Yes it’s cold and wet outside, but planning your food production now, well help you get the most out of the season.

Just wanted to get you folks thinking about this year’s harvest and planning now can help you get that much more in production and on your shelves. We had enough time with the move here last august to get one Hugelkultur bed installed, about 100 sq ft using straw bales. We will have a video coming on how we put that together, so if you are thinking of doing it, that may help. We chose to do Hugelkultur for one reason, water. The stored water in the wood will help immensely when the heat of the summer comes around. With that said, we are going to build 4 more beds, same size for this spring.

Now the planning on what goes in em! We know what we like to plant from our garden in Cali. Tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and squash to start. Lisa did the preliminary work with the JohnnySeed Catalog and then we sat down and planned out our order. We will also visit our local nursery to get info on what works well in this area, take advantage of that resource where you are. The exact plan of where each item will go in what bed for now does not matter. What does matter is planning what you want to do and why, just for eating or preserving to? Think about that, take tomatoes, Roma’s and variety’s of that are perfect for canning, not so much for eating. So plan the veges and fruit by what you want and need. We plan on 3 varieties of peppers with different scovil ratings, I don’t know how much of what, that we can figure out later.

Trees. We wanted an orchard since we have 10 acres, about 6 usable for now. Apples, great to eat, bake and preserve, can’t go wrong there. We are fortunate to have a great tree grower in our area who has done this forever and grafts his own stuff as well. Michael at michaelsapples.com, is a great resource and gives classes in the Reno NV area. We will get some from him and some from a nursery he suggested in Washington State; burntridgenursery.com. Burnt Ridge has a great variety and pricing is good. We will be planting Apples, Apricot, Peaches, Pears, Cherry, Ash, Plums and almond this year. Also we will put in Blackberrys and Raspberries supplied by Neil Bertrando through Loping Coyote Farms. Neil is our Permaculture Guru and I may take a class from him this spring as well, good guy.

I encourage you to get a catalog, talk to your nurseryman, they know a lot about what works in your neck of the woods. We are a little unique in that we are in the High Desert of Nevada, just north of Reno. Elevation at the house is 6,000 ft. So we have some challenges for our homestead, that’s half the fun. If we can do it, by god you can, so get out there and see what you want to do! We as preppers, always need to be able to supplement our food stores with fresh and extend the stores as well. Production is as important as Stores!