There is a war coming. Some say it is here already. It will affect the nation much like other wars. Prices will rise and there will be shortages. The increased costs will encompass essentials, fuel and food in particular. Inevitably, the wealthier will be better placed to preserve their lifestyle and quality of life. Black markets will prosper: there are many opportunities in times of war. Ultimately though, even the Black Market might stop supplying asparagus in January. Imagine.
It is not clear that we can rely on the Government to make the right decisions to help us, the governed, get through this crisis. That might be true of all governments, but our current one has too many ideological blind spots to be functional in this time of need. They are well-rehearsed by others and not the concern of this article. I will observe only that this is not the time for re-wilding farmland or allowing allotment sites to be sold for housing developments.
If we, as a nation are to survive this, we need to be as self-sufficient as possible. Instruct your gardener to dig up your lawns and plant potatoes. No gardener? Embrace gardening – its physical and psychological benefits are unmatched. As your physical and mental health is improved by gardening, so will your resilience grow. No lawn? Not a problem: potatoes can be grown in a plastic sack on a balcony. Exotic vegetables such as chillies, sweet peppers and aubergines make attractive house plants on a sunny windowsill and even thrive outside in a good summer. Herbs are one of the most expensive comestibles by weight, yet are easily grown in pots, inside or out. Survival needs to be psychological as well as physical and preserving the normal as far as possible will be essential. The smell and taste of fresh herbs will enliven even the dullest pumpkin stew. We will need to learn to love our pumpkins.
Over the Easter weekend I cooked the last pumpkin of 2025. It was a 9lb beauty of a ‘Tonda Padana’, one of 37 squashes and pumpkins which I harvested in October from nine plants which I grew in three beds, each of which is 8’x5’. Each bed also homed three tomato plants, which fruited well and remained blight-free in the hot summer. The trick with gardening, like so much of life, is diversity. Not only is it important to grow a range of crops as a good year for beetroot might be a bad year for beans, but to grow different varieties of each crop. Typically, I grow three types of courgette. If the summer is on the cooler side, then the ‘Nero di Milano’ from northern Italy will crop better than the ‘Lungo Bianco’ from Sicily. If the summer is hot and dry like 2025, the reverse will be true. The point is, there will be a crop of something. Which means there will be food on the table.
Which brings me back to the ‘Tonda Padana’. The first courgette of the year is a day of excitement, a red-letter day. By the end of the season, I am glad to see the last of them. They are not something I want to eat through the winter. The squashes and pumpkins have fed me for six months: pumpkin soup, pumpkin gnocchi, pumpkin stew, pumpkin and chickpea curry, pumpkin stuffed with pumpkin on a velouté of pumpkin. It’s a nutritious vegetable and a good source of Vitamins A and C, and the ever so fashionable fibre. Pair it with chickpeas and rice and the primary protein is covered. My short list testifies to my lack of imagination not its versatility. Much as I’ve enjoyed them, I’m glad to have eaten the last of them until the autumn.
My windowsills are carpeted with seedlings. Tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, cucumbers, melons, basil, coriander and parsley. And the all-important squashes and pumpkins which will store through the winter and keep me fed, war or not. It’s a tiny investment of money and time which brings me great pleasure in the growing, harvesting and eating. It connects me with a natural cycle of germination, growth and fruitfulness which is a re-assuring constant in a time of increasing uncertainty. It also gives me a sense of agency: prices may rise and the fresh produce supply become disrupted, but this is something I can do for myself. It just takes a little work.
Phil Robinson has been a professional gardener for 25 years. Once upon a time, he edited The Faber Book of Gardens. He has also published fiction and philosophy.
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“The wealthier will be better off”! Let’s rewrite that as those who work hard and save will be better off”. On average this has been true for most of history. And those who are lazy and stupid will suffer! And good people look after their own family rather expect the state do that! Anyway the indigenous people are not the priority. The illegal immigrants will continue to live in comfort in their taxpayer funded 4 star hotels with priority access to the NHS!
And the UK is getting less self sufficient every year as we cover farmland is PV panels and ram the country with more and more houses for immigrants.
Small garden, but I’ve started growing some veg and fruit in large pots. I’m furious that nothing seems to deter something from eating my cucumber plants.
Yes, I saw this coming and have taken up hydroponics. Also stocked up with tinned food and long lasting grub. Larder is now full and I have enough to last about a year plus the hydroponic stuff. So at least I won’t be contributing to the mad rush to the shops.
Dont forget bog paper and bottled water.
I made this decision 20 years ago.
We grow spuds, onions, peas, sweetcorn, salads, asparagus, cucumber, courgettes.
Soft fruits include blueberry, raspberry, blackberry, blackcurrant, strawberry.
Trees are 5 of apple, 3 of pears and a plum tree.
We also have hazelnuts but the squirrels beat me to them every year.
My advice is start now. Grow what you eat, fail often, fail better.
Check out Charles Dowdings YouTube channel on no dig gardening.
Sorry, what? War? Against whom?
Good question. I’ve no idea. We do have a vegetable patch in the garden but it is just a hobby, and we pick wild berries and apples from the garden which Mrs ToF makes jam from. But we are not thinking about a war.
This is the latest desperate scaremongering from the European political classless, echoed by the UK/Euro media. They have tried to beak Russia after it stopped their plans for regime change (by inflicting a “strategic defeat”), and placing missile bases (NATO) along Russia’s 1000 km border with Ukraine.
Even in their propagandised minds, where they believe their own lies about the origins of the war, they realise Russia is a slow moving juggernaut, which unlike America’s “shock and awe” approach (see Iran) delivers irreversible gains, and they are now encircling the last major conurbation in Donbass – Sklovyansk-Kramatorsk.
So seeing their plans collapsing, seeing the United States walking away from failed “Project Ukraine”, they’re bigging up the “threat” to all Europe by a victorious Russia, some saying war with Russia is inevitable, with Germany especially (who? yes GERMANY again) vowing massive re-armament, and considering conscription.
Thankfully this is just as fanciful as their fantasies to date. In contrast to Russia, their industrial production capacity is weak, and armament production especially has fizzled out. Germany’s leader Merz is even more unpopular than Starmer, but don’t underestimate the delusions of our Eurotrash.
In the cold war days governments had or arranged for others to run large scale food stores. Some were chilled while others were for dry goods. I suspect the Blair-Cameron-Clegg governments closed them all down.
In rural areas rustling is already a problem which seems not to fall within the police priorities list. Trying to grow more in times of shortage would lead to much more theft, not just at allotments.
May I also point out the article omitted the ingredients for ethnic dishes required for alternative ethnic people. Clearly, therefore, the article is racist.
The UK Cold War preparations, while well intentioned, were never actually likely to make a difference unless you were in a regional seat of government or under Bath in central government hq… the rest of us were to perish, which would probably be preferable to surviving tbh…
and you were correct – all disposed of post 1990 collapse of the Berlin Wall… the ‘end’ of the Cold War… the first one at least.
Yes, butter mountains, wine lakes and milk something or other… not sure that many of the ‘ethnic’ herbs and spices grow well in our climate though?
Perhaps, if they get a hankering for them, learning to build coracles might be a skill worth developing?
The author wrote, “ The squashes and pumpkins have fed me for six months: pumpkin soup, pumpkin gnocchi, pumpkin stew, pumpkin and chickpea curry, pumpkin stuffed with pumpkin on a velouté of pumpkin.”
Sounds awful. It reminded me of Monty Python Spam Song … but for vegans like the author: Veg-veg-veg-veg. Veg-veg-veg-veg. Lovely Veg, Wonderful Veg!”
I once asked an old friend and his wife why they sold their nice house and garden in the suburbs to move into a big city condominium with fantastic views, indoor swimming pools & saunas, when they would have been better able to survive any collapse of society by growing their own food, as the author suggests, while city dwellers would be starving. My friends replied that if the big cities collapse, the city dwellers will just go out into the countryside to hunt down “preppers”, take their house and all their carefully stored food away from them, and probably kill them in the process. So my friends had decided to just enjoy a downsized life in the city while they still could.
Not if you’ve got a shotgun and a backhoe… 😉
Already some allotment growers are experiencing raiders. How to defend your patch? Is that something for Starmer’s Home Guard?
The future allotment raiders will declare your patch to be a brownfield site, ripe for development. We will not be allowed to be self-sufficient in the new world order.
Or, more likely, ideal for solar panels?
Incidentally, I’ve read today that there is, apparently, a shortage of sand, due to the need for silicon in the panels… tbh, that seems unlikely, but I guess it must be ‘special’ sands, perhaps?
Yet more sad evidence of the destruction of the once “High-Trust Societies” of the West. You can be sure the allotment thieves are not Indigenous Brits.
An elderly lady once described how she could walk from one end of Bristol to the other in the WW2 blackouts and never be harassed or assaulted by men, who were, on the contrary, very protective of women. Despite the bombs, she felt safe among her own countrymen. Now women cannot even walk down their own street safely at night. Or even in broad daylight.
The phrase “own countrymen” doing most of the heavy lifting there…
Already doing it. However, I will never grow courgettes; they are the devil’s vegetable!
Why?
Watery tasteless things. I was given ratatouille out of a tin when I was a child. Yuk! I dint think I’ve ever got over it 🤣🤣
love em, now peas they are grim
Everyone has something they can’t abide… often as a result of being force-fed as a child.
My neighbour cannot stand the humble sprout, entirely down to her father who would make her sit there all night to finish, and serve them for breakfast the next morning if she didn’t.
I agree except for petit pois
Get hens.
Eggs are nature’s wonder food.
Red mites, sods to get rid of.
They truly are
Great source protein and so cheap