I agree on buying most of the grains, but I would do it now, then continue to replace what I used during that year, when it is harvest time for that product. Dry packed wheat will last for years. If your storage place is dry and cool you can store dry packed oatmeal, corn, and rice for several years. Flour does not store for very long, so grind as you need it. I would buy while it is affordable and available rather than try to buy or barter in time of need. If I were planning for a survival situation, I would choose nothing larger than a goat. For the last several months, I have averaged about a dozen eggs a day from 17 hens, and 3 of those are a breed not noted for being good layers. I am sure that the number of eggs will reduce in winter and as the chicken age. Rabbits and quail may be something you want to consider. I live on a lake so I have access to fish. Growing your own food is something you need to learn to do. Decide what you would need to have to sustain life and work on learning to grow those crops. It doesn't matter how small a space you have, there is something that you can start learning to grow. If you have a small plot, start building up the soil. If you must grow in containers or raised beds then choose carefully and practice as many crops as you can. Each crop is unique, and you will learn if it is possible to grow it where you live, or if you even want to. You can save seeds from your own plants if you plant only open pollinated types. Some people call them heirloom, but not all open pollinated seeds are heirlooms. I will link one web site that sells only open pollinated seeds, but there are others. My best advice to anyone wanting to achieve a self sufficent lifestyle would be to START NOW. It will take you a long time to get there, so begin now and take a few baby steps as you dream. I planted a lot of peppers and tomatoes this year. We eat all we can fresh. The extra peppers, I clean, remove seeds, and cut into the size pieces that I use for cooking and freeze them. I do bags labeled 'peppers' that I might grab for an italian dish, and bags labeled 'spicy peppers' that have both sweet and hot that I might want for a mexican dish. I do quart freezer bags, but I just take out what I want each time and zip it back up. I rarely can tomatoes, but I do know how. Instead I make picante sauce. I would much rather have to buy a can of tomatoes to cook with that try to find an expensive jar of salsa that is as good as my own. Once I get the speciality items made, I might think about canning plain ole tomatoes. In the spring we had all the broccoli we could eat fresh but our season turned very hot very early. I didn't get as much broccoli as I would have like, but we ate a lot and I put 13 packages in the freezer. In the spring, I had lots of lettuce, and other green things, but we always seemed to choose in favor of the chinese cabbage, and it became our 'spring green of choice'. The addition of the fresh snow peas, just enhanced it. Soon I will start those things for fall, along with some brussel sprouts. I live in a hot climate so fall things are more difficult. I get free sweet corn from a farmer friend, so I don't grow it. I wanted to make sure that I knew how to grow dent corn, for grinding into grits or cornmeal, in the event that I ever needed to. I took a very small spot of my garden and planted about 40 stalks. It is heading up but I will never grow it in my garden again. So, from the experience I learned that I could do it, but that I needed to find a new place for it. I am not a big potato grower but by growing them this year, I learned a lot. Mostly I learned that I don't want to use my good garden space for growing a crop that would be in my garden a long time and be ugly the last half of that time. I will find an out of the way place to grow them from now on. I only planted enough to produce a few new potatoes to eat, and the space alloted to them could have been covered with far less than two sheets of plywood, for a size comparison. I had over a hundred medium size potatoes and many small ones and I would guess that it was roughly 60 pounds. I proved that I can do it. They were delish. Everytime I pull a plant from the garden, my chickens begin pacing and talking to me, because they know that some of it may be for them. They get the weeds, the spent plants, the broccoli leaves, the lettuce that goes to seed, etc. and they can't wait. They like most anything green. They also take care of most of the kitchen waste. In return, they give me fresh eggs, excellent fertilizer, and entertainment. I grow lettuce, spinach, etc in the fall and keep it going until mid December most years. If it is going to be really cold, I throw a blanket over it at night. If you had it under a hoop house, you could probably do that too. If you are still in the planning stages of buying, then I would suggest that buy as much as you can afford, but plant less than a quarter acre, and learn from that. For reading (and learning) I suggest the Eliot Coleman books. It is a lot of work, so be prepared. Good luck. Carol

My asparagus is mostly dead, both the seeded and the roots. I suspect there was too much competition from the raspberries, but I have no explanation for the seeded plants since there wasn't anything nearby. I've been fortunate to be able to grow almost anything in our soil, but have never been able to keep asparagus roots alive in my 25 years working in this garden. When I first tried about 20 years ago, I dug up the mostly dead roots and did find that a number of worms were eating on them. So back then, before I switched to organic gardening, I used Seven, and that seemed to give them another year or two, but they eventually succumbed. Does anyone have any ideas?

I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland hills, about 25 miles from Romando. Here it is always 5 degrees warmer but much less windy and on the edge of the fog belt, so it is much sunnier. I truly wish Sunset would break up its zone map of area #17, which covers a large area where temps differ 15-20 degrees from one end to the other, with much less fog at the outer borders of #17, leading to much greater temp fluctuations on a daily basis. In many cities located 10+ miles from the coast, it's common to have a 25-40 degree difference between day/night temps, especially in summer. These cool nights are why roses and citrus do so well in the East Bay counties; almost everyone has a lemon or orange tree in the front or back. A number of older EBay homes have the unfortunate choice of giant redwood trees taking up an entire front yard bed - a once-popular but very poor choice for an urban lot. Gardening here is year-round. There is no 'off' season, which can be a bit tiring (no end, ever, to weeding!) but the rewards are HUGE. Some plants flower all the time - polygonum, lantana, aptenia groundcover, pelargoniums, osteospermums, cestrum, euryops, solanum jasminoides vine. Winter bloomers like hellebore (foetidus and argutifolius) can last 6+ months with flowers. Citrus blooms scent the air. Spring starts in mid-February, when the winter rains encourage the leafing out of freesias, nasturtiums, and CA poppies. The one month it's dreary - January - suddenly changes to those fresh new greens everywhere. The hideously invasive but pretty weed Oxalis pes-caprae shows up everywhere, turning even neglected gardens and vacant lots into a sea of soft clover-shaped leaves and nodding stalks of pale yellow flowers. Coleonema and rhaphiolepsis burst into bloom, and erysimums start flowering in yellow and lilac. Oxalis siliquosa, a non-invasive species, puts up little yellow flowers like the charmer it is. March is fast and furious, with callas and iris blooming, Japanese maples showing buds, azaleas and rhodies beginning to bloom. My roses start blooming in March (and are still offering a few blooms in mid-December). Daffodils are everywhere, as Oakland has given away free bulbs for several years now and people plant them in the median strips. Wisteria begins to show some green, but hardenbergia is far more floriferous and starts throwing out its purple racemes for an earlier and longer show. Leptospermum and ceanothus put on their once-a-year display of beauty, making them almost worth the 10 months of boring dull dark green the rest of the time. April and May are the showiest in my garden because nasturtiums and CA poppies have reseeded wildly. I yank them out by the handful to keep them from smothering my evergreen perennials, just leaving some to give those bright pops of color. The weather starts to warm because it's early summer now, so hydrangeas are leafing out like crazy even as the rhodies continue their show. Lavender - I have both English and Spanish - come into bloom. I have a single clematis and am glad I didn't plant more. They just can't compete with the evergreen vines, and their short bloom season just doesn't seem worth it. Out here, perennial morning glories are 45' monsters that crush fences while remaining in bloom for six months or more. My gladiolas are weeds - pretty, but weeds nonetheless, dropping bulblets everywhere. June is full summer here. The rains ended a month or more previous, and there'll be no more rain until mid-October. The soil warms up, so the dahlias will start and hydrangeas begin blooming, even as the nasturtiums and callas start to fade because they hate "warm feet". One of my bearded iris varieties is deciduous and blooms only this one month; unlike my other iris which are spring/fall rebloomers. Limonium starts to come up, always a good pairing with the roses for bouquets. My prized Lavatera olba "Aureum" blooms this month as well, with its gorgeous flower spikes of lavender-pink singles (it's related to hibiscus and the blooms are like mini-hibiscus, but multiples on single spikes). July dries out the garden. The nasturtiums fade, the CA poppies set seeds. But the roses are massive, the passionflower vines have encouraged lots of Gulf Fritillary butterflies. Ceratostigma gives bright burst of blue. Agapanthus send up their allium-like flower stalks: light blue, medium blue, purple, white. Cannas prove they are not really water hogs although they look better with summer water. The hills are all golden, and fire season is now a huge concern. August and September continue the same theme. The year-round bloomers keep trucking along, responding to deadheading by blooming again and again. Argyranthemums, aeoniums, Shasta daisies, dahlias, and chrysanthemums abound. Lavender reblooms in Sept/Oct. October is when the rains return. It's planting time in CA, even as the selection in the nurseries begins to fade. We can put away the hoses, but cleanup of deciduous litter starts now and continues for the next couple of months. The nights turn cooler, and we get some fall color from Japanese maples, Liquidamber (sweetgum) and Chinese pistache trees, even as the ever-bloomers keep up the flower show. November is cleanup leaf litter month, and enjoying the last of the heirloom tomatoes from the farmers markets. December is when we who live on hills worry about mudslides and flooded basements/garages; this and January are prime weeding time because the rains have sprouted all the chickweed, oxalis, dandelion, and Bermuda grass seeds. Mid- to late January is when the roses get cut back, and then it all starts over again.

concur about oats (they are also the most mycorrhizal of cover crops, although clover is close) but let me say something nice about buckwheat. It comes up right away with minimal moisture, outracing all those in the list above, which are themselves fast sprouters. It makes non fibrous plants with stems as thick as my thumb, which decay rapidly and will be good fertilizer in early spring. fenugreek is similar in functionality, although it is a legume.