Peter Lewis wrote a post on our Facebook page last week. If you had to set up a new survival garden (assuming you have enough food to keep you going til everything grew) and were only allowed 20 plants or seeds what would they be?

The comments are really interesting. Lewie’s own picks:

• Sweet potatoes for the tubers and leaves
• Pumpkin again for the pumpkins, pumpkin seeds and leaves
• Lemon tree
• A good high yield banana variety that you can cook green or eat ripe
• My green would be a Chinese cabbage or bok choi that can be fried or eaten raw
• A spring onion or chives for everything
• A coffee bush (who’s coming over every morning to swap something, their potatoes, their soul…)
• Turmeric for curries, everything
• Some sort of bean that can be dried for storage
• Probably parsley because it grows so well but it would just pip out coriander or several others
• Ginger
• Chillies
• I’d also be looking at what I can scavenge from the new location, like seaweed if it was near an ocean for the iodine and salt unami
• Tomatoes would have to fight it out with Tamarillos
• Zucchini might win a spot as well as carrots
• Avocados, mangos, and macadamia nuts and lastly olives for oil

Some of the others mentioned were snow peas, green beans, radishes, carrots, mulberries, pasionfruit, spring onions, Gotu kola, Warrigal greens, paw paw, mango, orange, broccoli, cos, yucca, taro, beetroot.

What would your twenty survival must have things be?