Some Stuff About Us, and Some About This Blog
So we’re Phil and Isabel. We enjoy growing things, watching The Walking Dead, and wondering why it took five seasons for Rick Grimes/Egg to start a vegetable garden.
For the past 10 years we’ve spent all our spare time developing an area of former pasture around an old barn in East Sussex, with the plan of a) producing as much of our own food as possible and b) surviving the impending apocalypse. Climate change, Brexit, screaming brain-biters: whatever comes our way, we believe that knowing how to grow our own veg, plus some fruit, nuts and maybe a few cereals will help.
But we’re very much not trained gardeners, and have made any number of mistakes. Many of which would, had we actually been living in a zombie apocalypse, have led to a slow death by starvation.
Sharing the pain
That was mostly our fault, but also partly because we found it really hard to track down concrete information about how much food you need to grow to survive, how much room that needs, and the best way to grow it. We read many, many allotment, grow-your-own and self-sufficiency books and blogs, and learnt something useful from (nearly) all of them, but in the end we had to work most things out by trial and error. We’re still working it out now.
That’s why we’ve started this blog. We’ve already written a book about gardening for the apocalypse, but we want to share more of what we’ve learnt, as well as allowing other people to follow the continuing development of our own zombie garden. We’ll be posting here regularly with:
- ideas and advice about growing specific crops – in large plots, small plots, in containers, wherever
- reports on other food-growing gardens and gardeners
- and (we hope) ways to solve problems in zombie gardens large and small.
We also want to continue something we tried to achieve in the book, which is to stick as far as possible to science: growing food is hard, and knowing what is myth and what is at least heading in the direction of fact makes good harvests much more likely. So wherever possible, we either link direct to the sources we based our advice on, or point you in their direction with footnotes.
We’re both nosey and enjoy chatting/picking clean the brains of anyone interested in growing food, from beginners to professionals – so either email us via the contact button below, or come find us on Twitter @thezombiegarden. On Instagram, we use @gardens4thezombieapocalypse to share food-growing, zombie-gardening, surviving-and-thriving ideas from around the world – use the hashtag #GardenOrDie if you’d like us to feature yours.
Thank you – enjoy your garden, enjoy surviving, and enjoy the blog!
