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Growing your own food for the (inevitable) invasion of walking dead

Everyone knows better than to go to the grocery store during the zombie apocalypse. Between the lineups at each cash register as everybody tries to stock up on canned goods and the odds that at least one person is infected with the zombie virus, it just isn’t worth it. But you need food to survive the zombie apocalypse as you hide in your basement and wait for things to blow over. So what can you do instead?

Well, you could try to grow your own.

Contributing editors Charlie Ryrie and Anne Halpin have put together a handy book on the subject of gardening, titled Back to Basics: Traditional Garden Wisdom. With a focus on creating a natural and self-sustaining green space, it is split into six parts that each focus on a different aspect of creating and maintaining a garden.

There are four sections that you’ll want to keep in mind while growing a garden that will keep you fed throughout the zombie apocalypse.

“Before You Start” is a section that centres on the planning that happens before building a functional garden. It stresses working with what you already have in your backyard and offers tips on how to make the most of the space. This section also teaches you how to organize your garden and outlines the practical tasks each gardener has to do throughout the winter, spring, summer and fall.

The chapter titled “Down to Earth” moves away from long-term planning and assessment, delving into the more physical side of gardening by looking at how to cut out flower beds from an existing lawn, sowing seeds and landscaping the area. The part concerning how to build gates, fences and boundaries could easily be adapted to keep the undead from invading your garden.

The book also details how to keep your soil healthy and correct nutrient deficiencies to keep plants healthy. A section on growing and storing vegetables, herbs and fruit as well as another section concerning how best to care for your garden gives you a fighting chance against starvation in the event of a zombie outbreak.

Almost all of the instructions and tips found in this book are accompanied by illustrations that are clearly laid out and easy to decipher. These illustrations strengthen the text rather than take away from it, visually explaining the instructions.

Lists of plants and other vegetation can also be found at intervals throughout the text. These lists often contain the top plants for certain conditions, such as “20 Great Low-Maintenance Perennials” or “20 Great Plants for Dry Soil.”

The information found in Traditional Garden Wisdom contains all the tips and tricks to create and maintain a sustainable garden that will get you through the zombie apocalypse, with a bit of luck. Just make sure that there aren’t any zombies hiding in the hedges before you venture out there to water your plants.

ksaretsky@cjournal.ca