Facing a disquieting global economy, rising food costs and spiking gas prices, one Provo woman is helping her neighborhood become more self-sufficient, one square foot at a time.

In January, Madsen began sending 200 of her friends and neighbors elaborate newsletters with in-depth information on how to feed themselves and their families from their gardens. Knowing that few people have vegetable gardens anymore, or the knowledge that would be required to actually live off a family garden, Madsen said she wants to show people who even have only a balcony or a window how to grow at least some of their own food.

"Even if you just plant something on a balcony or in a window, one plant of triple crown blackberries is supposed to give 30 pounds of berries a year," she said. "Wouldn't that be better than a can of freeze-dried berries" from a food storage store?

Madsen is both the perfect person for this job and perhaps the last person one would expect to give survival tips. She and her husband, Duane, who is an investment banker, live in a palatial mansion in north Provo with a manicured lawn and a garage larger than most homes. They also own a large ranch in Mapleton. The couple have raised 10 children, had a 6-acre garden in California before moving to Utah three years ago, and now cultivate a hazelnut orchard in Mapleton along with several thousand raspberry, blackberry, currant and other berry bushes, in addition to keeping several breeds of chickens.

"I really think that I am supposed to help educate my own family," said Madsen, who is a certified master gardener under the Utah State University Extension Service. "We really believed in having children work and having a large garden was a way where every Saturday they could dig holes and build fences and lay ground cover, and it was wonderful."

The couple's children were required to have "an animal kingdom stewardship and a vegetable kingdom stewardship" and as a result, the family not only raised a large garden but kept milking goats, bees, rabbits, lambs and pigs, she said.

The basis of all of this is religious, the couple said.

"When Spencer W. Kimball was prophet [of the LDS Church], he often preached the value of each family having a garden," Madsen wrote in a March newsletter. "At that time, national surveys by gardening industry businesses revealed Utah as close to the top of the entire country for states with the most families gardening vegetables or fruits."

Today, Utah is near the bottom nationally, she wrote.

"We think that President Kimball's advice to be self-sufficient is still valid advice -- to be out of debt and know how to garden and take care of the basic issues of life," Duane Madsen said.

For those with no space to grow a garden, Madsen encourages people to set up a greenhouse with grow lights in their basement or garage.

"In Europe, everybody has a greenhouse," she said. "But in this country if you have a greenhouse you are weird."

She is no purist, preferring to garden in the easiest way possible, she said. At her Provo home the garden is on a drip system with a timer. In newsletter instructions on using a basement greenhouse, she tells her readers to just leave the lights on all the time, as she does, telling her plants "they are living in Alaska where the sun shines all the time throughout the summer."

And there is no need to be intimidated by inexperience.

"You can't just have a gorgeous garden the first year," she said. "You have to have some failures."

She has challenged neighbors in her LDS ward to grow a six-pound tomato, promising that she and her husband will fly the winner to a vacation in Toronto. She has also told her neighbors she will buy vegetable-themed neckties for anyone in her ward who grows a vegetable crop this year. She just wants people to try, she said.

"I'm worried about people in Utah," she said. "Nobody seems to care about food storage."

To Madsen, food storage is not simply hoarding large cans of food, though there is that too. She believes people should have a supply of seeds, and know how to harvest their own seeds for use year after year. In her basement she has a refrigerator filled with a 20-year supply of seeds of every kind. They are organized by type and kept in plastic boxes with silica gel to keep out moisture.

In a recent newsletter, she sent out detailed instructions on how to use and save open-pollinated seeds, which produce true seeds, as opposed to hybrid seeds which need to be purchased every year. She even included packets of seeds for carrots, beans, beets, squash and peas in the newsletter.

"I have made you something!" says the newsletter's outer cover. "A complete survival kit enabling you to thrive and even bless the lives of your friends and family regardless of any possible disaster."

Madsen has a cheerful personality and may not be prone to gloom and doom predictions, but she heartily believes in watching the signs of the times and being prepared. She admits that she was spooked a bit recently when her daughter in Virginia went to buy wheat for food storage and was told that because of shortages she could only buy 100 pounds per family member.

People should pay attention to recent earthquakes and floods and how those affect the supply of and demand for food, she said.

"We have been having so many earthquakes and severe weather," she said. "Whoever thought we'd have salmonella on tomatoes?"

Should some major social disruption -- such as a pandemic virus or a nationwide truckers strike -- occur, Madsen says she simply wants people to be a little more prepared to take care of themselves.

"It would be good to have food storage -- not to mention it is a commandment," she said, referring to President Kimball's teachings.

People should also try growing at least some of their own food just so they will know how different and better it tastes than food in the store that is picked early, stored, packaged, trucked and displayed, she said.

Her first newsletter, sent out in January, focused on Swiss chard because it can be grown indoors in winter, and if treated correctly, can be a long-term producer, she said.

She is now working on her tenth newsletter, which will feature 30 recipes for meals that can be made entirely from food storage cans. And the 11th will focus on "the concept of growing things all winter," she said.