Destiny Survival

Survival gardening means you grow food you and your family could survive on. Ideally, you want to do the least amount of work for the most amount of food. And what if you could conceal it so thieves won’t steal from it.

Now picture this. You could plant a survival garden that you…

It sounds fascinating and enticing, doesn’t it? But does it sound too good to be true?

Rick Austin has been doing it for years and has been teaching others to garden that way. In fact, he’s written Secret Garden of Survival-How to grow a camouflaged food-forest to show you and me how to do it, too.

Rick Austin refers to himself as the Survivalist Gardener, and he was my guest yesterday on DestinySurvival Radio. He took a half-acre southern slope in North Carolina and turned it from red clay into a “food forest” in one year. He has proven his method of survival gardening to be the essential prepper food source that can provide you with all the fruit, vegetables, nuts and berries, that you and your family can consume in a year.

To quote from Rick’s info, he “is a long time survival expert, and has been using sustainable living and home building practices for 30 years. He is a permaculture gardening, solar, and off-grid living expert and has been a guest speaker to architectural, agricultural, sustainable building, and survival preparedness conferences. His presentations contain real life examples, photos, and anecdotes.”

I can tell you from our interview that he’s the real deal. He’s been prepping long before prepping became fashionable.

The contents includes…

Reviewers on Amazon agree Secret Garden of Survival is easy to read and gives you all the step by step info you need. It’s based on Rick’s years of growing experience using permaculture. It’s not theory, and he made it a point to include plenty of pictures to prove it.

Rick says it’s simply the way nature does things. This method of permaculture gardening relies heavily on companion planting. You grow plants that grow well together.

Keep pests away. For example, planting onions around fruit trees keeps mice away in winter. Catnip near tomatoes keeps tomato hornworms away. Attract beneficial insects by growing plants that will attract them.

Plants are grown in concentric circles around fruit and nut trees to achieve the food forest, camouflaged look. Space is saved when you grow vines up the trees. And plants are interplanted. This is both stealth gardening and intensive gardening.

Each tree with its surrounding plants is called a guild. Trees are planted 40 feet apart, but plants growing out around each tree will take up enough space so the guilds touch one another.

Rick has about 20 fruit and nut trees. He grows as many fruits as he can for his region in North Carolina, including numerous kinds of berries. He grows grapes, too.

From their first year of gardening this way, Rick and his wife grew more fruits and vegetables than they could consume. This was all done without fertilizers or pesticides. Even Rick is amazed by how well it all works.

It takes careful planning to make this system work. You must consider the space you have and select carefully for the varieties of plants that do well in your area. Rick says the best way to get started is to get his book and follow the step by step directions. Pictures demonstrate more than many words could explain adequately. It’s his goal to make it simple to understand.

This is truly low maintenance gardening. In fact, Rick doesn’t even worry about weeds. He says the most work comes at harvest time. Fortunately, crops are harvested at different times.

But the key is to work with nature, rather than against it.

First, listen to my interview with Rick Austin when you hear DestinySurvival Radio for February 28, 2013 because we talked about more than I have space to share here. Then check out Rick’s site at www.SecretGardenOfSurvival.com. Buy his book there at a discount, or click on the image below and buy it from Amazon and support DestinySurvival at the same time.

No matter where you get the book, you may want to get the paperback version so you can take notes to refer to later. And you’ll have a hard copy for the future when we find ourselves in the proverbial off grid situation.

What do you think? Does Rick Austin’s secret garden of survival sound too good to be true? Or is it the way survival gardening was meant to be? Is this something you’ll try? Would you grow this way at a bug out location? I’d love to know your thoughts in a comment below.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail