for maximum fruit yield will do them one way, and if they are left fallow a couple years without additional pruning of that particular type, they might as well be cut for firewood because the growth will be all screwed up. If you prune them like a big shade tree, they can live virtually forever, but forget being able to harvest half the fruit and what fruit you can harvest will just be so-so, but once that sort of tree is mature, it can go a few years between prunings.

Even if you cant't or won't get around to properly harvesting the fruit, the trees attract game animals of all times and that just supplements your diet. On my old property, we had a half dozen types of fruit trees and a pretty decent sized family of deer that called them home. I never shot any of the deer, figuring the grocery store being a good enough source of meat if there was not going to be a shit on the fan scenario, and the deer being comfortable hanging out on the property during hunting season meant that if I wanted to, I had the prize antlers just hanging out.

Thing is, the fruit trees are a long term deal. On the property in Oregon, they had mostly been planted in the 1970s. Stuff I planted in 2003 now ten years old is barely still alive.

I tried every alternative out there before just knuckling down, working the extra overtime and buying in the freeze dried food from Walmart and the long term storage stuff from the Mormon Cannery. For all the hassle of everything else, once I got past the six month supply I sure had a lot better attitude about no longer having to make excuses for not stocking up on the stuff.

The next big benchmark is the one year supply, then after that, "thickening" the supply to stretch it to more people and a little bit better quality food.

The Indians had the best ideas. They simply found hard to reach places at the edge of forests and planted among the scrub. They planted greens, maize, and onions along with various herbs hey used for medicines.

The stopped and picked what they needed and left the rest to feed the animals. Instead of cultivating rows they planted among other brush that provided protection to the new plants and never moved rocks that while hard on a plow was great for the new plants getting water and protecting the seeds and the roots from digging animals.

If you remember the stories of the Pilgrims the Indians taught them to place two seeds into the head of a small fish. The fish decays and the seeds grew.

If you find some places in the outback with small brush just add some seeds and come back and look at the progress. It will probably grow better and faster than with your Chlorinated and Fluorinated home sprinkler, and larger too.

Current developments in sustainable subsistence farming methods are the best ever because we have the Internet and massive fast communication to combine most of the best methods from everywhere.

Part of the issue why a lot of the sustainable stone age methods of the Native Americans have not been at the forefront of this is that they had pretty high land to people ratios. Lots of land used to feed not that many people. That, and the general population was usually made up of relatively short lived but otherwise very healthy and physically capable people.

Out situation is that we have to consider feeding and self sustainability for people with extended lifespans who can be "active" well into their 80s, but not highly physically capable, not at the level of running down a deer or hiking a five mile circuit daily to stop at batches of mushrooms, berries and squash for the daily meals. Yes, a few 80 year olds do that, but not the majority.

The real formula on this is to have roughly a year's worth of stored food per person with maybe two weeks to a month's worth of that supply as regular grocery store and comfort foods, the rest being long term storage stuff then if a situation lasts longer than that, you transition to the more deluxe freeze dried and preserved stuff, then after that, the cheaper long term freeze dried storage food and then the Mormon Cannery stuff which is mainly food staples which still need some supplementation that we would expect someone to accomplish with gardening, gathering, hunting and trade.

In the midst of that, you are on that time schedule to get relocated to a sustainable farming situation or solidify some connections with one since if you can manage to survive that long, some sort of economy is likely to re-emerge in the form of people selling and trading their own surplus food production of some sort.

I like the idea of planting renewable food crop items whenever someone is out in a wild or semi-wild area, even in unused land around the cities. A few years ago someone had planted some cherry tomatoes at the far end of our commuter train line, and when left wild, the bushes grew massive.

Here in Portland, at least in the decent weather seasons, nobody starves unless they are just plain stupid and crazy, but stupid or crazy, you can probably still get by. We don't have regulations against front yard food gardening and a lot of people grow more than they ever use so they get into a program where volunteers come by to harvest the surplus and then take it to food banks. Even then, there are not enough volunteers to handle it and a lot of fruit trees go unharvested, with pears, plums and apples just falling to the ground which gives us a little bit of a rat problem, but then the rats do so well outdoors that they don't get hard core about invading the houses.

Here in the UK I helped a friend establish what Safetalker is describing. I'd say our climate here in the UK is pretty similar to what you have in the PNW and probably could grow the same stuff whilst it wouldn't make he and his family completely self sufficient he is pretty close to it. He has a bunch of stuff in the forest itself and has 2 or 3 decent sized meadows of cereal crop and if he wanted to could probably use another meadow or 2 to keep a sheep or 2 (by the way don't discount the utility of sheep as a good shtf resource) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening is a good read

The stocking levels Breacher recommends is pretty spot on in my opinion. The way I've worked out for myself, I can live for 2 weeks initially on what I have in my house. I have rations to sustain me for a bug out for a month and spread out in caches I have food to last me 8 months so I can survive until a harvest happens.

I've been thinking about many of these ideas. Jerusalem Artachokes (aka 'sunchokes') are a great low input foods to grow in a wild setting. Been tempted to plant some naturalized plots in out of the wilderness park areas.