Category: Blogs

Surviving The Great Reset | Grow Your Own | Get Some Seeds & Seedlings

If you’ve ever heard someone you think of being a nerd, going on about saving or storing seeds, this is probably the moment when you will begin to make some sense of why.

Pretty much every vegetable, fruit or cereal that we eat can only be grown because someone has had the good sense to harvest, store and then distribute their seeds.

You will need seeds to grow whatever vegetables or fruits that you might choose.

Seeds are available online and even in some supermarkets, depending on the time of year. I picked up number of sachets a few days ago in Sainsburys (That’s well-known chain of supermarkets in the UK) and you are likely to find them near the flowers or any gardening things.

Again, its worth having a read up to check what you will be able to grow. Very little that you can grow in the garden will provide a crop year-round, if at all. So the next question will be what, where and how you can grow (or store) so you have something available year-round.

If you are lucky – and especially so at this time of year (spring/early summer), you might happen across seedlings that are vegetable or fruit plants already beginning to grow, on sale by the side of the road, at a garden centre or even in the plants section at your local supermarket. Grab a few if you can, as this is a great way to get a head start – and encourage yourself to get the growing bug – which can be very rewarding once you do!

Afterword – 23 September 2026

Thank you for visiting this piece, which was first published in May 2022 as part of my later book From Here to There Through Now.

With Grow Your Own and the wider question of Food Security becoming ever more important, my work since has led to the publication of a broad range of articles, books, and resources exploring these subjects.

If you have a moment, you will find links to some of those works that are currently available to read on this site below.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Further Reading

If you’ve reached this point and are thinking more seriously about growing your own, food security, or how we can all prepare better for the changes already underway, the following pieces will help you take the next steps. They build on the ideas first explored in this article and expand into what we can grow, how we can plan, and how communities can work together to make sure everyone has access to the food they need.

These resources are listed in the most helpful order – starting with the basics, moving through what’s possible locally, and ending with wider planning and the full portfolio of work available.

Grow Your Own or Home Growing

A practical and encouraging look at why home growing matters and how anyone can get started. If you’re new to all this or just need a nudge to begin, this is the best place to start.

🔗 https://adamtugwell.blog/2025/07/31/grow-your-own-or-home-growing/

Foods We Can Farm, Catch, Harvest and Grow Locally in and Around the UK

Once you’ve got the basics, the next question is what you can realistically grow or source locally. This guide explores the full range of foods that can be produced in and around the UK – essential reading for anyone planning ahead.

🔗 https://adamtugwell.blog/2025/07/18/foods-we-can-farm-catch-harvest-and-grow-locally-in-and-around-the-uk/

Foods We Can Trust: A Blueprint for Food Security and Community Resilience in the UK

This piece takes the conversation further, exploring how communities can build trustworthy, resilient food systems that work for everyone. It’s a blueprint for what secure, localised food networks can look like.

🔗 https://adamtugwell.blog/2025/12/15/foods-we-can-trust-a-blueprint-for-food-security-and-community-resilience-in-the-uk-online-text/

Local Planning for Food Shortages: A Guide to Local Support and Preparedness

A practical guide for individuals, groups and communities who want to be ready for food shortages. It covers local planning, support networks and the steps anyone can take to prepare meaningfully.

🔗 https://adamtugwell.blog/2026/04/28/local-planning-for-food-shortages-a-guide-to-local-support-and-preparedness-full-text/

Adam’s Food and Farming Portfolio: A Guide to Books, Blogs and Solutions

For readers who want to explore the wider body of work on food, farming, resilience and community solutions, this portfolio brings everything together in one place.

🔗 https://adamtugwell.blog/2025/12/18/adams-food-and-farming-portfolio-a-guide-to-books-blogs-and-solutions/

Get Some Seeds and Seedlings 13May22 PDF_Vers1_23Sep26Download

The tragic history of slavery is being used to make living innocents guilty, whilst each and every one of us is enslaved by a systemic crime that exists in real time

We live in a world today, where there is an obsession over the historic wrongs of slavery that were inflicted on people who they are not and who they will never know, by people who are not you or I that we have never known.

Yet what these apologetic obsessives don’t even realise is that an even more oppressive form of slavery exists right now in this day and age. It is the system that we live, breathe, work and exist in, where the politicians and the elites are the masters. Where our belief in the value of money and the value of wealth are serving as our extremely repressive chains.

But when the crash or systemic collapse finally hits us, we have the choice of freedom that ancestors of all races and backgrounds who were physically enslaved in an even less enlightened world than today never had.

We can choose to say no more and take back the power we have given to others to use our own weaknesses against us and learn again to value and have values based on all that we already have.

The introduction of Price controls on foods, goods and services may become essential as this cost-of-living crisis develops. We would be fools to rule out rationing becoming necessary too

Yes, it does feel a bit like being the voice of doom and gloom as I write and produce videos about all the things that are going on and talk about what we can realistically expect as being likely to happen next.

The point is, that if someone like me can see what is happening and what is likely to happen next, the people we have elected as MPs have absolutely no excuse not to do so too.

In fact, our public representatives should be well ahead of the curve in both their horizon scanning and thinking than most.

Regrettably, they are not.

To be fair, the complexity of the growing problems and how each and every one of them interacts with the others is mind bogglingly scary to say the least.

Yet it is the culture of ‘let’s always take the easy option’ that exists, top to bottom within the British Political System, that has made the difficulties that are only just starting for us, significantly worse.

There are many people in this Country today who cannot afford to feed themselves, home themselves, clothe themselves, transport themselves or function normally in any way on the wages or income they have, without debt or benefits – or what is really a subsidy from the Government and therefore everyone else in some way.

Prices of the foods, goods and services that provide the basic essentials for life are spiralling out of control. Living at the standard we are experiencing even today, will soon become unaffordable for most.

Yet the complexities I mentioned above, all come back to just one thing: That the economic system we have today has been developed to benefit the self-interests of the few. That those driving it have continued to push prices up in the pursuit of ever-growing profits for as long as our stupid politicians have printed money and kept handing it out. When instead good politicians would have faced up to reality and dealt with the problems for wider society that have been caused by that same greedy few.

The Covid Pandemic has caused out of touch politicians and greedy business and financial leaders to overplay their hand.

In fact, the inflationary spiral they have created together is now out of reach of any form of control they possess. Indeed, the only actions our politicians have to address the issues are only serving to make the whole problem worse.

Events, or a coming chronology of them – which will have been caused by so many different profit-driven people with influence behaving in the same way, will combine to make basic food unaffordable where it is available. It will be absent from the supermarket and shop shelves where it would otherwise be not.

Food riots, as the system collapses and the old order makes way for a new one that will work for all will settle the mind of many. Especially the politicians that we have for the time that their waning power remains.

Greed, hoarding and any kind of self-driven prioritisation will have to go out of the window.

That will mean supermarket rationing as we experienced during the early Lockdowns. There will be an immediate need for Government to step in and fix prices along the entire food and essential goods supply chain, so that nobody can use this time of crisis to profit off the backs of us all.

Some of the more economically minded will baulk at the idea of any kind of price fixing, price regulation or price controls, because of its non-capitalist and non-market-friendly nature.

But the reality is that the epoch of easy money and making massive profits by exploiting the many to benefit the already bloated few, is now reaching its end.

A new system will emerge that will be fair to all. But it will not resemble anything that we’ve seen or experienced before.

As we walk the pathway to get there, it will be necessary to ensure that what we still have available – which will plenty for all of us without the influence or intervention of ongoing greed – will be made available fairly to all.

Money as we know it is likely to become only one of many different ways to make payment as change takes place. And it is therefore just as likely that rationing of the essentials that are available will also be necessary for everyone.

The times ahead may prove to be painful. But it’s the future which is possible for everyone once the change has been completed that we should look forward to.

The opportunities for a fair and just way of living, where everyone and everything matters are not just a pipe dream. They really exist and are there for us all.

After the pain, we have much happier times in store.

Foods We Can Trust: A Blueprint for Food Security and Community Resilience in the UK |Online Text
Local Planning for Food Shortages: A Guide to Local Support and Preparedness | Full Text
Iran and the Prospect of Food Shortages: Ask the Farmers – Go Local
Grow Your Own or ‘Home Growing’
Foods We Can Farm, Catch, Harvest and Grow Locally in and around the UK
The Basic Living Standard Explained
The Local Economy & Governance System | Online Text
The introduction of Price controls on foods 8Feb22 PDF_Vers2_24Aug26

The Minimum Wage Paradox

The most obvious and apparently most simple way to deal with the Cost-of-Living Crisis is just to put the National Living Wage Rate up, as the Tories have planned for the 2022/23 Tax Year that begins in April.

Most low wage earners will jump at the opportunity to earn 50p an hour more, which works out as £20 extra for a 40-Hour Week and £1000 over the course of the year.

The problem that we now face in this respect alone is that prices of everyday items and energy on their own are likely to swallow up that amount from the pockets of many before the changes have even come into effect.

Whilst a Minimum Wage requirement seems like a very logical rule to have, the rather depressing and counterintuitive flip side of the National Living Wage is that it gives big employers a get out of jail free card when it comes to setting a realistic wage level for frontline roles within their business.

Greedy owners, shareholders and managers – often themselves being paid many times more than their frontline staff – are very happy to use the Minimum Wage benchmark because the Government has set the standard. And it works very well for them because there is an assumed belief that Government control is as far as it goes.

Companies are quite literally using the reference point of the National Living Wage as an excuse not to pay more, when in many cases there is no doubt that they could.

The dilemma is that without the Minimum Wage – as was the case until 1999 – businesses will always pay the lowest paid workers the absolute minimum that they can. They would surely return to this way of employing staff in minimum wage levels were to be scrapped.

Just because employers can get away with anchoring wages around the level of the National Living Wage, it doesn’t follow that they actually should.

Many larger businesses could afford to pay staff more right now by reducing their profits. But as so many of these companies are now shareholder-led, there is an expectation that the bottom line and the dividend payouts will always be prioritised above employees instead.

When the basic wage pays for everything anyone needs without them needing benefits or taking on debt, workers will be happy and jobs that people now avoid will be enthusiastically filled

The Cost-of-Living Crisis that our Politicians and Mainstream Media are now being forced to recognise is a life experience for many that is nothing new.

In fact, it is only because of the current circumstances that the Politicians and the Media have unwittingly encouraged that the situation is now beginning to become acute. The price to survive is starting to touch so many different areas of life, that the establishment can no longer avoid the truth that they find so unpalatable. The consequences of years of self-interest and inaction can no longer be kept out of sight.

Last Friday morning, Interviewers on BBC Breakfast News talked to paid carers and homecare companies struggling to find and provide staff to deliver a service that we may not want to accept that many of us at some point may need daily or perhaps more when we reach later life.

Social Care a political hot potato that is the subject of debate in its own right. But as an industry predominantly led by private profit-making companies, it offers perhaps one of the very best examples of how wage levels for staff in frontline hands-on roles are disproportionately low when considering the purpose that they fulfil.

Indeed, many of those who carry out this work require benefits or what are effective subsidies from the public purse in order that they can both work and survive.

Like many of the roles fulfilled by the people who are now beginning to struggle with the Cost-of-Living Crisis first hand, employed healthcare workers are being paid the Government set ‘National Living Wage’ or Minimum Wage, which from April will be £9.50 an hour, or £380.00 for a 40-Hour working week.

£19,760.00 per year simply isn’t enough for anyone to survive fully independently without support, benefits or going into debt on today’s terms.

There is a very important question that needs to be asked of our politicians: ‘Would you want to do, and would you enjoy doing a difficult and physically demanding job for a whole 40-Hour Week and then go to the shops and realise that food is a luxury that you cannot afford?’

The answer would of course be an unmitigated NO.

Whilst the rather obvious answer we would receive from our current Politicians would be sure to be accompanied by comments about all the benefits that are available to low wage earners to support them, there is another very important question the people ruling this Country should answer all of us too: ‘Why does the situation exist where Taxpayers are topping up millions of wages with benefits so that big and otherwise dysfunctional businesses can profit at levels which in most cases are absolutely obscene, given what they pay their frontline staff?’

Paradoxically, the work and effort that it takes those who are able to achieve wage levels that cover the cost of everything that they need is not something that a great many people really cherish or enjoy.

In fact, the quality of life that simple jobs with fixed hours without excessive travel would offer, would be something that many would choose to take – IF that kind of occupational lifestyle could achieve self-sufficiency with the security that everyone deserves as a minimum to achieve.

Despite what anyone with an interest in maintaining the perverse status and rules that allow all of this to exist will tell you, it is not impossible to change things and create a capitalist-based system where everyone can thrive and enjoy their lives fairly – rather than everything being funneled at the few and being maintained at the cost, expense and pain of everyone else who exists.

It is just a shame that we have a political class that is fixated with its own existence rather than seeing the real ills that society faces as something that can actually be fixed.

Sadly, for us all, in their obsession to maintain their positions, our Politicians have bolted shut the democratic doors.

Right now, there is no way we can get real leaders into Parliament who have the ability, wherewithal and commitment to do everything necessary to make life affordable and fair for all.