Fuel costs more than it did last spring, and so does everything that rides on a truck to get to you. What if the ground you already own covered some of that, with work you’d be doing on a Saturday anyway?
A packet of seed runs you a couple of dollars. That same seed, in the right crop, brings real money at the market this year, and it’s the kind of thing people will trade for when the shelves go bare. Garlic and herbs also turn plain beans into something you actually want to eat, which counts for more than folks think when every meal starts looking the same.
That part is easy enough to picture. What nobody asks before they plant is what happens to that crop when the dollar goes soft. Plenty of things sell beautifully at a July market and turn worthless the week the trucks stop running and nobody’s buying extras.
So the crops worth your ground are the ones that pay you today and still feed you when the shelves are bare. Every crop below has to pass both tests. It needs to bring in money now, and it needs to be something you’re glad is in the ground if things go sideways.
10. Cordyceps
This is the mushroom that turns a corner of your basement into real money. Dried cordyceps from American growers runs $30 to $40 an ounce, while oyster mushrooms bring eight to sixteen dollars a pound.
The price makes sense, because it’s one of the most potent and nutritious mushrooms out there. Cordyceps makes cordycepin, the compound every supplement company wants, and the wild Himalayan kind has gone for thirty-five thousand dollars a pound.
The American species grows east of the Rockies, coming up as small orange clubs on damp forest floor in late summer. It comes up on the forest floor in late summer as small orange clubs, and it’s been simmered into a tonic tea for stamina for centuries. Sauteed in butter with garlic it goes mild and nutty next to a steak.
The mushroom hides well in the leaf litter, though, so here is where to find and how to use cordyceps without walking past it.
It doesn’t grow everywhere, though, so if your woods come up empty, get this cordyceps tincture instead. It’s made the spagyric way, which pulls out the minerals most tinctures leave behind in the spent mushroom. Take it when your lungs feel heavy after a dusty day of work, or when you’ve got wood to haul from sunup to dark.
9. Hardneck Garlic Varieties
Garlic is almost impossible to mess up, but the grocery-store bulbs aren’t the ones that make you money. You want hardneck kinds like Rocambole, Porcelain and Purple Stripe, along with Music, German Extra Hardy, Chesnok Red and Spanish Roja. Local, chemical-free garlic often sells for three to five times what the imported stuff goes for, and the scapes in late spring bring their own money in.
The price comes down to how it’s grown. Hardneck doesn’t ship or store like the cheap imported softneck, so grocery chains skip it. Anybody who wants real flavor has to buy it from a grower. You also plant it from cloves instead of seed, which means a third of your harvest goes right back in the ground every fall instead of into the cash box.
Cured hardneck keeps six to nine months in a cool, dry spot with no canning and no electricity. It’s also been a home remedy for generations, so a braid in the pantry is food and medicine both.
In those old remedies, garlic was always matched with another synergistic ingredient. One example is the 2-ingredient garlic syrup for sore throat that holds in the fridge for months.
Nevertheless, how you cure gourmet garlic decides everything, and most of what you read online is just hanging it in a shed and hoping. This old curing method beats brining and freezing, because the cloves stay firm instead of going papery by Christmas.
8. American Ginseng
Nothing else on your land pays like a dry pound of ginseng root. Good wild-simulated ginseng sells for upwards of $800 a pound, and buyers take everything growers bring them.
It grows across the eastern half of the country, from Wisconsin down through the Appalachians into Georgia. Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee lead the wild harvest, and the plant wants north-facing slopes under mature hardwoods. You plant it the “wild-simulated” way, scattering seed in the woods and mostly leaving it alone after that. The catch is patience, since a good root takes eight to ten years to size up.
Being honest about it, ginseng leans harder on a working economy than anything else here, since you need a buyer with real money in his pocket. So think about how much of your ground goes to cash crops before you commit a whole shaded slope to a root that won’t feed anybody.
One word of caution before you dig, though. Ginseng is protected, and most states set a harvest season and their own rules for selling it.
7. Ramps
Every April, chefs from Brooklyn to Chicago fight over a wild onion that grows in Appalachian woods. Ramps bring $15 to $20 a pound at farmers markets, and buyers outside Appalachia pay up to $40 during their short season.
They want the same shaded hardwood slopes ginseng does, and most growers plant bulbs instead of slow seed. Large bulbs give you a harvest in two to three years. After that, the plants split underground and spread on their own, and even deer leave them alone.
Better yet, ramps come up before almost anything else in spring, right when the pantry runs low. You can cut one leaf per plant and leave the bulb, so the patch keeps feeding you for years.
Be careful the first time you pick, though. Poisonous lily of the valley grows in the same woods with similar leaves, so tear one first and make sure it smells like garlic.
6. Potato Varieties
Fingerlings and colored varieties like Purple Majesty and French Fingerling sell at a real premium, because shoppers can’t find them in stores. Seed potatoes move well too, since gardeners buy them every single spring.
What puts potatoes on this list is calories per square foot. No other crop here comes close, and a hundred square feet of good ground can run well over a hundred pounds in a season.
Storing them right is where most folks lose half the crop by February.
Potatoes need the humidity and the steady cold that only a proper cellar gives them, and the 3 mistakes that rot a winter crop come down to how the space is built rather than what you put inside it.
They store through winter with no canning and no power at all, and you replant from your own tubers. Grow the premium kinds for the money if you like, just put a few rows of plain storage potatoes in alongside them.
5. Culinary and Medicinal Herbs
Basil, cilantro and dill are the big sellers, and you can cut them again and again from the same plant. Think about those tiny plastic clamshells at the store, because you can undercut that price and still make a good markup. Live potted herbs sell well too, and restaurants burn through basil faster than anything.
Medicinal herbs are where this turns into something else. Yarrow, calendula and echinacea grow like weeds, and they’re the first things people come looking for when the pharmacy shelves empty out.
You don’t have to wait for spring to get them started, either. Calendula and chamomile sprout in about a week on a sunny windowsill, so you can grow a medicinal garden indoors by February and set the plants outside the week the ground thaws. Keep in mind that echinacea needs a month in a damp paper towel in the fridge before it wakes up.
Most herb beds stop at basil and parsley, and that’s a lot of good ground doing very little for you. So thuis winter you should turn your herb garden into a medicinal heaven and the same square footage starts covering fevers, wounds and winter coughs. Click here to see how.
4. Heirloom Tomatoes
Heirloom seed breeds true, so you save it from your best fruit and plant the same tomato next spring for free. A hybrid gives you nothing worth replanting, which leaves you tied to a seed company that may not be shipping anything at all.
In South America, where tomatoes come from, the plants live for years, and it’s only our frost that kills them off. People used to carry their best plant through the winter instead of starting over. They ripen weeks ahead of your neighbor’s seedlings.
Getting more fruit off the same plants has nothing to do with fertilizer, either. Double your heirloom tomato harvest with this old method and you’ll be picking into October.
3. Elderberry Plant
Elderberry is a shrub you plant once and harvest for years, and it asks very little of you once it’s settled in. Demand took off with all the interest in immune syrups, and cooperatives like the Midwest Elderberry Cooperative buy from small growers in volume.
Turn the berries into fermented elderberry syrup yourself and you keep a lot more of the money. A 12-ounce bottle is around $28, and half a gallon goes for around fifty. The price holds because barely 2 percent of the elderberry sold in this country is actually grown here, so anything American-grown gets a premium before you open your mouth.
So, learn how to make fermented elderberry juice before your first real harvest comes in, because the jars hold far longer in a cellar than cooked syrup does.
The berries do more than syrup, though. When your throat feels raw at night, elderberry gummies that melt in your mouth go down easier than a spoonful of anything, and the honey in them calms that dry cough. It’s an amazing recipe for kids and adults alike.
2. Pink Ginger
A pound of baby ginger brings $16 to $20 at a farmers market, while the mature stuff sits at $4 to $6. Growers up in northern New York pull that kind of money out of a single high tunnel every season.
You grow it in containers or a high tunnel and pull it in one season before the frost. It’s tender, pink-tipped, doesn’t even need peeling, and market shoppers go a little crazy for it because they’ve never seen it that fresh.
Ginger has a long history as a home remedy for an upset stomach, which matters more than its market price. Stomach trouble is one of the most common problems in any crisis, especially when water quality drops.
Grated into hot water with honey, it makes the tea people have sipped for nausea for centuries. Past that one, there are 5 doctor-approved baby ginger remedies that you must try, including one that warms your hands and feet after a freezing day outside.
There’s also a trick to getting a real harvest out of a northern season, and it starts weeks before anything goes in the ground. Do THIS to your ginger before you plant it and you’ll pull rhizomes two to three times bigger than you’d get otherwise.
1. Winter Squash and Pumpkins
Heirloom types like Long Island Cheese and Musquee de Provence sell for real money at fall markets, and roadside pumpkin sales in October bring in cash from people who drive past anyway. The seeds sell too, since gardeners want varieties they can’t get at the hardware store.
A Hubbard or a butternut sits on a shelf in a cool room for four to six months with no canning and no attention. The vines sprawl across ground you’d otherwise be mowing, and the seeds come out of your own fruit.
Those vines take up a lot of room, though, and good sunny garden space is the one thing you can’t make more of. Find out why you should plant squash under a tree and you’ll free up your best beds for the crops that really need the sun.
So when you cut one open, don’t throw out what you scoop from the middle. The 5 amazing uses of pumpkin seeds turn the part you’d normally toss in the compost into something worth keeping.
The Best Way to Get Started
You don’t need all of these. Pick one or two that fit your land, your climate and the buyers near you, then start small. Find out who’s buying before you plant, because if you can’t sell it, all you’ve grown is work.
Run the other test too. If the stores stayed shut for six months, would you still be glad this crop was in the ground? Garlic, potatoes, squash, tomatoes and herbs all pass that easily.
Whatever you decide to put in, the plants you already have growing wild on your land are worth knowing just as well. There’s a weed coming up right now where your grass is thinnest, and chewed up and pressed on a sliver, it pulls the splinter out without a sewing needle. Hundreds of plants across this country work like that, and most of us walk past them every single day.
Remember this book? Well, right now it’s 78% off for Ask a Prepper readers, and the offer runs until Black Friday. Grab your copy here before the price goes back up.
It walks you through the plants growing across the United States, how to harvest them at the right time and how to store them so they keep their strength for years. The remedies come next, and plenty of them are the kind of old kitchen recipes people made because they tasted good, not just because they worked.
Here’s some of what you’ll be able to do with it:
- Identify the wild plants on your own property, including the ones growing in the corners you never walk
- Dry, store and preserve your harvest so a jar you put up this fall is still worth opening three years from now
- Make syrups, salves and tinctures from plants you didn’t pay a cent for
- Cook the old-time recipes that feed you and soothe you at the same time, the ones that came out of grandmothers’ kitchens rather than a pharmacy
- Make your own apothecary from herbs around your home
The Ground Is Already Paid For
Rich doesn’t always mean a pile of cash in the bank. A few hundred dollars a week off a shelf of microgreens pays the truck insurance, and a winter’s worth of garlic sold at four dollars a bulb covers the property taxes most folks dread every fall.
So put one crop in this season and see what it brings you, then add a second next year. The money is real while the dollar still works, and the food is still there in the ground the day it doesn’t.
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