If you’re building a survival garden or preparing for a SHTF crisis, you’ll want to focus on crops that are calorie-dense, easy to grow, and reliable. We can never predict the exact moment of an economic collapse or sudden shutdown of the grid and a garden takes several years to build and learn how to keep and maintain.

These are the plants we rely on in our doomsday garden for food security, self-reliance, and peace of mind.

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Jerusalem Artichokes (Sunchokes)

Also called sunchokes, Jerusalem artichokes are one of the best survival foods to grow. You can harvest more calories per acre from this crop than almost any other. Best of all, they’re nearly effortless to maintain.

• How to grow: Plant the tubers in spring, and by summer they’ll reach up to 10 feet tall with sunflower-like blooms.
• Why they’re great for preppers: They’re ideal for small spaces and produce a dependable fall harvest.
• Downside: Like Brussels sprouts, they can cause digestive gas if eaten in large amounts, so introduce them slowly.

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Sweet Potatoes

In some cultures—such as New Guinea—sweet potatoes make up 80% of the daily diet. That tells you just how sustaining they are.

• Why they’re a survival crop: They store well, provide steady calories, and are incredibly versatile in the kitchen.
• Prepper tip: Bake, boil, roast, or steam them to stretch your meals in a crisis.

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Potatoes

Potatoes are the ultimate doomsday garden staple. They provide nearly complete nutrition and thrive in a range of climates.

• Gold & red potatoes cook quickly but spoil faster.
• Russet potatoes are hardy and store well for long-term use.
• Our approach: We plant a mix for short-term eating and long-term storage.

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Berry Bushes & Fruit Trees

Fruit adds valuable nutrients and variety to a prepper diet, and it can get expensive at the store. That’s why planting your own is a smart move.

• Blackberries (thornless): Spread rapidly and produce heavily. Great for trading or preserving.
• Black raspberries: Low-maintenance, thorny but manageable, and incredibly productive with no watering or spraying required.
• Blueberries: My personal favorite, but more challenging. They need acidic soil and consistent watering. While rewarding, they take years to establish, making them more of a long-term investment for your self-sufficiency homestead.

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Other Crops We Grow (But Don’t Rely On in a Crisis)

Not every plant is calorie-dense enough to sustain you during an emergency, but they still have value in a survival garden.

• Tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, kale, herbs – Great for flavor and nutrition, but not filling.
• Squash – A good survival crop if pests don’t destroy it. Using diatomaceous earth, neem oil, or crop rotation can help.
• Swiss chard – My top choice among cultivated leafy greens. Once established, it produces for up to two years and is easy to harvest a little at a time.

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Why These Crops Matter for Survival Gardening

A doomsday garden isn’t about growing everything—it’s about focusing on the plants that will actually keep you alive in an emergency.

• Calorie crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes) = survival foundation.
• Fruit (berries, trees) = nutrient-dense, long-term food security.
• Greens & herbs = flavor, vitamins, and variety.

When planning your prepper garden, prioritize crops that can keep your family fed if grocery stores shut down or prices skyrocket.

Overall Gardening Tips

Another thing we have done in our garden is prepare the soil prior to planting by using compost and leaves. If you don’t already have great topsoil, this will build topsoil easily.

Another hack we’ve discovered is having chickens, ducks, and rabbits makes a garden much easier and more productive. You do, of course, need to take care of the animals too, but you can get eggs and potentially meat if you’re willing from farm animals. Another surprising benefit is the chickens will pick through nearly all the vegetation in one area to prepare it for planting. If you use a movable run, like we do, you can simply move the run – and boom. You have a nearly weed-free area for planting. There might be a few remaining plants they just didn’t like, but these are always easy to pull out since they’ve worked the soil over so well.

Ducks will eat many of the pests in a garden, especially garden slugs. It’s great if you can let them roam the garden area while to pick out a bunch of the slugs. We have found they don’t do as much damage to the crops as one might expect – though it does depend on the plant. They did damage our blueberry bushes, but have left sweet potatoes completley alone.

Finally, rabbits, like chickens, will consume a ton of the weedy vegetation to prepare it for planting season – plus, they will give you amazing fertilizer for your garden in the form of waste. Rabbit poop is considered one of the best fertilizers to use. You can, of course, use the waste from chickens and ducks, but rabbit poop is a bit more nutritionally dense. We use ours mainly on our blueberry bushes because they thrive in fertile soil.

You do not want to use any fresh animal waste on anything you will eat raw and many gardeners have experienced crops “burning” from the waste (we have never experienced it – and we do usually keep a gap between the waste and the plants, so that might be why).

I hope these tips are enough to get you started on your own doomsday garden, no matter how small.

Please leave a comment about your own garden – what you grow, how you do it, successes, failures, etc.