A journey toward food self-sufficiency, Part I

I've received a surprising number of notes from fans about my attempt to reach food self-sufficiency. If you're interested in moving in this direction, I’ll give you some hints. It's going to be a four-part series.

Because “in a survival emergency” is not the ideal time to begin to learn how to grow/hunt all your own food, I'd like everyone reading this to start at least a small garden now, in 2020. It can be a simple 4 x 4 ft bed (or 1 meter square) with just one plant each of your favorite five or six veg, but starting is crucial. Your soil, your climate, and your pests are going to play an important role in your gardening future (and if you believe in a real SHTF scenario, in your survival). It takes a few years to learn how to garden, and to learn the peculiarities of your situation, so the sooner you begin, the better. Even if you gardened that one small bed for two years and gave up because you are too busy to keep it up, if an emergency arose ten years later that you needed to grow all your own food, you'd remember those skills. Maybe your kids would remember too.

Therefore, there's no time like the present. Grow something this year!

 

The perfect garden would be on the south side of your house, unshaded, with a gentle slope to the south. (in Australia/NZ, make that sloped to the north.) Choice B: a western exposure clear of trees and afternoon shade will give you a full afternoon's sun, which is enough to grow summer vegetables. A steep slope can be terraced. A bit of empty land on the east of your house would be a good place to grow salad greens, as the shade during the hottest part of the day would keep them growing longer into summer, but you'll likely have problems growing tomatoes there. If all you have is a sunny patio or balcony, you can grow your two favorite plants in big pots. Growing something is better than growing nothing.

I'm a fan and advocate of no-till gardening. Here's what I did to create 3000 square feet of garden space so far. (I’m going to stop at about 7000 square feet, half in fruit, and half in vegetables, and leave 3000 in lawn so as not to overly upset the neighbors). For free, in the autumn, I got wood chips from local tree services (call and ask—they usually have to pay to dump these, and they're thrilled someone will take it off their hands instead). I put down free cardboard from stores (plain, dull, uncolored cardboard only and remove all plastic tape from the top flaps). That goes straight on a lawn of grass or a patch of weeds in the autumn, and then you water the cardboard, and then you pile 4-6 inches of wood chips over that. By late spring, you'll be able to plant into those areas by pushing aside remaining woodchips and tucking in seeds or plants. Worms will eat all of the cardboard quickly and the wood chips eventually and convert it to better soil than you likely have now. (Most of us cuss our clay soil, and some of us cuss our sandy soil, but few of us have perfect soil to begin with.) A few pernicious weeds may fight you (Bermuda grass is probably the very worst around here and maybe couch grass in England), but keep yanking it out when you see it pop up, cover your beds with 2 inches of new woodchips again the second winter, and you'll win out over your perennial weeds.

However, as you can see, that over-winter system to prepare garden beds for the next year doesn't help us in year one if we’re starting in spring—but it's a way to make yourself subsequent beds for years 2 and beyond. So in year one, pull or hoe most grass and weeds out of an area (you don't have to be perfect. Get 80% of them and you'll be fine) no bigger than 4 feet wide, and from 4 feet up to 12 feet long, cover it with newspaper 4-6 sheets thick, and then cover that with bagged planting medium from a garden or box store.

For planting medium in year 1, I suggest mixing half a big bag of peat moss (or, if you're in the UK, coco coir), two large bags of top soil, one large bag of Black Kow compost (or any other aged animal manure), one bag of mushroom compost (as large as you can find, if you can find it--if not, any bag of vegetable compost will do), and a small bag of organic slow-release fertilizer pellets like Plant Tone—ones designed for tomatoes will also serve you for most veg and are easy to find. You can sort of sprinkle each one of these ingredients over your growing area, or you can put out a tarp, pile everything in those bags on, and then mix it with your hands (kids love this part) and by tugging up the corners of the tarp to flop it over on itself. If you have a 4 x 4 bed, you'll end up with a mound of dirt, which is fine. If you have a 4 x 12 bed and use that recipe, it will only be an inch or two over grade, which is hardly noticeable but will keep the newspaper in place until the worms eat the newspaper and suppress grass and most weeds.

Do you need raised beds with wooden sides? No. And they're expensive to buy or build and fill, so unless you have a disability that requires you to garden well above ground level, just plant into the new (weedless) growing mix spread over newspaper over your regular ground.

Many veg are best started from seeds sown directly into the ground: squash, French beans, peas, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, and root crops among them. Unless you're in a semi-tropical climate, tomatoes, eggplants, sweet potatoes and peppers need to be started as plants. You can buy those plants (may I suggest the local plant sale of a garden club, rather than a big box store?) or start them yourself indoors under grow lights at about 2 months before they'll be planted out. I'm going to send you to Youtube and Gary Pilarchik for details on that process. And big brassicas  (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts) attract loads of pests if they're out there a long time, and so most people set out plants instead, which helps shorten the weeks that pests might find them. In my locale, summer temps can hit the second week of May, and brassicas hate summer, so it’s good to get plants out as soon as possible. (They can take a 28 degree F night (-1/2 C), but no lower.) For your very first year, in a small garden plot, it’s going to be cheaper and easier just to buy plants, plus packets of seeds for lettuce, carrots, spinach, and radishes.

For your first bed, pick 4-10 vegetables that your family likes to eat. Pick ones that are expensive at the store or taste like crap at the store (hello, Florida tomatoes that taste like water and have as many as 36 poisons sprayed on them). Organic lettuce or spring greens at my nearest store are $8/pound on sale. Obviously, that's a good choice of crop if you like salads. Put in your seeds or plants when the packages/tags tell you to for your locale, spaced as the seed package says to space them, and wait for them to germinate or grow. Keep seed packs, which you might refer back to. Any brand seeds will do. Those 25 cent seeds at dollar stores are fine! As you probably spent $25 on the soil mix for your new bed, don’t break the bank on seeds.

I’d steer you away from pumpkins, melons, and winter squash the first year, as they take up a lot of space to grow. Maybe in year 2, okay? : )

Year 1, harvest your crops when ready and eat them the same day if you can, at the peak of nutrition and taste. And that’s a brief version of how to start your path toward food self-sufficiency. And if you enjoyed it, use my cardboard-plus-wood-chips method to expand your garden for next year.

Note: if you don’t have any land at all, look into community gardens or walk around your neighborhood. Ask someone to use their back yard and offer them half the produce as “rental” for their land. Be a good renter, keeping things tidy, and they’ll likely approve an expanding garden in subsequent years.

Back to me for a moment. My land is 1/3 acre, and 1/3 of that is house, garage, shed, and pavement. This leaves 2/3 of it to grow on, or about 10,000 square feet. That's plenty of land to grow all my own fruits and vegetables and to supply space for laying hens. If I were an ovo-vegetarian, that'd be great. I'm not—I eat meat and cheese—and so I supply some food off the property. More on that in part 4 of the series.

I learned what I could about gardening from experience, from books, and from Youtube. The best book I found for the US is The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, though there are several almost as good.

Stay tuned for parts 2, 3, and 4.

this could be your yard, in year 3

I'm anti social media

Just a note to new fans: I don't like social media. If you find someone actively posting on social media claiming to be me any time since early 2019, that's a fake account. (And yes, people will fake being writers online. I'm not sure what's wrong with people! Why don't they take that time and energy and get a nice volunteer job and help people instead?) There's an old Facebook account that might still be visible, but I haven't been there in years.

To stay in contact with me, sign up for my newsletter or follow this blog. I don't send out chatty newsletters, just notices of new releases and, twice in five years, a note about upcoming book plans. I hate getting spammy emails, and I assume you do too! The blog is a little more chatty, so if you're curious about what I'm thinking about, reading, or doing, this is the place to look.

If you like social media, that's fine by me! I'd rather talk with actual people face to face. We're kinder to each other face to face, I find. If you email me, I'll write you back. I enjoy hearing from fans. If that makes me old-fashioned, then I'm pleased to be old-fashioned.

In book news, I have a book out with a proofreader, due to come out in April. Another book is drafted and needs revision and editing, and it will come out in September or October.  Two books per year is my planned pace for the future. I know it was more fun for readers when I was putting out six per year, but I'm unable to keep up that pace and stay healthy. I decided it was more important to stay alive than to die at the top of the best-seller SF lists. It was a harder decision than you might think, but looking back, I wonder why it took me so long to make what now seems the only sane decision!

Book Availability

For a time, my ebooks are only available at Amazon. It's a purely financial decision. I apologize to fans at Barnes and Noble and iBooks, but I do have to pay my bills! I'll probably go back to having books everywhere again, but for now, it's much easier to have all my eggs in this one basket.

Thank you for your understanding. -- Lou

The story of Gray

This is the tale of how Gray was written, and when, and how it came to be in your hands.

I had ceased teaching university in 2004 partly because teaching writing was messing up my ability to write. Or, let's back up 10 years before that: after a moderately successful decade in publishing stories, poetry, and slick magazine articles, teaching had slowed me down for the following decade. But I missed writing, so very much. Teaching was also becoming boring after a decade of it (most jobs get boring after 2 years, so this was actually a win!), and it was always far too much work (I often only worked ¾ time, yet I worked 60-hour weeks and made far too little money and often had no health insurance), so I said "My house is paid off. I have some money saved. Let's go back to writing, Lou, which is still the only real passion that's lasted you a lifetime."

I wrote three books in my first year off. A pen name book (no longer for sale) was one of them. A non-fiction book (which I never published or marketed) was one. And Gray was one. I'd been reading about the topic of the type of disaster itself, as reading NF science is one of my hobbies. I'd always thought that disaster novels and movies had gotten something wrong. Often, in real life, disasters come without warning, and if there is no more electricity, no more communications, the people suffering in the midst of it don't have the slightest idea what was going on. Before the year 1900, no human would have ever known about the when of an impending disaster or the how or why of it!  (Read the terrific books Isaac's Storm or Krakatoa to get an idea of how disasters played out before 1900.) I wanted to write about that—a limited viewpoint of one person, a confused person who didn't know anything about the disaster, and whose struggle for survival was so demanding that she could seldom spare a thought to wonder over it.

Gray was a single long book, complete by the end of 2005. I tried to get a agents interested in it and in the pen name book, but I got no nibbles at all on either. The few who bothered writing back said of Gray, in their professional wisdom (cough, cough), "No one reads post-apocalyptic books any more."

I was mightily confused at that comment, for I certainly still loved the genre, but I moved on in my writing. I outlined a book I still like the idea of, a mainstream novel about a woman whose husband died young, who with her insurance payout decides to foster troubled teen girls on a small farm/homestead she had always wanted (or at least thought she wanted). It's funny at points as things go wrong, and poignant at points. I did write a lot of it, but then I thought, "They won't want this one either," and let it sit unfinished. (I think I still have it somewhere, but I couldn't swear to that.)

After my three and a half books were written, I didn't go back to work teaching. I liked being away from it too much. I found a way to live on the cheap (and I do mean cheap—it cost me $4000 US/year to survive, and that was without food stamps or any other assistance) by selling my house, and while I wrote some short stories and poems for the next seven years, and even some outlines for novels, I burned it all in campfires. Wasn't worth the trouble of marketing it, I figured. Agents didn't find my work appealing, and agents were the barrier to my communicating with publishers. And short work simply doesn't pay much, so you may as well burn it in the campfire as send it out into the world. Financially, you'll come out ahead by using your lighter.

Then I settled down to a life you'd call more "normal." More settled, certainly. More electricity to run the computer, and daily internet access after years without. So I started writing novels again, first a draft of my family history novel, and then my disaster novels. Again, I ran into the agent brick wall with all that. I was beyond frustrated. I had great publishing credentials. I'd had stories in top fiction magazines. I had writing awards, so I knew I couldn't totally suck as a writer in everyone's opinion. Good magazines had written me once upon a time, asking if I had any stories for them, so I was sure I wasn't deluded about my skill as a teller of fictional tales. I'm still not sure why agents didn't like my stuff. (Had you still been able to approach publishers directly, as you could when I was young, I suspect I would have sold my books, but those days were long gone by 2012).

But by this time, I didn't have to burn my work and give up writing again, or give it up for good. Now there was the Kindle, and my dear friend Shelley said, "You can do this. Self publishing can work." There was Howey and Konrath and Hocking and others proving it would work danged well, in fact. Still, I hesitated (in retrospect, too long!) But I took the plunge with my old pen name book and with the disaster novels, planning to follow up with whichever genre of book sold best. And very quickly, total strangers around the world started buying my disaster ebooks. So cool! I wanted to hug every one of them. :D I even got a few pieces of fan mail! Lifelong writing dreams were finally coming true, and nobody was in my way. I was my own publisher, reaching readers directly, and learning how to run a business.

People in the know said, "Good start, but you need a series now." I didn't have a series idea, but I'd been re-reading Gray with thoughts of publishing it next, and I thought, "I have a lot more to say about these characters." So I took the long novel—which was somewhat different, and ended soon after Coral finding Benjamin and them deciding to leave his house when something bad happened there—and I rewrote what I had and then continued the tale, making sure each book had a climax and came to a resting place that completed a section in a satisfying way. One of the books of the series gave me a bit of trouble and took seven months to complete, but I worked at it to get it just how I wanted it. 

And the series found its readers. Fans wrote me daily. I got offers for traditional publication of it and for audio publication. It was great—and overwhelming some days, for my email inbox was stuffed full every morning, needed to be combed through, the offers needing to be vetted, and at times I despaired of carving out more time to write!

Gray continues to be my most popular work. Podium Publishing picked it up as audio book, with a professional approach to me when I'd gotten past those overly busy days. They did a great job with it, and I was given a wonderful narrator, Lauren Fortgang. I've moved on from Gray, to other books and series, but it continues to excite and move readers all around the world, and I'm still as grateful as I was in 2015 to every single one of you who bought, read and enjoyed it.

And while Amazon has its problems sometimes managing its self-publishing platform, I'm also grateful to them, for had they not taken the risk of developing the e-reader, losing money hand over fist on it initially, and had they not opened up publishing in ways that didn't demand that writers schmooze agents to get through to publishers (who all live in the same place and all look and think alike, which is not necessarily how most readers think), you'd have never read Gray. I'd have never been a full-time writer. We wouldn't have countless numbers of wonderful novels by other people were it not for Amazon leading the way with the Kindle and letting novelists be their own publishers, be their own agents, and free themselves of the NYC system that wasn't working for most writers or many readers.

Mostly, though, the gratitude I have—and which I never forget, not for a day—is aimed at my readers. Without you, I'm still a frustrated person living well below the poverty line and burning my stories in campfires.  So thank you for reading.

Congratulations to my books designer for an award

Deranged Doctor Designs, my book cover designer for most of my books, has always done a terrific job. In May, they won the e-book Cover Design Award for Code Name: Beatriz.

I can't claim more than .01% of this award (I did describe the book to them, so that's why I claim even that much!) so I'm not bragging on me, but on them. They've always been a delight to work with, and I've recommended them to several writer friends.

Congratulations to the design team there.