'Very dangerous': Trump dumps billions of gallons of water farmers were counting on for summer

[NickB79]

43. I posted on the DU Gardening Forum in November about re-planning my gardens post-election

I'm lucky enough to have 1.5 acres in southeast Minnesota, absolutely gorgeous soil, my own well, lots of chicken manure for composting.

In the past, I've grown a lot of plants just for fun. Lots of experimenting with unusual, "pretty" crops that don't really produce as much as tried-and-true varieties. But following the election, I decided that had to change. Between tariffs, deportations and the dismantling of environmental laws, the risk of food being expensive or simply unavailable is too great to ignore.

I grew up poor on a family farm in central MN, so we grew a lot of our own food. I learned from my dad and my grandma how to garden, raise livestock, hunt, fish, butcher, make sausage, etc. I still have the skills, and now I have to put them to use again.

Doubling the size of my gardens to 2000 sq ft. My wife and teenage daughter, who aren't really into gardening like me, know they'll have to help out a lot more this year. Lots of basic crops. Peas, spinach, lettuce, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, garlic, corn, beans, tomatoes, banana peppers (they outproduce ANY other pepper in the Midwest), and so much squash. Squash everywhere. I can store piles of winter squash for months in my unheated garage, and in a pinch I can use it for supplemental chicken feed. My basement is unfinished, and I'll be converting the NW corner with a small window into a cold storage room by walling it off, so it stays 50F all winter. I'll also be burying metal trash cans in the backyard, where when filled with straw and covered with bags of leaves, will keep produce like carrots and potatoes insulated and fresh deep into winter. Thankfully I've been planting fruit trees and berry bushes for years now, so I'm set on apples, plums, pears, peaches, apricots and aronias (you can use them like blueberries).

My daughter wants a beehive. I've been hesitant to put one in, because a quarter acre of my property is prairie wildflower and native grass restoration, and honeybees are non-native and compete with native bumblebees for flowers. But now I'm debating, because a steady supply of honey would be nice. A few friends from high school and college have successful hives, so I can pick their brains on Facebook about it.

We needed a new stove right before Christmas, and I convinced my wife to go back to a coil-top model instead of a glass-top. Why? Because you can't pressure can vegetables on a glass-top; the weight of the big canner can crack the glass. A coil top can support it. I already have 50 jars of canned tomatoes, 50 jars of salsa, 50 jars of chili base, 50 jars of applesauce, and 25 jars of pickles in the basement from last summer's harvest. Now that I can pressure can, I'll be adding jarred green beans, sweet corn, carrots, etc.

The chickens are laying eggs at a good pace again now that we're past the dead of winter. I'm getting 6 eggs per day from 14 hens; by summer it will be up to a dozen a day as more sunlight stimulates egg production. My flock is fairly young, and I'll be culling the three oldest girls for soup this spring. A neighbor down the road has a flock of 30+ birds, and I'll be trading fertilized eggs with her this spring to add genetic diversity and prevent inbreeding. I may build a new coop this year, and found some pretty interesting plans for building them out of recycled pallets. At the least, I can put up a smaller coop to sequester the broody mothers with their young chicks away from the other hens and rooster until they're big enough to reintroduce to the flock.

I've been knocking doors to find new hunting land locally so I don't have to drive 3 hr north to my family's land. It's hard to find deer permissions, but turkey, squirrel and rabbit are surprisingly easy to get an OK for. Too many trophy hunters chasing big bucks, but as they say, you can't eat antlers. And with the spread of chronic wasting disease here (a prion disorder like Mad Cow) I'm fine not eating venison anymore. And FYI, a big woodchuck tastes a lot like pork when seasoned up and cooked slow in a crockpot.

And this winter, I've actually managed to get out on the lakes a couple times and snag some nice meaty crappies and bluegills through the ice. I found a lake in the middle of some state land a few miles from me without a dock access, meaning you have to hike a few hundred yards from the nearest road to get to it. But that also means it's virtually unfished, so I have a 200 acre lake almost entirely to myself.

Trump is going to make preppers of us all at this rate.