It cannot be said enough that “hard times are ‘a comin’”, and it’s now more important than ever to acquire both food and the ability to reproduce it. Many people’s minds turn towards gardening when this notion hits them, and at the outset they think; “Oh! I’ll grow tomatoes!” But the season for growing tomatoes is very short in most places, and you can’t very well depend on them. Enter the root crops.
“The Latin writers have only treated of this plant in a cursory manner, while those of Greece have considered it a little more attentively; though even they have ranked it among the garden plants. If, however, a methodical arrangement is to be strictly observed, it should be spoken of immediately after corn, or the bean, at all events; for next to these two productions, there is no plant that is of more extensive use. For, in the first place, all animals will feed upon it as it grows; and it is far from being the least nutritious plant in the fields for various kinds of birds, when boiled in water more particularly. Cattle, too, are remarkably fond of the leaves of rape; and the stalks and leaves, when in season, are no less esteemed as a food for man than the sprouts of the cabbage; these, too, when turned yellow and left to die in the barn, are even more highly esteemed than when green. As to the rape [turnip] itself, it will keep all the better if left in its mould, after which it should be dried in the open air till the next crop is nearly ripe, as a resource in case of scarcity. Next to those of the grape and corn, this is the most profitable harvest of all for the countries that lie beyond the Padus.”
-Pliny the Elder on the turnip rape, Natural History, Chapter 34
Turnips, carrots, garlic, onions—root crops, all of them—are essential ingredients to our everyday diet. But perhaps most important of all: they are easy to grow, and they can be grown in multiple seasons. Anyone can grow these very simple roots. More importantly, what would we do without them? Sure, a survivalist might be able to hunt a decent amount of table meat from a successful outing, but isn’t it also necessary to have some garlic to rub into the steaks?
But even more importantly is the fact that these crops are extremely easy to acquire. Here, in the First World of the 2020s, we have grocery stores. And there, we find ourselves purchasing bundles of green onions, garlic bulbs, bags of carrots, and so on. Yet, these grocery store foods have the ability to serve more than one purpose. True, we can cut them up and eat them. But also, we can take discarded cuttings from these foods and plant them.
For example, should you purchase a bundle of green onions in the grocery store, and you use the green stalks but plan to discard the rooted ends—don’t. Keep those little white bulb ends. As you can see, they have small root systems hanging from them. Instead, take the ends of those green onions and plant them. They will take root in soil and sprout up naturally in prepared soil. If you have a whole onion, you can cut off the rooted end of it and put it in a dish of water. The dry roots will come to life, drink in the water, and within a couple of weeks you will have green stalks sprouting out of that “onion cap,” and it will be ready to put in the earth.
If you bought some carrots, and there’s a bit of green at the head of the carrots, cut those carrot heads off, put them in a dish of water, and watch the carrot return to life. You can plant the carrot in soil after it revives, and you’ll be able to harvest fresh seeds from its stalk in the next season. Harvesting seeds from these plants is very important at this time, as most store-bought seeds have been on the shelves for a very long time, and they might not be as successful as you’d like.
Have potatoes growing “eyes” on them? Divide those potatoes up with a knife, plant them, and gather a few bundles. Aged potatoes can be a treasure. Do you have some spare garlic rolling around in your food stores? Plant them root down into your backyard’s soil, and let them grow for a couple of seasons. Heck, you can even salvage unused portions of a celery stalk or cabbage in this fashion. Salvaging kitchen scraps can quickly fill up your empty garden space if you can’t find any seeds.
Is the weather getting chilly? Well, another very useful thing about these particular plants is the fact that they are capable of growing in colder weather. They are biologically designed to survive and even thrive in the spring and fall. They don’t always do too well in the scorching summertime. “Kitchen-cuttings” root crops like these are very useful, in the fact that they can be grown in at least three of our seasons. If the winter is mild, even four seasons.
In fact, if it is winter time, and you have crops of onion, garlic, or carrots in the ground, you can protect them from extensive frost damage by putting those fall leaves to use and surrounding the leaves of the plants, shielding them from weather that would potentially kill the crop. By doing this, by having your root crop in the ground through the winter, though it’s true it will not grow much with its leaves, the root system underneath will continue to proliferate. Of course, if the winter is utterly terrible, you might not have such luck. But it is possible to succeed even through the darkest of the four seasons.
With scarcity on the rise, and a tremendous need for frugality, thrift, and resourcefulness, it would do everyone a world of good to acquire some of these rudimentary gardening skills, utilize that backyard, or if necessary, even launch into a guerrilla gardening campaign. There is a lot of dirt available out there that’s simply not being used, and a lot of these small roots we eat don’t require much space at all. With things going the way they are now, it’s crucial we get some food systems going, pronto—which means it would do us good to utilize every method for getting a crop going as we can.
I’ve been a gardener all of my life to one degree or another, here in eastern Oklahoma.
I run the Trad Catholic blog known as The Forge and Anvil, and before that I was known for running The Hirsch Files. I’ve been linked to by Ann Barnhardt, OnePeterFive, Canon212, Vox Clamantis, and others. I’ve been published on sites such as Men of the West, Culture Wars, and Stares At the World. I wrote the introduction to Vox Day’s Innocence and Intellect. I currently have an e-book titled Let There Be Signs: 2017, and under the pseudonym Jack Mikkelson, I’ve published the book Bovodar and the Bears, and I am also the author of the Bovodar and the Bears comic series on Arktoons.
Laramie Hirsch
