How I'm Gardening So I Never Need the Store Again

#landraceGardening #breedingcrops #seedsaving
There's gardening, there's homesteading, and then there's resilience. They're all different things with different goals. This year I'm gardening for resilience.
That means growing storage crops to feed my family and my animals without ever running to the feed store again, and without ever having to buy a seed again. No more relying on the supply chain. On half an acre.
In this video I'm sharing every strategy we're using this year to pull that off, including multiple breeding experiments I'm running to create crop varieties that don't exist yet — varieties adapted specifically to my land, my climate, and my needs.
I'm crossing four varieties of sweet corn to create my own resilient landrace. I'm crossing Atlantic giant pumpkin with blue Hubbard squash to create a giant blue storage pumpkin with a huge seed cavity for animal feed. I'm breeding Black Krim into Amish paste tomatoes for a more complex canning tomato. And I'm growing a dent corn mix for the chickens and ducks that will get more adapted to this half acre every single season.
Two books changed the way I think about all of this: The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe and Landrace Gardening by Joseph Lofthouse. If you're serious about food independence I'd start there.
This is how we're building true resilience on half an acre — not just growing food, but creating food that grows itself back better every year.