The Coop Episode #24: How to Grow Real Food That Actually Feeds Your Family w/ David The Good

David The Good:
I love the idea that I could go out to the backyard too and if my kids ate the strawberries back there or the blackberries back there or the mulberries or whatever else, they weren’t sprayed with a zillion pesticides. With survival gardening, it’s not necessarily that you’re always going to be in a panic mode, but it’s that you have the skills that if you need to do it to the point where you feed yourself completely, you could at least get close. So you suit your gardening to the climate. Don’t try to force plants into your climate that are not ideal. Don’t just go watch YouTube videos and say, “Wow, that looks like a really good one. That looks like a really good one.” You got to say, “Where is that fellow located? Where is she growing that?

Anna Sakawsky:
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I’m your host, Anna Sokowski, editor-in-chief of Homestead Living Magazine. And today we are talking about something that has long been top of mind for a lot of homesteaders but feels especially relevant right now. So with ongoing supply chain disruptions, rising food costs and inflation stretching household budgets thinner than ever, more and more people are asking the same question. How do we grow a garden that actually feeds our families? Not just a garden that produces a handful of seasonal vegetables or specialty crops, but on that provides real sustenance, calories, nutrients, and resilience without relying heavily on expensive inputs or labor intensive methods. And I couldn’t think of a better person to have on for this conversation other than today’s guest. So David The Good is a regular contributor to Homestead Living Magazine and is actually featured on the cover of our July, August issue with his article on Survival Gardening.
He’s also the author of 14 books, including Create Your Own Florida Food Forest, Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting and Grow or Die, The Good Guide to Survival Gardening. He’s also the voice behind the Survival Gardener website and runs a popular YouTube channel where he shares simple solutions to growing food no matter what your level of experience. David also runs Atmore Farm and Garden, a plant, nursery, feed and seed store in Atmore, Alabama alongside his wife, Rachel and their 11. Soon to be 12, I hear children. You may have read his past articles in Homestead Living on lazy composting, permaculture gardening and growing food forests. And in his latest piece, he focuses on low cost, low input, ways to grow calorie dense and nutrient rich food at home. So today we’re going to dig into what survival gardening really means, how it differs from the way many of us are currently gardening and what practical steps we can all take to become a little bit more food secure and resilient right where we are.
So David, welcome to the show.

David The Good:
Thank you, Anna. It’s good to be here.

Anna Sakawsky:
Awesome. Well, before we kind of dive into this, I kind of just want to get a little bit more of your background and context around where you’re growing and all that you’re doing. So can you start just by sharing a bit about who you are, where you live, what gardening zone you’re in and your approach to gardening and food production?

David The Good:
Sure. I started gardening when I was a litle kid. I was six years old and we did this little thing at school where they would bring you a little cup of soil and some beans and we planted the beans. And when those beans came up, I was just like, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” So I went on and I planted a lot of the dry beans out of my mom’s pantry. I probably tore into more bags than I should have and a few black beans and a few lama beans and a few pinto beans and just started planting them all over. So I grew up gardening and always had a garden in the backyard every year that I could except occasionally when I was moving for work or something like that. And then after I got married and we started having children, we went through the housing crisis and I had a feeling it was coming because I was reading the classical Austrian economists and I was looking at the amount of spending that was going on in the government and I started research what happens when you deficit spend and how do you pay for it?
And I realized that the way it’s usually paid for is through inflation and that there are these cycles of boost something up with inflation and then it crashes and then something else will make a bubble and it crashes. This constant bubble cycle was just a function of modern monetary policy. So knowing all of that in the back of your head is great, like you see the cliff coming, but what do you do? So we tried to live as simply as possible and also I wasn’t making very much money. I was just a writer for a radio program and did some audio editing and we had a little yard and I was like, “This is the time we should really put in more gardens.” So we put in more gardens through 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006. And then when 2008 actually happened, I was like, “Finally.” No, finally I’m not crazy.
But then I really just love the idea that I could go out to the backyard too and if my kids ate the strawberries back there or the blackberries back there or the mulberries or whatever else, they weren’t sprayed with a zillion pesticides. That was another sort of a side thing that to me was important when you get a little packet of strawberries from the store and they’re conventionally produced strawberries and I put them in front of my sweet litle two-year-old and I’m like, “Here, eat some strawberries.” And I’m always like, “How were they handled? What was sprayed on them?” And I kind of always have this in the back of my head like I would feel much better if I had grown these or I knew who had grown these. And so for us it was to take some out of the budget mostly, but then secondarily we wanted to get healthy food.
And as I gardened more and more and built more and more and tested different crops, there was a day where I was like, if I was writing and sharing some of what we’d done, maybe that could be my job. Maybe I could actually write about gardening for a living instead of writing advertisement, throwaway advertisements for radio and just like coming up next to the program, 15 ways to save your marriage in 15 minutes or less. All right. So then we got Dr. So – and-so here and it was like you’d write these little things for the DJ to read on the air and then what happens it just gets thrown away and it’s all worthless information promoting stuff I really just didn’t care about. I’m not really a sales type. Every time they tried to push sales and things, I was like, “I don’t really like this, but I could tell you about what’s growing in my yard and feel good about it.
If you do this, it’ll work.” Or if I tried this and it didn’t work. So I just started writing posts for my blog and ended up writing for Mother Earth News and Natural Awakenings Magazine, which was a little local one and a couple of other things. And so over the years that grew into writing the books. And then I started a YouTube because not everybody likes to read and people kept saying, “I would rather see a video of this or why don’t you do more videos?” And so I started doing that and had some fun with that and then ended up buying a farm and garden store. So that’s where we are today. I wanted to actually be able to put out some of the plants. And then I also feel like AI is taking over a lot of stuff in writing and video and it’s gotten to the point where if I write an article, people will say, “I think that might be AI, but I don’t use AI.” But AI has gotten so good at mimicking and replacing.
I think it’s probably only a matter of time before we’re seeing complete AI written garden books and all of the stuff just goes, the algorithms just promote whatever is being written rapidly and it’s throw away. And so I thought if I’m working directly with people and talking to people in person and telling them what really is growing in my climate, I could do more relational connections and less of this weird fake internet mess that we have today. So that’s partly how we ended up with a store where I could just work right with people.

Anna Sakawsky:
Wow. Well, so much is buzzing in my head from everything that you just said. I think it’s also cool doing the farm and garden store too, you’re diversifying then, right? So that if there is some AI internet takeover or whatever and I think that I see that in your approach to gardening in general as like this idea of having redundancies and diversifying and making sure that you have backups in case of anything. I think we think similarly, and it’s funny you talking about kind of starting to understand the way economics works and just the way the world was going and pre 2008 and kind of seeing that looming in the distance and then being right, yeah, you’re not excited about it, but it is this kind of reassuring, like it’s reaffirming I guess is more the

David The Good:
Term

Anna Sakawsky:
Right that – People call

David The Good:
You crazy forever.

Anna Sakawsky:
Right. But you’re like, “No, did anybody else see this? ” And I think I feel like I followed a similar trajectory, but I was post 2008 because I was early 20s back then and I didn’t really understand what was going on. Didn’t affect me and my disposable income back then. But when I got married and settled down and it was kind of the mid whatever, 2014, I think 2012, we started watching a lot of those documentaries on the food system and just like how unsustainable all this is. I don’t want this. And I could just see all the problems with this. I’m like, “This is not the future I want for my family.” And then of course here we are when COVID hit in 2020 and then all the things that have happened subsequently, you kind of go, okay, I’m really glad that I saw some of that, not that I saw those specific things coming, but I could see that all it’s going to take is one thing to falter
And then another thing and dominoes fall, right? And so now again, especially that’s why it’s especially relevant this conversation and it’s on a lot of people’s minds because there’s a lot of uncertainty, there’s rising oil prices, there’s fertilizer holdups, all sorts of things that could affect not just our food supply, but like our whole way of life really. And so more and more people, we’re seeing more people come to homesteading, gardening, wanting to grow their own food. And then the people that are already doing it are like, “How can I increase this? How can I make this more efficient? How can I make sure that I’m actually building real food security at home?” And so I mean, you use the term survival gardening quite a bit. It’s the name of your website, it’s the name of one of your books, it’s the name of the article that you just wrote.
And I saw you recently posted a video too on I think a talk that you gave on Florida Survival Gardening on your YouTube channel. So how do you define survival gardening and how is it different from the way that most people approach gardening?

David The Good:
Well, that’s a good question and I should probably back up slightly for those of you who are looking for some context for where I’m gardening. In the past, I have gardened in middle Tennessee when I used to work there. That’s where I’ve really started building up my gardens to feed a family. But I grew up in South Florida, which was zone 11. It only froze there once and just very slightly when I was a little kid. And so I grew up there and then I moved to Tennessee for a while and then we moved to North Florida, which was zone eight / nine. And then from there we moved down to the Caribbean and we lived on the island of Grenada for four years and I studied tropical agriculture down there. I rented a cocoa farm, built a couple little cabins on the hillside, planted a food forest and actually planted a couple of food forests because I planted one at a church as well and then came back to the states during the pandemic and moved to lower Alabama, which is zone 8B.
Some of the videos that you’ll see on my channel are focused on very regional solutions and then some of them are very broad solutions. So with survival gardening, it’s not necessarily that you’re always going to be in a panic mode, but it’s that you have the skills that if you need to do it to the point where you feed yourself completely, you could at least get close. You could get enough that you’re going to take the major pinch off. So a lot of the prepper type community is focused on storing a huge amount of MREs or rice and beans. And then often they kind of have these ideas on gardening, but they’re often doing things like say, I’m going to put in this fadish type of garden, like an aquaponics system. I want to raise all of our fish for calories and then I want to raise our food, our vegetables, and we’ll have a cycling system.
And a lot of the people that are into prepping are people that are smarter than average and they’re the type of people that tend to look for problems and then try to come up with engineering style solutions. So I joke a little bit about the engineering mindset. We definitely need engineers, but there’s also the possibility of over engineering a system or trying to replace systems that have worked for thousands of years with a system that is modern and it may not be as anti-fragile as Nazam Talib, the philosopher has written, he wrote a book called Anti-Fragile, and I found that very useful. The idea of something that may even benefit from disorder rather than just being tough or reliant, like you can actually do better if things get worse. Finally, I don’t have a job. Now I can really garden. You know that kind of thing.
So with survival gardening, when you have a complicated system, you have more possibilities for breakdown and you have to think what could break. If you compare aquaponic system to say a traditional agricultural system, when we were down in Grenada, there was a ministry that was working to try and fight food insecurity and they came from the Midwest and so they’re coming from a cold climate with a short growing season and they were smart people that were technologically minded. So they said, “Let’s do aquaponic systems and teach people how to do aquaponics.” But they end up having to feed the fish, import the PVC, import pumps, solar panel, and then they end up with these beds of anemic lettuces and then fish that would die repeatedly because you’d have a power failure or you’d get a hurricane or you had some other kind of a problem or somebody wouldn’t feed it or you wouldn’t test the pH or something like that.
I was looking at the system and I was looking at how the Rastafarians would get up in the morning and they would go up the hill and they would have a machete and they would have a grub hoe like that traditional broad hoe head and they would have a sack of yam pieces and they would go up to a piece of hillside, slash down all the grass and brush and they would knock holes in the ground and they would go into the jungle and they would hack sticks from more rot resistant species. They knew which species were rot resistant. There was one called wild coffee that was really popular for making yam steaks and they would plant these yams. Now this is a tropical large root that’s just a starchy root. You don’t usually see them inside of the United States, but they would in a day go up there, cut those yams up, they would dust them with a little bit of ashes and put them in these little pits and put steaks next to them.
Then they would come back occasionally with a machete and slash down the grass in between and lay it on the ground basically to suppress the weeds and they could come back at the end of the year and harvest thousands, hundreds of thousands of calories out of that space. I was looking at this complicated unit that cost probably $1,000 or so to put together that needed constant maintenance compared to gardening with the rainfall on a piece of unused land where they just slash down what’s there and they plant a crop that is suited to the environment that is a high calorie crop. Because if you’re going to compare a starchy vegetable comparable to a potato to a bed of lettuces or whatever you could grow in that system, you got a few tomatoes, a few lettuces, maybe some celery or something like that. You had high calorie yields, especially because they kept having failures with their fish.
You had high calorie yields in this space fed by rainfall that could be basically ignored except for slashing down the weeds occasionally. And once the yams got high enough on those steaks, they pretty much took care of themselves with almost no care. And so I looked at that system and I was like, this is not really high IQ gardening, but this is practical gardening. It didn’t take a lot to do that because this is how they’ve been doing it forever. They probably were doing something very similar in Africa hundreds of years ago before their ancestors had been brought to the island. So if you’re going to survival garden, you want to think calories first and get those staple crops that will actually keep you full because if you have to fight zombies by just eating lettuce, you’re going to be in trouble and not having a full stomach is a bad feeling.
So the further north you get, you’re going to grow whatever fits further north. So potatoes, potatoes and flint corn, you might raise some grazing animals. Some areas are just, it’s so cold for so long, you’re really only going to get some greens and berries and maybe a few roots and maybe some small grains, which are very high effort. But if you put out some pigs or grazing animals or something like that, you might be on milk or meat. And as you go further south, you have more root crops opening to you and then you get to the tropics and it’s a totally different set of root crops, but there is usually a staple crop or more that is suited to the area that’s going to keep you fu. So the first thing is to make sure that it’s high calories and that it’s not a pain in the neck to grow because it is suited to the climate.
So you suit your gardening to the climate. Don’t try to force plants into your climate that are not ideal. Don’t just go watch YouTube videos and say, “Wow, that looks like a really good one. That looks like a really good one.” You got to say, “Where is that fellow located? Where is she growing that? And what is the rainfall like? What is the altitude? Is that something that will actually work here?” As people get a crop stuck in their head and they’re like, “The number one survival crop is fill in the blank.” It’s like that may be true in Georgia, that may not be true in Minnesota and that’s almost certainly not true in Costa Rica or in Canada or wherever else you happen to be. So getting the crops suited to the climate and then planting those calories that are going to keep you full, that’s really the main key of it.

Anna Sakawsky:
So I mean, obviously it’s going to also differ if you’re growing in a more northern colder climate versus a southern warmer climate like you have mostly gardened in. The crops will be different, but also the growing season is different. So some things you’re going to be able to produce year round maybe where people in farther north you’re going to have a shorter window. So what other types of things might you recommend to somebody in a colder climate that they could implement to stretch how much food they’re producing or putting up or whatnot, but also using low input methods? Well,

David The Good:
The further north you get, obviously the less solar energy that you have available. If you were in the tropics instead of doing an aquaponic system or something like that or doing a traditional European style row garden, you would probably just plant plantains and bananas and bread fruit and cassava and true yams and hickema, things like that that are really suited in long season, lots of calories and you’re more almost going to make a jungle ecosystem sometimes than you would do an annual system. The further north you get, I think some of those annuals become more important because you have a short season, you need something that’s going to live fast and die young and produce quickly for you. So as you get into the middle, talking about North America, which is where I’ve done my gardening, as you get towards the middle of North America, you’re still probably going to be able to do sweet potatoes until you get it past maybe zone five or so.
It gets harder because they really like to get a lot of sun to run and you start to move towards potatoes and you can grow potatoes and get high yields. That’s why when potatoes came from the Andes and they ended up being introduced to Europe, once people started adopting them, they stopped doing as many of the small grains that they were doing because the sheer amount of labor of say making oat bread or harvesting barley or wheat was going to be way too much work compared to you could pack a whole bunch of potatoes into a small space. So it was a godsend for some places though of course in Ireland where you had only one variety of potato or maybe a few varieties and then you get a blight that hits and you’re completely reliant on potatoes, then you can have a problem. So you want some redundancy too.
But you get to say where the Inuit are, the Inuit were surviving basically on a high fat and meat diet, seals and whale and hunting. And it gets to a point where you really have to have some animal that is capable of gathering the limited amount of materials that are there and you have to go to that. But a lot of people are not in that extreme environment, but often the way to determine what would be a good thing for your climate is to look and say, what traditionally did people grow here before you could drag a hose out in the yard, before you could buy a bag of Triple 13, what was growing here? Were they growing? People will say like the three sisters method, right? You got the traditional Native American pumpkins and corn and beans. Well, I’ve experimented with that and where we are, it doesn’t work quite as well.
We don’t do well with dry beans at all because about the time when the beans start to ripen up and dry, we get our summer rains and extremely high humidity. Humidity might be 90% or more. And so you end up with beans that mold and rot in the pods or even sprout on the plant and they don’t do it. So that’s not great for us. But if traditionally that was grown in your area and preserved, look for those traditional crops first. What did the settlers grow or what did the natives grow? What did people grow when it was not easy to just come up with a technological solution for it?
So the best way to figure that out is to look at history. And then another thing you can do is say, what are commercial farms growing in your area? What is your area known for? I gave a talk recently and I said, okay, let’s say Georgia, what is Georgia known for? And people said cons? There you go. Cons, peaches. Oh yeah. Peaches, peanuts, sure peanuts, sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes. There’s even Georgia varieties of sweet potato. So you look and say, okay, well, if there was a commercial reason for it, that means that somebody found it economically viable to grow it and that it grew so well that you could make money at it. So you look at the commercial and say, what did the farmers do? Because farmers are not going to push. If a farmer tries to push something that doesn’t work in their area, they usually end up going out of business unless they’re fulfilling a very specific niche and they found a specific variety that’s going to work.
And then if they have, say they found an apple that grows in the very deep south, find out what that apple is and try that one. But if it’s generally not known for apples, you’re probably not going to have a big cidery and the jars and jars of apple sauce put up for winter are probably not going to happen for you.
They say, “What did people grow?
What did people grow?” And then pattern yourself after that. And another thing you can do, a really easy thing is to drive around your neighborhood and if you see any nice gardens, go say hi. I often have extra seeds or plants and I have been known to stop by the side of the road and give somebody some seeds. I’ve almost always got seeds laying around in my car from all kinds of things. I’m always carrying stuff around with me. But if I see somebody, sometimes I’ll mark, there’s a really nice garden there that I’ll look over their fence, kind of creep on them a little bit like, “Well, look at that garden. Well, they’ve got all kinds of cool stuff back there.” And I’ll go home and next time I drive past there, I’ll bring them one of the little mulberry trees that I started in my nursery, give them a little potted mulberry and say, “Hey, I saw your garden.
I grew this variety of mulberry. It’s done really good in my yard and I really love it. And I just wanted to give it to you. ” I don’t know if you’ve grown mulberries before, but I thought it was cool. And I thought, I wanted an excuse to come see your garden. And most gardeners are like, “That’s wonderful. Where do you live?” “Oh, I live over on the other side of town and this and that and the other thing. “And then you start asking questions.
If you were just starting out, what would you plant? If you don’t know anything about gardening, don’t pretend like you know things about gardening. Just listen, don’t tell them ChatGPT says this and that and the other thing, or I saw this guy on YouTube that does whatever. First of all, start and say,” What do you grow and what’s done well for you? If you were just starting out, what would you plant? “Well, I’ve had really good luck with this variety of tomato. These beans have always done well for me. I tried this one year, didn’t do that great. I don’t know if it was the year or whatever, and you just take notes and keep that in your head so you can borrow from somebody else’s experience. You don’t always have to start from nothing. People have said to me a lot of times,” I don’t even know where start.
“I said,” Well, talk to somebody older or talk to somebody that’s more experienced. I don’t care if it’s a 16-year-old kid. If he knows how to grow it and he’s got something cool going on, just ask him. “What did you do? What did you do? And then just listen and you can pick up that. But the other thing is that you’re going to end up with friends and with somebody in your community that’s going to watch out for you. I gave a fruit tree to somebody that I actually met him at the Dollar General and you say,” Hey, who are you going to meet somebody at the Dollar General? That’s pretty funny. “But there was a little Dollar General in town and I just moved to the area and I had, because I was always doing this, I was always starting my little mulberry trees in the backyard.
So we got talking about gardening and I said,” I got to give you a mulberry tree. “So I gave him a mulberry tree and we got talking and he came over and looked at my garden and he didn’t know a lot about gardening himself. I knew more about gardening than he did, but I said,” Yeah, I said I’ve been putting barrels in my little… I had this little greenhouse that I had propped up and I put barrels in it to try and warm it up. I said, “I got to get some more barrels at some point.” And I said, “I’m going to put some in there.” Well, about a week later he rolls up with a trailer with 10 barrels on it, 10 empty barrels that I could use for thermal masks to put in my greenhouse to keep it a litle warmer overnight. And he goes, “Hey, I got these for you.
” They just dropped them in the yard. And from then on we’ve been friends and we’ve traded plants and he came over and fixed my Bobcat for me. He ended up helping us put in our greenhouse and a lot of other things, but I wouldn’t have had that friendship if I hadn’t have just said hi to somebody and now I’ve got another person in my network. It’s not just you alone against the world, but I’ve got somebody else that I can call and I can go, “James, I’m not sure what to do with this thing. I’m not as good at fixing this as you are. ” And then he’ll ask me, “What about this such and such bamboo? Have you tried growing that? You think that one would be worth trying here?” And we can kind of trade information back and forth. So if you find somebody that knows how to garden, just go over there and say hi.

Anna Sakawsky:
Totally. Well, just building community in general, it’s not Gardening itself, but I think it’s an important part of building a resilient life is having that community. Like you say, somebody might have something that you need to borrow or might be able… We’ve even been snowed in before and our neighbor comes by with his Bobcat and digs us out because the city’s not coming down this way or whatever. And so I think that it feeds into this idea of how do we build more resiliency just in case we can’t get what we need or whatever. We have to rely on more our local community. And to the point of making friends with gardeners as well, same with us too. Our neighbors are gardeners too, and we’re always trading plants and trading tips and that sort of thing. And yeah, I think that that’s just a really important aspect of it.
And then you also mentioned your greenhouse and sounds like it’s probably a passive greenhouse from your approach and from just using the barrels to help heat the greenhouse and everything. So back to that point too, of if you’re gardening in a more northern climate, because again, you could start getting really technical with things like heated lit greenhouses and season extension and everything. You can get really technological, I guess, with it, or you could scale it back. What would you suggest to people that are considering things like season extension and that sort of stuff, but that want to do it as low input as possible?

David The Good:
I would say start with the easy stuff and improve an area very well and try to grow the crops that work in your area. And then from there, once you feel like you’ve got a basis in that, and if you can garden in the ground itself, I always much prefer that to going out and buying a bunch of lumber, building raised beds or say, I’m going to do some horse trough gardens or whatever else. Just try to keep it simple and garden like people traditionally did. And another thing too is you don’t have to be perfect right from the beginning with it.
There’s a couple that grows a huge amount of food and they put things in rows and they use triple 13 and they use seven dust and that sort of thing, but they’re 90% of the way there. So you don’t immediately just go, “Oh, you guys are bad. You’re bad people because you’re doing this. ” If you see somebody that’s growing their own food and it’s coming right from their backyard, you at least have that in common. And sometimes when you first start too, if you’ve got poor soil and you really just want to get started, you could just till the area up, put things in rows, get a sack of fertilizer and just start because the primary goal there is to get food. But long term, it would be much better if you were making your own compost and do your compost teas, you could gather mulches and cover the ground and a lot of that.
But if you get too hung up on, I have to have the perfect permaculture system like I saw so – and-so do, sometimes you don’t end up actually growing food. So start with a simple thing. Try to improve that soil because everything’s coming out of the soil first. I know some people will be like, “I can’t believe you would say use tri 13.” But if you had a system where the gas supply broke and you had triple 13 in your

Anna Sakawsky:
Already,

David The Good:
Just use that and get them started. And then you’re going to try to build systems because it takes time to ramp up to a more complicated system. And if you want to try season extension, I mean, just having some frost blanket covers or little hoops, that sort of thing, you can do it. If you want somebody that’s really good at it, I think it’s Elliot Coleman, the four season gardener, he’s in a colder climate than I am. And that would be a person that you would want to get his books and read and study from or look at what Stefan Sepaliak is doing with his permaculture orchard and how he’s got alternating different trees in between his apples and planting blight resistant varieties. And he’s got all kinds of fruits and food growing in a very beautiful way. But he started with a conventional orchard and was going, “What’s wrong?
What could I do better? What can I do better?” And then you improve over time. You don’t have to have everything perfect. The concept of iterative design is first get the garden out there and then you’re going to keep moving and improving as you go. I think a greenhouse is extremely useful if you’re starting your own transplants and extending things longer, but a lot of greenhouses just end up kind of vanity projects where somebody wants to keep their orchids or something like that. You got to look, is this a plant geek sort of a thing? Because I definitely lean towards plant geek sometimes. When it comes to growing my food, I try to keep it really simple, but I also have coffee in my greenhouse and I’m trying to grow my own cup of coffee way outside of proper coffee growing area. So I’ve got a few coffee beans in the greenhouse, so I might be able to get about a half a cup this fall.
But it’s just like one of those cool

Anna Sakawsky:
Things

David The Good:
To do. But if I wanted caffeine during the apocalypse, I have yapan halle, which is a native holly that grows all over the place here and it has caffeine in it. All you have to do is go out to the woods in this nasty sandy pineland soil and there are these halis all over the place and I can cut them. And it’s very similar to yerbamate. I could make basically a mate out of it and get my caffeine. So I’m not relying on that. Primarily it’s just because I’m a bit of a plant nerd and I want to collect some of these things and play with them. But that’s the sort of thing that you do after you’ve got your plants already in place and you know how to grow food in the ground traditionally.

Anna Sakawsky:
Right. I was going to say, what place, if any, do plants like that or more vanity projects… So you know how a lot of gardeners will even just look at the seed catalog every year and choose a couple just unique varieties of things that maybe can’t get in the store or whatever where you’re like, oh, I want to try that. Is there a place for that in survival gardening and how much of a place is there? How much do you allot to that?

David The Good:
So if you wanted to figure out say what tomato grew in your area, seeds are cheap. So go buy 10 packets of seeds, make 10 little spots and put 10 varieties of tomatoes out there and pay attention and do that for a year or two. And then the one that really does well for you, you can double down on and then try a few more. You could spend $40 to do an experiment. Say if you’re spending $4 a seed packet, you’re buying some fancy variety and you could just put them out there and then after a while you know. Or you could do like Joseph Lofthouse who wrote the book Land Raised Gardening. D what he does, plant a whole variety of heirloom, the type of plants that crossbreed because tomatoes don’t usually crossbreed, but something like corn or pumpkins or dicon radishes or something like that.
Plant a whole bunch of varieties. Don’t treat them very well. Let them all cross. Plant the seeds from the ones that do well. Let some of those individuals make seed again. And then what you end up doing is adapting the genetics because when you have an heirloom variety, an heirloom could have been bred originally in Vermont or in Louisiana or someplace else. And in order to make that variety produce, they take a whole bunch of genes and over time it’s been inbred down to on specific set of genes. So if you had everybody only intermarrying with people that had brown eyes and blonde hair for a period of time, you might not end up with a population that’s sick if you had a wide enough individual group of individuals to start with. But it gets to be that you don’t have any other skin colors, hair colors, eye colors or anything like that or they become very uncommon.
So when you have an heirloom variety that’s been bred down in a specific climate and it thrives there and it always makes the same thing over and over, you’ve eliminated a whole bunch of genes that might be useful in your climate. So you take 20 varieties of corn and you plant them all together. You let them all interbreed. You save seeds from the winters and you have a large enough population that you can just start to get varieties that will do well.
And so that kind of experimentation is extremely useful. You can start with one that you really know grows well in your area. Hickory king corn is like a classic Southern grits and cornbread corn. But if you mix that with some of Reed’s Yellow Dent and Bloody Butcher and Trucker’s Favorite and some other varieties, you can let them all cross together. And then you don’t really care necessarily if those ears of corn have red and yellow and white or anything. You’re not breeding for them to be pretty, you’re breeding them for survival first of all. So you don’t treat them particularly well and you save from all of the winners and you’re actually those genetics that live in your area through natural selection are selecting to your backyard. And that’s something that over the last five or six years or so, we’ve been experimenting with after discovering the work of Joseph Lofthouse.
Before I was just buying multiple varieties and then picking the variety that did the best. Or sometimes if something grew, I would save seeds from it and plant it again or it would self-seed and go, “Oh, that’s cool. It works here.” But when you’ve got the potential for all these genetics and then all the genetics that don’t work fall out of the system and then you’re left with a few that really do work and then they consistently grow well in your backyard. Now it’s not a corn that came from Vermont or Louisiana. It’s a corn that came from your backyard and it’s been selected to it. And playing around with, I want to grow lemon cucumbers or purple carrots or rainbow chard or whatever else, that’s totally fine. I mean, there should be some joy in your gardening too. And if you like it, just try it and see how it does.
Maybe you’ll discover a variety that you really like that does well and don’t just get rid of the joy and be a brutal utilitarian all the time.

Anna Sakawsky:
Right. And I mean, there are a lot of crops that are pretty standard crops that grow well in a lot of different climates and they might not be localized to your specific climate or bioregion, but they still can do pretty well with pretty low input. I would add to that with saving seeds and you’re at maybe a different level than some listeners where that might sound really complicated, all this crossbreeding and everything, but even just the basics of learning how to save seeds and growing crops that you can save seeds easily from pollinated crops and things like that, that also then builds this resilience where you’re not having to go buy seeds all the time. You’re able to save and replant your own seeds. And to your point too about you talked about, I don’t know if it was when you were talking about preppers, but about just kind of thinking, I’m just going to do this.
And I find a lot of people have this idea like if the apocalypse happens, for example, well then I’m just going to do this. I’m just going to grow a garden. Well, but you need to learn the skills over time. A, all the knowledge that doesn’t all just happen overnight. But also to your point of you need to try different things and experiment because what works for one person or one climate might not work for you or might not work in practice or whatever. So I think again, this idea of just start where you are and it’s not just about what you’re growing, but it’s about the knowledge you’re actually gaining through the process as well. Yeah.

David The Good:
It’s extremely important. It would be like saying, well, if I couldn’t find any contractors or framers or whatever, I’ll just build my own house. Well, have you picked up a saw before? Have you soldered pipes? Do you know how pex pipes work? Have you poured a slab before? Do you know it’s necessary to pour a slab? Do you know how to frame up a roof? Do you know how to put the insulation in? There’s a lot of all of these pieces. And if you haven’t done any of it, if you’ve never even built a doghouse, it’s going to be overwhelming. And I would say that gardening doesn’t necessarily have to be overwhelming, particularly if you know already what thrives in your climate. I mean, that helps a lot. Some things just want to grow in your climate so it’s not that hard. But if you’re counting on, okay, I’ve got this survival seed vault underneath my bed with all the cans of spam
And you haven’t grown a garden before, there’s a learning curve to it and you should at least start with something small and start gardening. If you can learn how to do it on a small space, then you can expand if you need to. So if you consistently are growing and you’re getting better at it and you figure out, okay, I had a problem with this pest or okay, this variety didn’t grow well, or I really don’t like this tool that I got and I’m going to look for a better tool. And you figure out what tools you like, which things work well, what does well in clay or what does well in sand. And then you have this body of knowledge and experience and you’re just not afraid anymore. It’s like I could turn the lawn into a hundred thousand calories and I could probably have that in four or five months.
Then you’re okay with having a little 10 by 10 patch or something like that. It’s like I could ramp this thing up anytime I wanted to if I had to.

Anna Sakawsky:
Yeah. Well, and learning how to do it, like you say, doing it a low input way so that you’re not relying on a lot of fertilizers and inputs and all that and then just going, “Oh, well, if I need to figure it out, then I will.” And this is the problem we’re seeing on a large scale right now with the crisis with the strait of hormeus and the fertilizer getting held up and the gas prices and diesel and everything else. It’s conventional farms rely on that. And it’s not so easy to just switch that overnight, whereas people who’ve already been doing this regeneratively and that sort of thing are not going to be impacted the same way. So it’s about A, learning how to do it so that you know how when the time comes, but also building your soil and building those systems so that they’re ready to go if and when something happens.

David The Good:
Yeah. Yeah. And I wrote that bok Compost Everything, The Good Guide to Extreme Composting because we had accidentally poisoned multiple of our garden beds by getting manure from a source. We got manure from a dairy and it turns out they had sprayed their grass with a long-term persistent herbicide. The cows had eaten it. It had gone through into the manure. The manure was well rotted. It wasn’t hot manure or anything, but I spread it around multiple plants. I put it through my garden beds and then a lot of my plants started getting this weird knobby twisted growth. And it just really hit it like
I can’t rely on anything coming from commercial agriculture. Even something as simple as manure. The ancient fertilizer has been corrupted by these industrial agricultural systems, which are looking for absolute highest yield. They want hay that doesn’t have a single pigweed in it. It doesn’t have any blackberry briars in it. It’s just pure, perfect grass, but it’s grass with poison in it, long-term persistent herbicide, doesn’t kill the grass, kills everything else in it or most of it. And I’m like, “What would I do? ” And so always experimenting with different composting systems and saying, “How can I build my soil up so I don’t have to rely on those inputs anymore?”

Anna Sakawsky:
Okay. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about your approach to composting. Because I’d say on one hand, so you wrote an article for us called Lazy Composting. So I want to talk about that because I’m a total lazy composter. I rarely even turn my compost pile. We’re still trying to figure out and build our systems. And this again comes from years of we had a composter where there was a bind weed problem and we were just constantly fighting bind weed coming through it. So okay, where do we move the composter? We finally ended up putting it back where the chickens are because now the chickens can do some of that work for us. So bringing them in and they’re scratching and they’re pecking things out and they’re adding manure to it and everything else. But as far as my hands-on composting, I’m a super lazy composter.
I kind of leave it, turn it every once in a while and that’s about it and then sift it and use it when we need it. But you also have written the book, what was it? Compost everything. Compost everything. Oh, and it was the extreme godship composting because you did this kind of lazy composting and this extreme composting. And actually that was probably the first book that I read of yours quite a few years ago now that just kind of blew my mind because you really pushed the boundaries with some of the things that you compost and then how you extend that compost through things like compost teas and that sort of thing. So talk to me a little bit about your method and approach to composting and building your own soil. If the thought of raising chickens has ever intimidated you, consider this you’re a sign to stop putting it off.
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David The Good:
Well, if you look at the way a lot of composting guides are written, it’s a big list of dos and don’ts. You get your 24 to one carbon to nitrogen ratio and you’re going to layer your greens and your browns. And then some of the things that are greens are actually brown and vice versa. And you look at all these lists and it’s like, don’t put bread in it. Don’t put meat in it. And somebody said, “You can’t put cooked food in it. You can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t do this. ” I’m like, “Why?” I mean, if it’s organic material, like if an animal dies in the woods, what happens to it? You get your primary decomposers, you’ve got your scavengers that eat it and they start tearing pizzas off and turning it into manure. You’ve got your flies and you’re carrying beetles and then it starts to break it all down.
It rots into the ground and you end up with your slower composters breaking it down over time. Your bacteria and your fungi are breaking it down. And eventually it all returns to the soil. But if you look at a lot of the stuff that’s being composted, it’s great to compost your stems off of your broccoli or throwing your wilted lettuce greens in there. Or you’ve got a floral arrangement and you just toss it out there to compost. But if you look at how much nutrition says in a dead chicken, one of your chickens dies, there’s a huge amount of nitrogen in there and there’s a lot of minerals. Think of everything that that chicken is consuming and gathering and putting together and building its body with. When it rots down, you’re like, “What are you going to throw it in the trash can? ” And so I started to experiment like, “How could you do this?
” And I remember Steve Solomon in his book, Gardening When It Counts, writing about the Native Americans would dig a pit and they would often throw all their refuse and everything in it. They would throw buffalo hides or whatever, whatever leftovers. If they tear a piece when they’re skinning and they throw it over there any of the awful or the guts or the bones or whatever they don’t want, it goes over there. They might have campfire refuse that they throw over there. They might use it as a latrine. And then what happens is they cover it over and then garden on top of it. And so all that material that’s in the ground there ends up feeding crops. And sometimes the crops are even incidental because they eat the pumpkins and then throw some of the pumpkin guts over there and the pumpkins sprout in the spring and they cover the entire area and they get this massive amount of pumpkins.
So I started saying, “Well, how could you use it? ” Well, you could bury something like that into the middle of a compost pile. You could dig a hole and plant over the top of it. We had really good luck. I called it the melon pit method because we would dig a pit with a post hole digger and then throw a dead chicken in there. Or you could throw a hot chicken manure right in there. You just throw some stuff in there that might be a little too hot to put directly on a plant or might cause bug issues or rats or whatever else. You bury it and then you plant on top of it and I planted melons and they would start growing and they would look pretty normal until their roots started to reach that material and they would turn deep green and they would just run everywhere.
And I had great luck with them and I had great luck with pumpkins doing that to the point where when we butchered our own chickens, I took a lot of the material that we weren’t going to use and I froze it in little… I took paper bags and I froze them in paper bags. And then I would just punch a hole and just drop this frozen paper bag of waste in there and that whole thing would just rot down and I could grow pumpkins off of the top of it in extremely poor soil. And that was the only feed they actually needed. One time as a demonstration, I trapped a rat and I just dropped the rat into a hole and I covered it over and I planted a Florida pumpkin variety called Seminole Pumpkin named after the Seminole Indian Tribe. I planted seeds on top of it, but I had my other pumpkin hills around it.
That one grew the best looking vines and they were fantastic. So I was like, why would we throw all of this away when it could be used? Think of all the leaves and the grass clippings and everything else. Basically, if you throw it on the ground, it’s going to rot. And if it’s really obnoxious, bury it and plant on top of it. So that tends to be my approach. And then one of the other things we often do is I’ll take a bunch of weeds and sometimes some chicken manure or whatever we have available, a few cow pies, throw them down in the bottom of a 55 gallon drum, fill it up with water, let it rot down for about a month or so. And then I’ll ladle some of that into watering cans with the ends taken off because there’s always bits of grass and stuff that’ll plug up the rows on a watering can.
And then I went and watered my corn with it as an experiment. Could I just feed corn with this? That was years ago. And it did great. It did great. Corn thrived on it. So you’re basically fertigating with the weeds and often just waste materials and recycling them into the system. So all the minerals that are in there, they end up in that slush. Of course, it smells terrible for the first month or so because it’s anaerobic decomposition so it smells horrible. After a few months, it starts to level out well. One time I threw a bunch of chicken waste into a barrel and then I was like, “This is the most disgusting one I’ve ever done.” And I just literally was like chicken guts in a barrel and I covered it and I just let it rot for quite a while. And then I opened it a few months later and it kind of smelled like soy sauce.
I was like, this is not as bad as I expect. About soy sauce.

Anna Sakawsky:
Well, and even you mentioned with the compost tea that it’s anaerobic. Even that I’ve found like compost tea, I remember when I first started learning about it and it was kind of like with building compost power where they go, you need this much brown material and then this much green. And I’m thinking like, I’m just throwing whatever in there. I’m not like keeping those things separated and trying to, and it’s got to get this hot and you got to use to get your thermometer out and make sure that the interior, that’s beyond anything I have time for. But compost, same thing. It can get really complicated. When I was first learning about it, it was people going, “Well, you got to use a bubbler and keep it aerated basically and do all this fancy stuff with it. ” And then I think it was around the time that I read your book that I’m like, “I can just let this rot.” And I always though that.
I’m like, “Why couldn’t I just let it steep here?” It’s just going into the ground. I get you don’t want to pour it directly on your plant leaves or something. Right.
You’re not going to want that to do that anyway. But if it’s going to be breaking down into the soil, why not? And then I read that you do a lot of this and I though, “Well, if you’re doing some of the things you’re doing, then I can certainly do that. ” And it’s worked great. And that’s a way that we can extend our compost to go a little bit further too, because you can only produce so much, right?

David The Good:
Right.

Anna Sakawsky:
Yeah. And I like that you talked about the burying animals and chickens and stuff because one of our chickens died and my husband had a bad habit of putting them in the garbage there for a while. And I said, “Why are we doing that? We have a small property. We’re only on a quarter acre.” And we have two septic tanks. So part of it’s just that we don’t have a lot of space to bury them, but the rest of the space is taken up with gardens. And he was kind of like, “We don’t want to bury them under the garden.” I’m like, “Well, maybe not under our annual rose.” But I said, “I know we’re going to put an apple tree in this spot. Let’s bury her there.” And so that was probably I guess last year. And now we just put our apple tree in a couple weeks ago.
So we’ll see how she does. We’ll compare it to the other fruit tree that we have with no dead chicken underneath and see if we have an improvement.

David The Good:
Yep.

Anna Sakawsky:
All right. The first

David The Good:
Apple tree I have in my garden right now is buried over a goat.

Anna Sakawsky:
Okay. And how’s that doing? Exceptionally well.

David The Good:
The trunk of it is this big and the other apple trunks are about that big. I didn’t bury directly over just in case as the goat collapsed. Kind of disgusting, but buried it over here and then put the apple right there.

Anna Sakawsky:
Oh man. Well, okay, let’s talk about tools because this is another one that you’re like, don’t get too fancy with it. You certainly don’t want for a survival gardening type of setup, you don’t want anything that, again, is going to require a lot of inputs to run or anything like that. But what kind of tools specifically when it comes to hand tools do you think are a must and which ones are just more kind of nice to have?

David The Good:
My first indispensable hand tool is the machete. And I love the machete. If you go down to the Caribbean and you see how machetes are used, they will use them to slash the brush down and they’ll feed their animals with it, but they keep a file wrapped in wax paper in their pocket. And then if you have a good steel machete, so something like a Imakasa from El Salvador, that’s a good one. Tromentina from Brazil, that’s a good one. Or the Martindale machetes that are in the English speaking Caribbean, that is an English machete brand. You want a machete that’s a decent machete that feels good in your hand, that doesn’t feel slippery and it’s not made of junky steel. A lot of the hardware store machetes are poor quality, even Gerber and some of these other companies, you want a machete that’s not going to ding if you’re chopping up little pieces of wood with it to start a fire.
And you want to be able to basically, you could cut down a tree with a machete if you wanted to. So get a good steel that you can work with. So I like a machete. You can also use it as a transplanter.
They’ll actually dig all the holes for transplants in the Caribbean. Stick the machete in the ground, put it sideways, drop the transplant, stick the next one, drop a transplant. And they just pull the ground like this and stick it. So you have to have a machete that’s stiff enough to be able to handle that. And then afterwards, then you can go and do what you want to with it. So in a more tropical climate where you have a lot of fleshy materials like bananas and sugar cane and things like that, a machete definitely, I still use a machete up north, but it’s not quite as much. You start to get into hatchet territory with a lot of those hard, slow growing materials. But we used a machete all the time when we were in Tennessee as well. Once you get used to using a machete and you feel confident with it, you can do a lot with it.
I can go along and weed with it. I’ll go in between my plants and just slip it just beneath the ground and go like this and pull out and you can grab a clump of grass and just go underneath the bomb of it and saw it out and throw it. And a machete is cheap enough that you can just keep a couple of them around because you’re certainly going to lose one somewhere. And it’s just one of those tools that has pretty much reached its peak technology and is good. So if you get a good brand and you can use that, that’s a good one. Another one would be a broad hoe, like an eye hoe. Sometimes they call it down here in the south, they call it a cotton hoe. They might call it a grub hoe. There are some of them that have a real heavy head on them that is made for just hacking holes in the ground and usually the angle is a little different.
And then there’s ones that are just broad. They’re made for basically moving earth around and hack Picking out heavy roots. That’s a very useful one. If you ever look up videos from Africa where the gardeners are working, they’ll actually make their garden beds by chopping the ground with a hoe. And often they have a shorthandled hoe. They’ll be bent at the middle and just hacking the ground and moving it. I have used the short handle ones and the long handled ones, kind of depends on what I’m doing. But if you put an edge on it too, that’s another thing because people often get a hoe and then they don’t sharpen it. You’ve got to sharpen it. Sharpen that edge really nicely. They’ve got good steel on them. And then you can go through all kinds of roots and things. If you wanted to clear gras off the ground, you can basically just chop, chop, chop, chop, chop and just scrape it.
But then you can also make nice mounded garden beds and move dirt around. You can turn it sideways and you can make a furrow and you can just drag it. Or if I have a loose seed bed already, like I forked an area up or it was a tilled area, I can turn the hoe upside down, put the handle on the ground and go thump, thump, thump with my fist like this and leave a little perfect line. And then I go a little further down, do the same thing, thump, thump, thump. And then you get this little line so you can put in your carrot seeds or turnips or something like that and just kind of go right through. And then you’re going to want to shovel, obviously, get a decent shovel. The standard combination shovel, which has the broad head on it and the long handle.
The idea is you’re somewhere between digging a hole and moving materials. It’s got its uses, but if you’re going to be planting trees, something like a radius roots layer is a really nice one or a trenching shovel that has a shorter, sharper blade and you can sharpen your shovel as well. Some of them have the little jaggedy edges on them so it’ll cut through roots and everything when you dig. That’s really nice to have because you’re going to want to put in perennials and fruit trees and other things and having a shovel where you’re not just killing yourself digging is quite useful. And then you’re going to need some sort of a fork. If you have a fork, you can dig your potatoes out, you can loosen up the bed, you can do double digging if you want to work really hard and fork the ground up and loosen it up.
You can also fork into the ground and then drop your lime or whatever compost you’re putting in there and kind of work it further down into the bed. I also really like broad forks. I’ve often made beds with just a big broad fork to the two handles, you stick it in the ground and you stand on it, you rock back and forth. I have used a meadow creature for a long time because I like that they have the steel handles and they’re basically indestructible. They’re a little bit heavier, but the 12 inch model is really nice for anybody to handle. It wouldn’t be necessarily the best for prying up boulders, but they’re also still really hard to break. So I’ll fork an area of ground up, pull the weeds out of it and then use my eye hoe and then scrape out the pathways and make nice rounded beds that are maybe three to four foot wide.
And they’re all nice and loose down to if you’ve got a 14 inch, that’s 14 inches. It takes more work in the clay for sure. I’ve done it in clay and in rocky clay, but I’ve also done that in sand and it’s really fast in the sand. But a broad fork I would like. I wouldn’t say it’s indispensable, it’s very pleasant.

Anna Sakawsky:
Let’s touch on water as well, because that’s another one that we are all pretty reliant on. And especially if you’re a gardener or homesteader, you need water to do what you’re doing. So how can people build resilience into their water supply?

David The Good:
We are in a climate here that gets about 60 inches of rainfall a year. So some of what we’re doing here is people always go, “What do you do? How do you water your gardens?” And I’m like, “I don’t really water my gardens. I try to build the soil up and mulch and then grow when the rain’s come in. ” So if I know it’s going to rain in the next couple of days or it’s just rained, I can go out and work the garden and put transplants in and just let the rain put them in. Most of the time that works. I have a pond which would be useful if I needed to go grab water and pour it, but because I have such a big amount of plants, I like to space things wider so they don’t require as much soil moisture and then mulch when I can to hold in the soil moisture that’s there.
If I can’t, I just rely on wide spacing. If I’m doing field crops like watermelons and things, I plant them way out with lots of space and then try to keep the weeds down in between them so the weeds don’t suck up the water. And when I lived down in the tropics, we had a very profound dry season and then a very rainy wet season. And sometimes you get a few months with no rain, but you could grow. It’s just there’s no water. And there I built a little cabin and I got a 500 gallon tank that was on the side of it and I cast a little slab and put it there so the gutter would run off of there and fill that tank up when we had rain. And then I had my vegetable garden downhill from it so I could slowly water because there wasn’t quite enough water pressure, but I could at least get water down there and soak the plants.
And we had a backup, a little bit of a backup to get us through that season. If you are in a very dry climate, I would read the book Water Wise Gardening by Steve Solomon. He has done a lot of experiments with dry farming and sometimes farming where you don’t have water for months at a time. And he’s got some very interesting tips in it that are beyond my personal experience. I’ve never lived in a place that had less than maybe 40 something inches a year. So I just try to grow with the climate and use rainfall as much as possible. And when I was doing more intensive gardening and I had a well, I put up standpipes and I would run the well so the standpipes would have little rainbird sprinklers on top and they would overlap a little bit so I could just go and turn it on and I would get high yields because I could pull water out of the aquifer and do that.
But then again, if I didn’t have electricity, I would be out of water. So I tried to put up, I had some rain barrels and would catch a little bit extra just in case, but really there was not a way to hold a lot. And I’m not really a great engineer. I tend to be sort of lazy. So like what plant would live if I didn’t water it kind of approach sometimes.
So I talked to a pool company that would install hot tubs in people’s yards and I said, “Do you ever get old hot tubs?” And they said, “Oh heck yeah. We always got old junky hot tubs we got to get rid of. ” I said, “Could you deliver a few to me? ” They said, “For a hundred bucks, we’ll deliver two of them this next week. Just pay the driver a hundred bucks.” I was like, “Okay.” So I got two big ones and I put them at the edge of my garden space and I put pond plants in them and I stuck some fish in them. I put some goldfish, just regular feeder goldfish because our climate was not so cold that it would freeze them to death. And I put in some of our native, they call them mosquito fish. It’s a little fish that eats mosquito larvae.
So the mosquitoes would all come from that area and lay their eggs in the pond and then it would break the cycle of mosquitoes because they would eat all of the larvae that got laid in there. So I actually probably lowered my mosquito population by adding the ponds. And then I ended up having frogs in the ponds too, which was great for my garden and for pest control. But when the rain wasn’t raining, I would go and I would take my watering cans and I would just dunk them down in these hot tub ponds. I ended up getting a third one by the side of the road and setting it up there too. And I would go and water the plants with it. But I would also skim off the duckweed and throw it in the compost pile or feed it to the chickens. And I also grew water chestnuts in the ponds, the Chinese water chestnut, because I could harvest water chestnuts out of there to eat or to sell in our plant nursery.
And so I had multiple uses just having that extra water there. I mean, if you get a pond passive water saving, that’s a really good thing. And that was just a one acre suburban yard. We were lucky to have an acre, but we were not in really a controlled area so we could stick them back there. Now my wife told me, she’s like, “Are you ever going to get a hot tub for us? You keep fish and duckweed and stuff. Could we have? ” I was like, “No, that’s a liability.”
I have to actually clean it and stuff. The kids always joke if you ever got a pool. They’re like, “Yeah, but you get a pool?” And then mom’s like, “Now he’ll just put catfish in it

Anna Sakawsky:
Or something.” Also, there you go. Sounds like you’re eating some aquaponics of your own. Lazy aquaponics, passive aquaponics. So I mean, all of this, it can feel like a lot to take on at once, obviously, especially for people who are just starting to shift their approach or just starting out. And as we mentioned, the pragmatic approach is to take it slow, build these systems and this knowledge and your skills and everything over time. But for many, the need to grow more food at home feels increasingly urgent, obviously. As you look at the world right now, what do you think is the single most impactful step somebody could take say this season or within the next growing year to increase their food production and reduce their dependence on outside systems?

David The Good:
I would think both short-term and long-term. Short term, you want your annual gardens, but anytime that you can plant fruit and nut trees for long-term food, I would do that. So when you’re saying, oh, okay, I’m going to put in some grain corn and I’ll put in some pumpkins and I’ll plant some beans and I’ll see if I can get some potatoes in the ground for calories. Well, put in a row of blueberries, put in some chestnut trees, put in some pecan trees, put in some hazelnuts. Think of what could be falling from the sky and feeding you. If you have native plants that grow in your area, normally like wild plums, put some wild plums out there. If you don’t have them, even some of your non-native species, like the autumn olive, which is invaded all over the Northern United States into Canada has edible fruit.
So if you have some in your yard, you might not be like, “Ah, I’m just going to kill all those things.” Well, there’s some
Decent quality fruit that I can use. Some of those bushes may taste better than others. You can cut down the ones that don’t taste good. And then there’s a lot of genetic variation. You could have a wild plum that’s really sour and then one that’s really sweet. So plant more from the one that’s really sweet. And think of this long term, can you build up? Can you make an edible food forest system? Can you put an orchard out there? If you were going to redo the side of your yard because maybe those old cedar trees have way outgrown the fence line and you want to cut them down and put something else in, why not put in some high bush blueberries or put in a hazelnut hedge or think about maybe just mixing a whole bunch of species down there. You don’t necessarily have to have perfect spacing on everything.
You could put a pear tree and you could stick a couple of blueberries next to it, put some blackberries, put some gooseberries, linguin berries. Just try to get every little extra piece of food going for long-term production. Because if you’re looking at the price of inflation over time, a fruit tree is an extremely good investment. I told a class a couple of weeks ago, I said, even if you spend $100 on a fruit tree, it’s still a good investment.

Anna Sakawsky:
It’s still

David The Good:
Be a good investment because after a few years when it starts producing, think about a standard apple tree making a thousand pounds of apples or so. That could be a good bit of food. You could have dried apples, you could have applesauce, you could make apple cider, you could make apple cider vinegar. You could feed it to a pig and then eat the pig. You could feed it to your chickens and then get eggs. So think of these things or mulberries, a lot of people don’t utilize mulberries. Mulberries are such a great, fast producer of large crops of berries and there’s all kinds of different improved varieties that you could do. Plant some pawpaws in the shade. Just think what else could I do? Some of those things may not keep you full, but the cumulative effect of having a lot of good
Variety of fruits we’ve got fruits that start to come in really early. Our mulberries are very early and the wild dewberries, I just mow around them. That’s a little wild creeping blackberry relative that grows down here. Very thorny. People hate it. They try to get rid of it and spray it and stuff like that because it’s so thorny, but it makes a lot of fruit. So my kids will go out and pick those this last month through April they were picking them all over the yard and eating them all the time. That’s good high quality wild food that’s got all those beneficial anthocyanins in them, your antioxidants. And then I got those in the mulberries and then it starts to come in with peaches and plums and then it’s apples and pears and then chestnuts. And then towards the very end of the year, we get the fall from the seedling pecans that were in my yard and I’ve planted more improved varieties after that too for thinking five years, 10 years down the road.
So your resiliency starts to go up without you having to do the backbreaking labor all the time of turning the ground over and chopping holes and doing that. It’s just a matter of taking care of them for the first year or two and getting them started. And again, if you pick varieties that like your area that are suited to your climate that aren’t high maintenance, plant them.

Anna Sakawsky:
Well, that’s great advice and it’s reassuring for me because we’ve put a lot… We’re scaling back our annual gardens this year to focus on getting some of the infrastructure stuff done that we still have outstanding, but also to focus on our perennial beds. So we’ve invested, I looked at our bill for plants and garden and stuff last month and it’s higher than it normally is at this time of year because of the things that we’re buying. But like you said, the $100 apple tree is worth the investment. Well, that’s about what we spent on ours. And I’m like, oh, we can’t afford 100 bucks right now. But I know that that’s going to pay off way more than the initial investment in the long run, right? That’s right. And so all of that extra kind of money and effort that we’re putting into, or even just like I’m doing a medicinal bed now.
Well, those are all mostly perennials too and over time that’s going to grow and fill in and we’re going to have lots of plant medicine and that sort of thing. And our strawberry bed too, we’ve got a row of blueberries and then we’re underplanting with strawberries now and trying to fill that in. And that actually, there are ways too, to save money on this sort of thing too. You talked about local community and making friends with gardeners and that sort of thing. I have a friend that’s a gardener that let me take a bunch of strawberries from his patch and then somebody else again on marketplace up the road that’s like, “I got too many. Anybody can come take them for free.” Meanwhile, the garden center is selling them for like $4 a strawberry plant. So there’s ways to go about this or mulching our whole yard.
I mean, it ended up costing us, I think, a case of beer for the arborists to just come down our way and drop it off and free mulch. But yeah, I think it’s worth the investment even if you have to pay for some of it too in the long run, especially if it’s going to be payoff for years and years down the road. Well, David, you are a wealth of knowledge with so many resources to help people grow more of their own food at home. So where can people go to learn more from you and where would you suggest they start? Because you have a lot, like I say, you got a lot of ebooks and you got your YouTube channel, you got your website. Where would you suggest somebody start if they’re looking to learn more about survival gardening?

David The Good:
If you are a reader, you can get my books on Amazon or you can actually, if you don’t want to shop at Amazon, you can go to your local book seller and say, “Can you get this book for me? ” Because they have international distribution so bookstores can get them from Ingram distribution. So they probably are already doing that in their bookstore to get their stuff. They’re not buying it off of Amazon and reselling it. So you can just go to your local bookstore and ask for my books. Probably for the broad audience, Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening will help you do that and to keep things simple and to get practical tips. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Minimalist Gardening: The Good Guide to Growing More With Less. That book is basically my overall philosophy of how can you simplify and make things easier for yourself and have reliable systems that suit where you are and the amount of time and ability that you have.
And then if you want to read my gardening articles, it’s thesurvivalgardener.com. And I’m David DeGood on YouTube. Or you can find me on Facebook. I never maintained Facebook for myself very well. I’m not really a fan of social media in general, but now that I have a farm and garden store, if you look up Atmore Farm and Garden, I post what’s going on at the store there and you can always follow that page and you can message me off there. I try to respond to everybody. Even if you’re not in my climate, I don’t mind trying to help you out, though it may be in between loading a bunch of ferns into a lady’s car.

Anna Sakawsky:
Or hopefully a bunch of fruit trees that are going to thrive in some climate. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. Obviously, for those of you listening who are already subscribed to Homestead Living Magazine, David’s article on Survival Gardening is out now. It will be at the time that this goes live. So if you haven’t had a chance to check it out or if your magazine hasn’t showed up yet, it should be arriving any day, but definitely check that out. Obviously, if you are not yet subscribed, we would love to invite you to subscribe so you never miss an issue and you can learn more about that at homesteadliving.com/subscribe. As always, we’ll have all the links that you just mentioned and that we mentioned throughout the show. We’ll have those in the show notes below. So if you want to check out all David’s books and website and YouTube channel and all the resources he’s got, you can check there.
And if you enjoyed this conversation, just be sure to hit subscribe, leave a review, share this episode with a friend. It really is the best way to support us in the work that we’re doing so that we can help more people who are looking for simple, practical ways to live more self-sufficiently. So David, again, thanks so much for being here. Until next time, keep learning and growing and building what matters and we’ll see you all next time on The Coop.