Types of Seeds for Your Survival Crops

When disaster hits, you won’t be able to protect home gardens and buy seeds for the next season. Money- and space-wise, it is also impossible to store away decades’ worth of food and water in a way that covers you in all possible situations.

Knowing more about different seed types and how to use them for indoor gardening may be the single choice to avoid famine for your family and future generations.

GMO Seeds

Genes from other living things are joined together to form a plant that can’t occur in nature. These plants, in turn, make GMO seeds which may or may not sprout.

It is important to note that most survival-oriented food production will rely on hydroponics or other forms of indoor gardening. At the current time, GMO seeds are not produced for these applications.

Therefore, without trial and error, it is impossible to determine if seedlings started from GMO seeds will actually produce crops in an indoor garden.

Heirloom Seeds

These seeds have a proven track record for making the same kind of plant and crops from generation to generation. Some varieties have been handed down for hundreds of years.  Today, all seeds marked as “Heirloom” must be produced from plants that were open-pollinated. They must also be free of GMO and hybrid pollen.

Most survival gardeners feel that heirloom seeds are best for long term crop production. They are also preferred by indoor gardening, vertical container, and hydroponic gardeners.

You should make sure you can successfully germinate the seeds, and then advance them to seedling and crop stages in any setting of interest before trying to grow them out of necessity.

Hybrid Seeds

This type of seed is made when pollen from one strain of plant is used to pollinate the flowers from a different strain. Hybrids make plants with features from both strains, or even completely new traits.  

If you choose compact strains suitable for various levels of humidity, hybrid seeds can be used for hydroponics and indoor gardening.

On the other hand, even if you start working with these seeds now, there is no guarantee that they will germinate and continue to produce plants in the future.

Organic Seeds

Organic seeds are guaranteed to come from plants that were grown using natural methods. While this may include using a number of chemicals and fertilizers, most organic seeds are not treated with synthetic pesticides.

This type of seed is also free of GMO contamination, but may still be a hybrid variety of non-GMO strains.

Other Types of Seeds

As with other types of seeds, you should be able to find suitable seeds for indoor gardening and hydroponics. That said, if you can’t seem to grow plants past the seedling stage, you may need to look at where the seeds come from and determine if you need to make additional adjustments to the growth environment.

When it comes to preparing for complete environmental and social collapse, it is very important to make sure you will have enough food to eat. Rather than simply purchase the first pack of seeds that looks good, it is important to make sure that you know what type of seed you are working with.

It is also very important to successfully grow and harvest several generations of plants in order to make sure that you can achieve the same success in an emergency situation. Needless to say, practicing Aquaponics and indoor gardening methods are just as important as more traditional outdoor forms of growing edible plants. Waiting until your survival is dependent upon their growth is a bad time to find out if you’re any good at alternate growing methods!

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Find out more about growing indoor gardens using Aquaponics in Pocket Farm.

This article has been written by Carmela Tyrell for Survivopedia.

Photo source: 123RF.com.