About survival food plants

What is a survival food plant?

It’s a little difficult to define “survival food plant”. In a real-life survival situation, any plant that can be eaten would be considered a survival plant. That would include any vegetable or fruit you have in the garden right through to local weeds or plants that are edible (well at least a non-poisonous form of nutrients!).

I think a survival food plant is one that you put in the garden once and it grows continuously with a minimum of care. A plant you can turn to in times of need, but also regularly harvest for your daily greens.

A survival plant should meet the following criteria (in order of importance):-

It should be edible (of course), tasty and nutrient rich

It should perennial – or at least readily self-seeding

It should need a minimum of care

It should have a long or repeated harvest

There’s not too many conventionally grown vegetables that will meet all of this criteria. Most require regular preparation of the soil, regular & seasonal planting, regular watering, regular fertilising and once the plant has yielded it’s crop, you have to pull it up & start all over again. Growing conventional crops is very rewarding, but let’s face it – it’s can be a bit of work.

From my experience growing both conventional vegetables and survival plants, I can say that survival plants have far less problems with bugs, diseases, and bad weather – if they do, they will usually recover without any assistance on your part. Even better, if you interplant them with your conventional vegetables, they’ll get less bugs too! Survival plants do take a little bit of work up front to get them settled in but then you can leave them to do their own thing. Some will die back in winter and resprout in spring, others will go all year round – the common thing with survival plants is that they are perennial and don’t require replanting every year. If allowed to, most survival plants will never need replanting. Many don’t need watering if you get a decent amount of rainfall, and fertiliser requirements are optional – just fertilise & mulch when you get to it. The most work you’ll do is harvesting.

To get most value out of survival plants, it is best to learn how to use them. Why wait for disaster to hit when you could be getting value out of them all year – every year? Many of them have far more nutrition than many conventional vegetables and they all taste great. The best way is to use them is in combination with the vegetables you eat now, but try using them on their own too. Once you’ve learned how to grow & use these plants regularly, you won’t need to be concerned with food or nutrition if there was any interruption to the food supply. Your backyard garden could keep you going for months or even years. You’ll also save money in the meantime – and more in future as food prices continually move upward.

Why survival plants?

Perhaps this is a good time to explain how I have come to know and love these wonderful plants.

For a long time now I’ve been interested in growing my own food. I’ve tried to grow just about every conventional vegetable there is over the years. Some years I’ll do well with some, and fail dismally with others. Sometimes the weather will ruin my crops, at other times it’ll be the bugs that come in and wipe them out. Even to this day, there’s many crops I won’t bother with as they just don’t seem to do well in my soil & my climate.

You see I’m not the type of gardener that faithfully works in the garden every day. At times, I might spend an entire weekend in there preparing new gardens & planting new crops. At other times, I might not do any work in there for weeks or even months. My work or family might take me away, or sometimes I’m just not motivated or interested in garden work. At the times I’m working in the garden regularly, I find I’ll get great crops of things like lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, beans, cauliflower, cucumber, eggplants etc – some failures sure, but mostly good returns on my efforts.

At the times I’m neglecting my garden though, something very interesting happens. Apart from the obvious proliferation of weeds, the exotic survival plants I’ve put in continue to thrive. In fact, mostly they’ll outcompete the weeds and continue to provide daily food for me and my family. While this is happening, most or all of the conventional veges I’ve planted eventually fail.

Seems almost too good to be true – plants that thrive on neglect! Plant them once, they’ll multiply by themselves and continue to provide food on a daily basis. If anything, many of these plants become a weed themselves and might need to be removed just like you would any other weed.

If, on the other hand, you do have a green thumb and successfully grow conventional vegetables on a regular basis, survival plants still have plenty to offer.

Firstly, they make great companion plants. Plant them around the edge of your garden beds or amongst ornamental plantings and they’ll help by diversifying your garden & confusing the bugs. Many of them make great mulch and so don’t need to be eaten to be of value.

Secondly, they’ll add variety to what you can put on the table. These plants in general are highly nutritious and tasty too and will add interest to all your salads & stir fries in particular. It’s fun to explain to visitors what those unusual delicious leaves are in the salad!

And finally, it improves your personal food security. If through sickness or absence you’re unable to attend to your garden, your perennials will keep right on growing and cover any losses to your regular food production.

Why you won’t see these plants in your supermarkets

You may well ask “ if these plants are so nutritious & so easy to grow, why aren’t they available in supermarkets?”

The quick answer is – it depends where you live. Many of these plants are staple foods in other parts of the world – especially Asia & Africa where they’re bought & sold in local markets or grown in local plots. In some cases, they’re endemic to the area & are wild harvested. If you live in a western society, the story’s a little different. Supermarkets are geared to be the end seller of what modern agriculture can produce. They won’t show much interest in few kilograms of local produce. Their mode of operation is to buy produce by the ton, then package & distribute it around the country. High nutrient value is of no interest to supermarkets – it’s all about long shelf life & appearance – or in other words – profit, profit & more profit!

I’m not suggesting you aim for self-sufficiency here (that’s a worthy but difficult goal), just that you put some of these amazing plants in your garden, and even better, learn how to incorporate them in your diet.

Even adding a single perennial food plant to your back yard can have an impact on your diet. These plants are packed full of nutrients that are mostly lost in fresh food available in supermarkets. Simply adding a leaf or two a day to your salads straight from the garden will make a difference, and getting the bulk of your greens from the garden will most certainly improve your chances of good health.

This process of growing food & then eating the produce will also bring you closer to nature, you’ll be much less reliant on modern farming for your nutrition and at the same time reduce your impact on our planet’s ecosystems.

The survival food forest

The best thing about a survival food forest is that it needn’t be a lot of work.

A food forest is a bit of effort up front to find and plant the different varieties, maybe some fertilising, weeding and mulching along the way, and if it get’s really dry, maybe a bit of watering. No daily, weekly or monthly chores and certainly no back-breaking chores like digging or starting new gardens from scratch every season.

Survival plants are mostly very forgiving and will still reward you when you neglect them. If you can get them established in your garden, you’ll probably have them forever. If you can learn to eat them, you’ll have free, high quality food forever. It’s a pretty good deal. Another great thing about a survival food forest is that it is a great place to hang out and relax. An awesome place to be at dawn or dusk perhaps picking your next meal. A place to wander around picking at leaves or berries as you go. A place to meditate or enjoy a relaxing cup of tea.

If you really want to survive well in a time of crisis, why not form a “friendship” with your garden now – get to know the individual plants, how to use them and how to incorporate them into your lifestyle. Always be on the lookout to bring some new ones in, get to know them too. Learn to propogate them, and share them around with your friends and neighbours. Anywhere you’ve got persistent weeds, replace them with survival plants and save yourself some weeding.

Then, if you and your family were ever thrown into a survival situation, you’d have the food aspect already covered from day 1. Maybe not all your food requirements, but enough to keep you alive and thriving through difficult periods.

Real Nutrition

If the term “survival food plant” conjures up thoughts of a plant that tastes like cardboard and is empty of nutrition – think again. Nutritional facts from the USDA national nutrient database say otherwise.

I like and grow Lettuce too, but I’m well aware that it’s my survival plants that pack the nutritional punch to my diet. Same goes for survival plant tubers compared to potatoes. I’ve set out a table below of Lettuce compared to 4 perennials that are super easy to grow.

It quickly becomes obvious that the perennial survival plants win hands down. That’s in a scientific comparison under controlled conditions. It doesn’t take into account the nutrients lost in the time between harvesting and eating – something you won’t have to worry about if you plant them in your garden.

As for taste, well it’s always personal preference, but I consider Lettuce pretty bland next to these perennial survival plants – more than likely you will too. You can add variety, flavour and nutrition to your diet by using these plants in addition to the vegetables you use now.

On this site I detail dozens of edible plants that can be used in salads and cooking so you’re virtually guaranteed to find several (if not lots more) you like.

Nutrient facts – Salad leaves (raw)

	Unit	Lettuce	Malabar spinach	Kang Kong	Sweet potato leaves	Garlic chives
Energy	kCal	14	19	19	35	30
Protein	g	0.9	1.8	2.6	4	3.27
Fat	g	0.14	0.3	0.2	0.3	0.73
Carbohydrate	g	2.97	3.4	3.14	6.38	4.35
Fiber	g	1.2	2	2.1	2	2.5
Vitamins
Vitamin A	mcg	25	400	315	51	218
Vitamin B	mg	0.35	1.14	1.32	2.13	1.41
Vitamin C	mg	2.8	102	55	11	58.1
Minerals
Calcium	mg	18	109	77	37	92
Iron	mg	0.41	1.2	1.67	1.01	1.6
Magnesium	mg	7	65	71	61	42
Phosphorous	mg	20	52	39	94	58
Potassium	mg	141	510	312	518	296
Sodium	mg	10	24	113	9	3
Zinc	mg	0.15	0.43	0.18	0.29	0.56
Copper	mg	0.03	0.11	0.02	0.04	0.16
Manganese	mg	0.13	0.74	0.16	0.26	0.37
Selenium	mcg	0.1	0.8	0.9	0.9	0.9

Read about the plants here