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my experience was with squash/zucchini the second year they were the rock hard inedible miniature pumpkins/squash things they sell as Halloween decorations

heirloom is the way to go, sounds awesome

Yesss, that's what I'm talking about... something to know about anything in the squash/melon/cucumber family is that unless you isolate them completely from others, if you start out with heirloom, the following year you'll have hybrids. One year I had some kind of melon/zucchini hybrid... 

Those little pumpkins probably would have made good winter squashes,  though!

i am not too well prepared, my adaptability and pack lite camping experience is about all i got going at the moment, i am too busy dealing with the disaster of the day to get ahead
my limited supplies (my small stash of gold and silver guns and ammo, camping gear are spread all over three states)
if i had a few bucks i would do this http://www.survivalseedbank.com/ it looks like a good idea, keeps well and gives you new seed each year something garden store seeds no longer do...

I just looked at that website, and it's just another marketing scheme...

It's been very difficult to acquire high quality, open pollinated seeds lately.

Bullshit, if anything high-germination-rate heirloom seeds are more available now than they've been in 50 years. Fuck, I get three or four catalogs every winter that specialize in organic, high-quality heirloom seed, the nurseries all have started stocking several lines of heirloom, and even the big seed companies like Burpee, Lilly Miller, and Lake Valley have jumped on the heirloom bandwagon. Plus, for anyone who internets, there are quite a few heirloom seed exchanges.

So don't believe the hype, and don't get suckered into spending that kind of money on readily-available seed you can buy from dozens, if not hundreds, of other sources!

http://www.halcyon.com/tmend/links.htm

http://www.southernexposure.com/index.html
http://www.territorialseed.com/
http://www.burpee.com/category/vegetables/heirloom+vegetables.do
http://www.heirloomseeds.com/


http://www.seedsavers.org/
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/exchind/
http://www.seedswaps.com/

Etc etc.

[Better learn to harvest and dry seeds for next year,]

befriend any local survivalists that you can now.  they will have large stashes of equipment, ammo, and comestibles for you to use, and if you get in good now, they won't expect it when you shoot them in the back later. 

Survivalists are ALWAYS expecting that.

Better, develop some leadership skills, convince your neighbors to pool resources, barricade your neighborhood, and take turns patrolling the perimeter in small, armed packs. Learn to garden so you can convince them to let you cultivate their back yards. Better learn to harvest and dry seeds for next year, or you're fucked.

wont work with most store bought seeds see my above post. 

That's part of learning to garden.

Actually, it does work with most store-bought seeds, it's just that since almost all store-bought seeds are hybrids, the resulting offspring will more closely resemble the grandparent strains, which may or may not be a good thing. Also, next year's squash may be lulzy if you plant multiple varieties of cucurbit, it's always a crapshoot with squash! 


Most of my garden is heirloom these days, and some of the squash, tomatoes, and spinach has a pedigree that dates to my first house which I bought 11 years ago this spring.

befriend any local survivalists that you can now.  they will have large stashes of equipment, ammo, and comestibles for you to use, and if you get in good now, they won't expect it when you shoot them in the back later. 

Survivalists are ALWAYS expecting that.

Better, develop some leadership skills, convince your neighbors to pool resources, barricade your neighborhood, and take turns patrolling the perimeter in small, armed packs. Learn to garden so you can convince them to let you cultivate their back yards. Better learn to harvest and dry seeds for next year, or you're fucked.

A suggestion is to build a stash of barter goods that are inexpensive now, but will be incredibly valuable and necessary in a future where there are no Wal-Marts.

A few ideas:

Liquor - cheap vodka can also be used to make tinctures and sterilize wounds. I pick up a sale half-gallon once or twice a month to stash in the basement.

Salt - big bags of rock salt are perfect.

Refined sugar - people bitch about it now, but when it's hard to come by it will be worth more than gold.

Band-aids

Antibiotic ointment

Aspirin

Razors

Knives

White gas

Lanterns

Oil lamps

Candles

Paraffin Wax (needed for canning when all of the disposable lids are gone)

Candlewicks (cheaper than candles, and can be used in primitive oil lamps fueled with simple fat)

Flour (tricky because it doesn't keep that well and is susceptible to mold and vermin, but will be in high demand)

Duct tape

Resealable glass bottles and jars

Cheesecloth

Nails & screws

Matches & lighters

Basic hand tools

Metal screening material (for making drying racks)

Zip-loc baggies (for distributing your salt and sugar)

Needles and thread

Corncob pipes

Tobacco


Also, develop some barterable skills. For instance, learn how to make a decent oil lamp out of a tin can, some wire, and a wick. Learn to identify local medicinal plants, and how to administer them. Learn how to make tinctures and salves.

My friend says that if she has any money left over after her bathroom remodel, she'll buy us both wood stoves. Cross your fingers for us, guys; we need to be ready when the zombies come.

Also, LOLCram!

 

That was awesome. The ending TOTALLY made the story.

And I want my taint licked.

You'll have to ask your wife how she feels about that.

IMO what the government should have done is identified at-risk homeowners and bought out their loans, dropping the interest rate to something like 3%, rolling back payments into the loan, and giving each homeowner a 3 month payment respite to help them catch up. If they'd timed this to take place around October or November, the stupid growth-based economic system would probably have seen a strong Christmas season, staving off the inevitable eventual collapse for a few more years. It even would have benefited the banking industry by taking their highest-risk loans off their hands.

I actually really like it, up until the "fuck 'em all" part. Because, IMO, the family and friends are the only thing that makes any of this shit WORTH holding onto or surviving for.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "Oh dear, you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?" At first, Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while, he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.

I love those books.

People like to talk, they really like making noises with their mouths. They talk talk talk all the fucking time, rarely saying anything of interest of value EVEN TO THEM, just fucking reading labels out loud or narrating the events around them "the dog is looking at me, oh man now he's going up the stairs, bye dog! I'm going to have a cup of coffee. There's a bird outside the window, oh nope he flew away. The sun is out today. Haha this bottle of syrup is funny! I think I'll read the ingredients..." on and on and on FOR NO FUCKING REASON other than that perhaps if they stop FUCKING TALKING their brains might switch on and they might have a moment of wondering what the hell all this is about, anyway, and what they're doing with their lives besides being another cog in the machine. Maybe if they stop talking the universe starts pressing in on them and they begin to become aware of how tiny, how meaningless, how insignificant, and above all how lonely they are.

Worse yet, their chatter infringes on any thinking anyone else might do, as well as triggering routine responses to complete fucking inane prattle that needn't have been said in the first place, more inane prattle, back and forth endlessly forever until they plunk their stupid vapid asses in front of some stupid fucking mind-wasting TV program, which they can then TALK ABOUT later.

Talking, talking, talking. I wish I could cut their fucking stupid tongues out of their hollow heads, but then you know what would happen; they would grunt and wave their arms around all the time, just to make a noise and get you to look at them, not caring that nobody understands. That's basically the same thing they're doing now.

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

If you try to tell them that you're not big on talking, that you like quiet, that you like being left alone, that you need peace so you can think, 99% of the time the fucking retard population that we call "humanity" will switch into autopilot and interpret that as the one possibility they're capable of understanding; that you need to be cheered up. So they amp up the painfully boring vapid narrative by trying to make it clever and funny, until you actually ARE in a bad mood and start fantasizing about hitting them with a hammer, over and over again, until there is only blood and pulp and fragments of bone. Because that's the only way you can make them stop. Even if you tell them, listen asshole, SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE, I HATE YOUR STUPID CHATTER, they will slink away all wounded for a couple of days, complain to all their friends about what a bastard you are, and then come back and try to make up. And as soon as you grant them any attention, any hint that you might not be about to punch them in their moronic flapping mouths, a smile or a bit of conversation or even just a moment of eye contact, they start again, talking talking without saying anything at all.

SHUT

THE

FUCK

UP

Stop talking.

Stop talking about some goddamn TV show

Stop talking about your cat

Stop talking about the weather

about what you're eating

what you see out the window

whatever

Stop... just stop.



OR KILL ME.

/b/ reminds me a lot of Apple Talk.  Everyone complains about it, but nobody ever stops going there.

I  think that you see that because in order to complain about it, you HAVE to be going there, or you wouldn't know what you were complaining about.