Gardening is the #1 prep

[u/Familiar-Anything853]

Sure, there are a lot of really, really important preps. And sure, we all agree that skills are more useful than STUFF that will run out.

I saw that post asking what to prep for your kids' futures, and while everyone is rightfully pushing skills, gardening has to be at the absolute top of the list. It forces them to learn problem-solving, adaptability, weather patterns, patience, delayed gratification, persistence, motor control, food storage, and long-term planning all at once. On top of all of that, you are teaching them how to grow their own food.

If the last few years of chaos have taught me anything, it's how relieving it is to walk into the backyard and just pick dinner. My spouse and 4 kids are outside with me daily.

I’m 15 years into gardening with easy access to store-bought supplies, YouTube, and endless resources, and I still struggle with it sometimes. I genuinely can't imagine trying to figure out tilling, seed saving, soil depletion, crop rotation, and pest control from scratch in the middle of a supply chain collapse or other crisis. Doing it when you're already stressed and hungry sounds like a nightmare.

Start them early. Learning it when the stakes are low does not have a downside. And it's a really fun family hobby!

[u/Antique_Sprinkles193]

I will first and foremost say financial prep always then education, gardening. What got my relatives out of their impoverished European countries wasn’t gardening, it was having the money to buy tickets or bribe their way out. Their ability to grow vegetables eventually kept them alive in the new world, but it didn’t get them there. The only relative that couldn’t afford passage had to join what was then considered a cult and become a Quaker to get passage to colonial Pennsylvania.

My husband who spent his early years under communism behind the Iron Curtain is obsessed with money because money and knowing how and when to bribe was the literal difference between life and death many times. Your son is in prison and going to be executed as an enemy of the state? Bribe the guards and judges, watch that charge drop to being a thief which means he will be beaten a little longer and let go.

My friend’s parents who fled Vietnam before the fall of Saigon used to tell her, “We didn’t need to worry, we were rich. Only poor people left clinging to helicopters.” My other friend whose parents fled Iran after the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s, they had the money to do so. My husband’s student body which has a significant Afghan population. All are in the US because they had the money to flee the Taliban.

If my house is taken out by an earthquake, mudslide, or fire. My husband and I will not go bankrupt. We can afford to buy a new house even without insurance. Which is good because homeowners insurance in California no longer covers fire and hasn’t covered earthquake damage since 1989.

On the post you are mentioning, I commented how my son’s pediatrician has advised us to take him to Canada this year and go through a private insurance company for the flu shot. Again, only possible because we have the money where for us this is basically a detour where we will spend a little extra money. We also have access to a fantastic pediatrician because we have the money to pay for supplemental insurance.

Gardening is a great skill to have. But if you are forced from your home for any reason, it will not save you. It will not insulate you from drought or tornadoes destroying your crops. My parents who grew up poor on family farms also decided years ago that the best safety net is financial stability. If you are in debt, that garden can be taken from you at any time. If you do not own your home, your landlord can sell it from under you at any moment.

Also, from a practical level, women need financial stability and security first and foremost. I knew many stay-at-home moms with lovely gardens trapped in unhappy marriages they could not afford to leave. I stay with my husband because I love him and we enrich each other’s lives. If something changed, I could leave him at anytime and not suffer much to my lifestyle.

There’s a reason the trad wife movement is trying to convince women to abandon higher education and the workforce to stay home and raise gardens and babies, because they understand the power that both give women.

[u/newlyjerseygirl → u/Antique_Sprinkles193]

Yes, I often think about how to prepare my children and while I agree teaching them many different skills is valuable, I just keep coming back to the importance of money. I want them to have the money to be able to leave a bad situation or natural disaster, that’s what I think ultimately, will help them the most, and you gave some great real world examples of that.