It doesn’t involve the undead, but it might just save your life
OK, we admit it. A zombie garden is basically just a vegetable garden. Except…it isn’t.
A standard vegetable, kitchen or market garden is usually big – sometimes very big. A zombie garden, on the other hand, can be as small as a couple of pots of herbs on a windowsill. Because “zombie garden” is the name we invented for a place – any place – where people grow some of their own food, and grow it in a certain kind of way.
Why just some food?
When beginner gardeners start growing food, in an allotment or anywhere else, they often dream of supplying all the food they need from just this one magic spot. But then they find that growing food on your own – or at least doing it well – is labour-intensive and time-consuming. To provide a year’s worth of calories and nutrients for even one person involves an enormous amount of soil preparation, seed-sowing, transplanting, weeding, watering, feeding and harvesting, plus aeons of time spent prepping and storing harvests. It doesn’t leave much room for all the other things you might need or want to do. Such as sleeping and breathing.
Food crops also have wildly different needs. Some like it cool, some like it hot. Some like it wet, some like it dry. And all only provide a crop for a few weeks or months each year. No single plot of land can ever have the climate or soil conditions to provide you with the year-round choice you’ll find in a supermarket. But that shouldn’t stop people from growing some food of their own. Even before the apocalypse.
How to be a zombie gardener
First of all, you really don’t need masses of space to have a zombie garden. It’s more about how you grow, not how much you grow. This approach to gardening concentrates on two things:
- Planning and planting in a way that extracts the maximum possible nutrition from your plot.
- Using the minimum of offsite resources to do it.
Doesn’t matter if you have acres to play with, or just a window box, you can still plant in a way that uses your space as efficiently and constantly as possible, following on one nutrient-rich crop with another across the whole year, and never leaving soil bare for any longer than is necessary. Market gardeners do this to earn as much money as possible; organic gardeners do it to keep their soil healthy; a zombie gardener does it to provide as many different nutrients as possible – carbs, protein, vitamins, minerals – quickly, throughout the seasons, and year after year.
Meanwhile, reducing your use of off-site resources – things like fuel for garden machinery, or shop-bought compost, fertilizer and seeds – reduces yours costs, both monetary and planetary. But we try not to be starry-eyed about how easy that is. Permaculture gardeners talk a lot about closed-loop gardens, where all the necessaries such as water and plant nutrients constantly cycle through the garden without ever needing replenishing or topping up from elsewhere. This might work for low-output agroforestry systems (we’ll post about these another day), but if you’re aiming to produce loads of calories from a small space it’s never going to happen. Still though: you can always aim to produce, recycle and re-use as much of your own gardening kit, compost, fertilizer and seeds as you can manage. This is something that farmers have known for, well, pretty much ever: minimize the amount of energy you put in, and maximize the amount of nutrients you get out.
Why start a zombie garden?
First, there are provable health benefits. As long as you either eat it or freeze it straight away, nearly all fresh-from-the garden fruit and vegetables will have a higher vitamin content than if it spent days or weeks in transit and sitting in shops[1].
Second, you can make a zombie garden in even the smallest space: a few pots on a patio or a rooftop, a corner of a flower bed. That means growing at least some food is an achievable aim. And achievable aims are what keep us happy – before, during or after an apocalypse.
Third, if (and this is important) you grow food that is well adapted to your plot and climate, are careful about what resources you use, and eat as seasonally as possible, you’ll be responsible for less emissions than if you buy the same food after they’ve travelled half way round the world.
Fourth, if the zombies do rise, it’ll help keep you alive and healthy.
Finally, there’s this. As we’ve discovered, growing even just a little bit of food engages you with your environment in one of the most immediate ways possible: it makes you brutally aware of how dependent humans are on the natural world, and how precarious our survival will be if we wreck things like soil, climate or biodiversity. A nation of climate-conscious, small-scale food-producers might be more likely to make the changes we need to keep our planet viable. And so avoid an apocalypse that sadly – unlike zombies – really could happen. So we’d say, start a zombie garden today. It might just save your life.
[1] Maximising the Nutritional Content of Fruit an Vegetables, Diane M Barrett, University of California, Davis http://www.fruitandvegetable.ucdavis.edu/files/197179.pdf
