Tips On Tactical Gardening

In this age of 24-hour supermarkets and food that is imported from every corner of the world whatever the season, it might be difficult to get your head around the benefits of self-sufficient gardening.

What is today easy to pick up at your local supermarket as and when you need it tomorrow might prove impossible in the face of some emergency or disaster. You will then have to rely on whatever stores you have already put away or grow your own.

Tactical gardening like this naturally requires more than a little preparation.

Count yourself lucky

If you have a garden, count yourself lucky and do that by making good use of it. One in eight households have no garden at all, according to British seed merchants Suttons in a posting on the 26^th of June 2020, and that proportion rises to one in five in London.

Suttons point out that you are likely to be surprised by just how much you can grow in a square metre of ground. Not enough to live off, for sure, but plenty to launch a spot of tactical gardening. So, if you are fortunate enough to have one, don’t waste it.

Vertical gardening

Where space is at a premium, a trick suggested by Wise Living magazine on the 14^th of January 2020 is to think vertically.

In other words, think in terms of window boxes, tubs and barrels on your balcony, wall-mounted growing, and interspersed planting. In just one small patch of ground, for instance, you could be growing pumpkins and squashes down below, sweetcorn growing up the middle and beans climbing the sweetcorn as a trellis. It’s a kind of cityscape in your own back garden.

Know your garden

Here in Britain, we are blessed with a mild maritime climate that ensures good weather for gardening practically wherever you live. Bear in mind, though, that the particular qualities of the soil and micro-climate of your own back garden may vary from one place to another.

To maximise the productivity of your garden and realise its full potential, therefore, learn all you can about the prevailing weather and soil conditions – as suggested in a piece by the Organic Prepper on the 20^th of May 2021.

Energy

You’ll be supplying most of the energy needed for tactical gardening through your own labour – when a little more help is needed, remember to set up sustainable and renewable resources.

You might invest in a solar-powered water pump, for example, to get the water collected in water butts onto your spaces under cultivation. You might even think about heating a greenhouse or the inside of poly-tunnels with small solar photovoltaic (PV) panels.

What to grow

Your tactical gardening is unlikely to leave you entirely self-sufficient in food – but design it with its ability to add flavour, supplements, and valuable nourishment to your diet.

Do your research, start modestly and build up towards more ambitious aims – along the following lines:

• growing herbs is a relatively simple, straightforward, and usually successful way of making a start – Moroccan mint or lemon verbena, for instance, are great for herbal teas and will taste a lot better than any shop-bought packaged teas;

• lettuces are also easy to grow and can be started off in quite small containers yet be ready to eat in as little as just three to four weeks;

• cress and microgreens are also great plants to get your tactical gardening underway – they sprout quickly, and you’ll never need to buy a bag of supermarket salad again;

• when you’re feeling a little more confident, turn your hand to tomatoes and cucumbers if you want a good economic return compared to the cost of those foods from the shops – and crops such as mini-star cucumbers can give you three to four fruit a day while tomatoes are one of the most versatile foods to grow;

• where space is at a premium, consider where and how to build your wormery for valuable compost – you might not have thought of it, for instance, but an odourless solution with tiger worms eating most of your waste can even be kept in your kitchen.

Depending on the size of your garden – or an allotment, if you have access to one – you are unlikely to become completely self-sufficient, but that is not the ultimate aim of tactical gardening. Grow your own and – however well you succeed in producing food from the ground – reassure yourself that it’s all contributing to your general state of preparedness