I have been very inspired by the resilient gardener in my garden journey so far. While i am only a year in to the learning process, i am hoping to get to the point in the next few years where i am growing all the potatoes, squash, corn, and beans that me and my husband will consume in a year.
I have also been experimenting with wheat, rye, and barley. I am hoping that i can also potentially get to the point where i dont buy flour, but will have to wait and see if i can get to that scale.
I am curious what everyone else is able to grow to fully supply their family for a year? What region are you in, what are the crops that you have been able to achieve that with, how much garden space do you need for a years supply of that crop (and how many people does that provide for? Similarly, what strategies do you use for preserving a years supply? If you are able to grow years worth of tomatoes, are you canning it as sauce or are you reducing labor and canning whole tomatoes? What other ways do you preserve the tomatoes?
I am interested in particular varieties as well, as i have been excited by my experience with dry peas this summer. They did well, are easy to preserve since they are already dry, and i foresee us eating them frequently. I have yet to determine how much space i would need to provide enough to eat for a year.
My goal is similar. I just started at this location this year, so I am very far from my goal.
If I may make a suggestion, plant one or two crops and plant as much as you think you’ll need for the year. Then test it by using your storage exclusively for the next year. I’m pretty sure you’ll find you need more than you planned for. Or you may have more, in which case you have one crop nailed and you’re a little ahead for the following year.
There are guidelines out there about how much to plant. Victory Gardens has a pretty good one, I believe.
Wheat was an interesting test. Understand that it wasn’t anything formal, just throwing the seed out, and a lot was probably eaten by birds. I got about 2-3 quarts of wheat from a 10x10 foot area. Kamut was the easiest to grow and thresh. I did them all as winter wheat.
Family of 2.5 here. The only things that I have produced clearly more than I need for a year is potatoes and winter squash. A 4x40’ bed of garlic grow very nearly enough for replanting and a year’s use. 6x50’ of field corn isn’t even close to enough – maybe triple that would be if I got my soil a little better. I think I have figured out beans well enough that next year I’ll grow all I need for a year. I grow enough tomatoes for our fresh-tomato needs – mostly sliced onto sandwiches or eaten out of hand as fruit, but we’ve only canned ~three gallons of marinara and two of salsa, neither of which keep us through the winter. Even on a good year, I don’t produce enough chiles. I might have grown enough basil last year if I’d been more careful with preserving it in pesto or as dry flakes, but we mostly just gorged in the summer and went without in the winter (I grow a little fresh all winter in an Aerogarden too). Growing enough brassica leaf for a year’s worth of kraut/kimchi is clearly doable, but I haven’t actually done it yet, same for turnip and daikon. I keep playing with small grains but haven’t gotten serious about it and haven’t really succeeded. We make do with the raspberries we grow and in the next couple years, I expect to have enough apple growing, and a few years after that a wild surplus.
I have similar goals but suspect that the township lot I can rent (and am technically limited to one, though others have somehow gotten two…) isn’t really enough space for it. I read Resilient Gardener too and am higely inspired by it. Right now I am reading her other book, The Tao of gardening (thanks @UnicornEmily for the tip on that book!) And I know when paging through it I saw a rundown/estimation of how much you might need to grow to last a year. I will try to find it and post it here!
I have a 600 sq ft lot in zone 6b, eastern PA
This year I tried to do seed increases for corn, and cornfield beans and trial some squash varieties. Somw have succumbed to the intense squash bug pressure, one squash I saw to day was literally grey with squash bug nymphs… hoping it will make it, it was a Nanticoke landrace so somehow has survived in this general area for hundreds of years.
Similar goals here too. There are two of us and ignoring drought years -
Leafy greens: all we need as we don’t freeze solid over winter. We want to widen the species list.
Winter squash: all we need. We haven’t yet tried drying any.
Beans (dry): all we need. We grow both common and runner beans.
That’s it for full coverage.
We are working to improve our growing of potatoes but we aren’t there yet.
Root vegetables we are working on to increase what we grow are beetroot, carrot, parsnip, turnip, swede.
We’d like other pulses too such as dried peas, cowpeas, chickpeas but they are secondary for the moment.
Tomatoes: we’re a long way from a year’s worth of tomatoes.
Grains: we’re at the dabbling stage, trying to find those that are easy to thresh by hand. Corn is an obvious one and we’re developing a polenta corn landrace. We have a hulless barley that is very easy to thresh but we don’t use much barley so it’s not a priority. In wheat we’ve only tried khorasan and it looks promising. We have a sorghum that’s easy to thresh but like barley it isn’t high on the list. Of course, all these grains are of interest for chicken food.
We also have lots of fruit and nut trees planted out but they take time to come on line. We seem to get plenty of apples and plums and could preserve more but don’t. The almonds have only just started producing but late frosts play havoc with nut set. Hazels are just at the stage where they might start producing. Walnuts, heartnuts, pecans, chestnuts are all a long way off.
We haven’t really assessed how much space we need for all this. That too is a work in progress.
Edit: Forgot to mention eggs and meat. We have plenty of eggs. Meat is not something we currently produce. Possibilities are beef, pork, chicken, duck. If I had a gun and was a decent shot we could have hare and rabbit as there are plenty of both. Also a number of farmers in the region are happy for you to hunt feral goats and deer.
I have about 1/10th of an acre of growing space, and I plan to grow a LOT of different species in a food forest polyculture. Here are my thoughts specifically about staple crops for my family.
Fruits: Apples. They do extremely well here, and everybody in my family loves them and rarely gets tired of them. Plus they store well. I want to have a lot of different varieties that mature at different times, and I particularly want late-hanging apples and ones with really long shelf lives, so we can enjoy these year-round.
Proteins: Legumes. Peas and fava beans in winter. Common beans, tepary beans, cowpeas, and peanuts in summer. (Eventually, I may be interested in a laying flock of quail.)
Starches: Potatoes would be perfect based on what my family likes to eat, but they don’t grow well here. Squashes would be perfect based on what grows well here, but I’m the only one in my family who likes them. This one is a challenge. Perhaps the solution for the rest of my family may be . . .
Grains: Winter annual grains do great here.
Vegetables that are high in fiber: Brassica oleracea for me. I hope to grow it year-round. Jerusalem artichokes for all of us in winter. This is a headscratcher for the rest of my family in summer. Maybe “just eat more fruit while it’s in season in summer” is the solution for them.
I would starve to death if I depended on my garden to sustain me. If I grew nothing but proven sweet potatoes and trade some of those for other groceries, I probably could feed one person for a year. My lot is a half acre. I haven’t measured my beds in a while. I figure it’s about average size for a southern backyard garden.
I plan to do a lot of future reading on how the pioneers survived. I have a feeling pulling a 150 pound deer out of the woods regularly had more to do with survival than a row of lettuce.
The highest density society pre-industrialisation was east Asia, where they still had 0.3 acres of double cropped rice per person. Much of the regions protein came from the sea. There is a wonderful book called “Farmers for Forty Centuries” that outlines how these farming systems worked before they were replaced. I did a review of it recently on my old wordpress version of my blog- Book Review- Farmers for Forty Centuries by F. H. King (1911) – Zero Input Agriculture
I’m not able to, yet, and I think about it a lot. I’ve been an animal person most of my life, but I tried and failed (ended 2 years ago) to grow my protein by feeding potatoes to my laying ducks. I ended up feeding them mostly grain, so I decided that my current situation to be even 75% self sufficient I would have to be mostly plant based/vegan.
I ate a ton of potatoes, squash, flour corn, tomatoes, greens, and dry beans (bought beans until I get my big bean harvest in this year). But I ended up with low energy, was anemic, gained weight, and the biggest problem–I kept waking up in the middle of the night really hungry and generally had blood sugar issues. Too many carbs for me. I introduced some meat back into my diet, cut all the carbs and I feel back to normal.
This really stinks because I LOVE potatoes, squash, and corn so much and I thought they were the solution to the bulk of my calories It will be hard for me just to taste as many squash as I need to continue working on my 5 squash breeding projects lol.
I’m growing a ton of beans this year and making a big effort to learn how to eat them daily (I do not love eating beans, yet) and will trade squash for animal products with neighbors/friends. Lengthy learning process for me for sure.
This book is very cool, originally recommended by Anna
I share my time between the city and the homestead, which sometimes makes things difficult. Despite of that, I grow enough potatoes, squash and garlic for our family needs. We make jars of canned veggies and fruits in amount bigger than we manage to eat. From early spring until late autumn we have full supply of leafy greens. We have more than enough zucchinis in season for a dozen of people. Right now we have tomato glut. On top of that a little of everything - corn, beans, yacon, onions, favas, tomatillos, carrots, you name it. Also, on top of that own honey and fish from a pond. We have decided not to use freezer, so that limits our ability to store food for winter. In the city, on a small terrace, I grow in containers enough hot peppers to make a very hot sauce for few dozens of people. I also grow my own herbs for culinary and medicinal use. I am in an equivalent of Zone 6b.
I could be mistaken, but people whose ancestors predominantly come from NW Europe probably ate more meat than people whose ancestors come from warmer climates. The rationale is a cave man in colder climates killed more animals in the winter for food. There were not as many edible plants in winter conditions than those people enjoyed who lived closer to the equator.
On another note, I saw a beautiful cow the other day on a trailer probably being hauled to its final destination. I felt bad for it. But that’s just because modern living makes me soft. The reason why cow meat tastes so good and keeps me full, regulates my blood sugar, keeps me healthy, and all those great things is because that’s the kind of food that I am adapted to eating.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean about meat. I have tried eating a vegetarian diet before (because it was cheaper). I was careful to eat complete plant proteins. I was eating loads of cheese and eggs, too. Yet, for the entire two month period, I was weak, exhausted, and constantly sick. I slept sixteen hours a day. Ten minutes of walking would exhaust me. I lived this way for two months. My body never adjusted to it. I took multivitamins and protein supplements. No effect.
I tried adding in chicken. It didn’t help. I ate a cheeseburger one day. I immediately felt healthy and full of energy. This was astonishing after two months of being frail and weak.
This was the start of my realization that I have to eat beef every day, or else I get sick. Is it anemia? I don’t know. That seems like a pretty strong candidate. All I know is that it has to be beef, lamb, or buffalo (all of which work equally well, and beef is cheapest), and I have to eat at least half a pound every day. When I’m pregnant or breastfeeding or donating blood, it has to be at least a pound a day.
That’s a lot of meat! And that’s a lot of food I can’t grow! That really, really, really concerns me. In an emergency situation where we need to grow food, I’m going to need to be physically fit so that I can work outside to grow food. And that seems to require a lot of meat. Not only meat, but beef, which I definitely cannot grow in my back yard.
I found out, much later, that being an obligate carnivore is fairly common for people whose ancestors grew up in a place where not many plants grew, so they ate mostly meat. Most of my ancestors come from Scotland, which was such a place. I have also learned that people with O negative blood types are often obligate carnivores because of anemia. And then I read in Carol Deppe’s Resilient Gardener that she seems to be an obligate carnivore because she needs animal-based omega-3s. There’s a lot of strong evidence that obligate carnivory in humans can exist, and I have a lot of strong experimental evidence that I am a human who’s an obligate carnivore.
This is difficult for me. It would be so much more convenient if I could grow all my food! It would be so much easier if I could live off beans and squash and fruit! But I really don’t think I can. If I try, I won’t have the energy to even harvest those crops, much less plant them or water them.
For now, my solution is to make my food storage mostly canned beef. Almost all of my food storage is now beef, with some other protein sources like cheese. I started out trying to have a balance of everything, including lots of vegetables and grains, but you know what? I can grow those. I cannot grow the meat. In a long-term emergency, I want to have as much beef food storage as possible, and I can get plants from my garden or from foraging.
It’s not a perfect solution. “I’ll stockpile what I need” is not sustainable indefinitely. But it can last for awhile, maybe enough to find a source of local meat (venison? local farmers?) that I can trade for.
I would love to be self-sufficient. But as Carol Deppe points out, self-sufficiency is not a realistic goal: community sufficiency is better. Rather than trying to figure out how to take care of all of my needs for myself, I should be trying to figure out how to take care as many as I can, and how to have a surplus of those things to share. Hopefully, everyone will do the same thing, including those with access to different resources, and everyone will be taken care of.
I don’t own a gun or know how to hunt. A lot of people in my area do. It’s entirely possible that my growing extra staple crops will be of value to them.
I enjoyed your summary of the book. I am convinced it’s worth my time. I downloaded the book. I now have about 20 books in the pending list.
Also, I’ve noticed some cow farts towards capitalism. I would r commend books by Harry Browne, Robert Ringer and Aynn Rand. These have been very influential to me. Although capitalism is responsible for many negatives, the fact that both of my kids survived being born, my wife is still alive after giving birth to them, the fact that our biggest issue is keeping the weight off, not starving to death, etc. I owe all of these modern and wimpy problems to capitalism. I am fortunate we are not like those farmers described in your summary of the book.
You mentioned venison. Is it beef, or red meat that you need? Wild meat and rabbits are possible sources.
I know I am anemic (vitamin b anemia) and I am a fativore (to make up a word). I need high amounts of animal fats, whether that’s butter, cheese, lard, etc. NOT hydrogenated oils or crisco. Real fat.
My sister went vegan on us and she’s in and out of the hospital. She is just all-around sick, and I think it’s her diet.
Pork and chicken are ok, but I also do better with beef. I wonder how I’d do with sheep or goat? I don’t have the O blood type, but my ancestors are primarily from Northern europe.
Beef, lamb, and buffalo all work equally well. So it’s very likely it’s red meat.
Pig meat doesn’t work at all. I have a strong intolerance to it: it makes me sick.
I’ve never tried rabbit, squirrel, or venison, but those are all things I’d like to try, because it seems likely they would work, too. Same goes for things like guinea pigs, etc. It would be nice to find something small, like guinea pigs or rabbits, that I could maybe raise for meat on my own, though I strongly suspect I would struggle to have enough space to maintain those, too. Especially if I wanted to be self-sufficient in meat, given how high my meat needs are.
I’ve also never tried goat or mutton, and I’d like to.
Rather intriguingly, chicken hearts may work, even though chicken in general doesn’t. Which may strongly imply that the thing I need is highly bioavailable iron (perhaps because my body can’t absorb iron well from anything other than meat). I believe chicken hearts work less well than beef / lamb / buffalo, but they do work, so maybe organ meats from poultry may be helpful.
That could be a potential thing to keep in mind in an emergency situation: if nobody else wants the organ meats left over from a batch of chickens from a poultry farmer, maybe I should ask for the organ meats? Could be a good idea to keep in mind as something I might trade for.
I think it would be a good idea for everyone who wants to be self-sufficient to:
a) Try eating only what they can grow / hunt / raise / forage for themselves for a long enough period of time to evaluate how well that works for them.
b) Make sure to choose a timeframe long enough that you’re getting a stable long-term response from your body, not just an initial reaction. (Detoxing can be really unpleasant short-term and wonderful long-term. Nutritional deficiencies can be fine short-term and dangerous long-term.)
c) Be open to the idea that their body may say, “No, this really will not work for me.” Don’t try to make the data fit your hopes. Try to evaluate the data objectively. You need the truth, not just encouragement.
If the data support your hopes, that is awesome!
If they don’t, start thinking in terms of usable Plan Bs and Cs and so forth. Test out whatever you can.
On the subject of obligate carnivory – whole can of worms, but it probably is a really important discussion, given how important it is to the food security of people whose bodies exhibit it.
I recommend reading this book:
The author is a medical doctor who also has a PhD in nutrition. It’s an unusual combination, and a valuable one.
In one chapter, she says frankly that veganism is “thinly disguised starvation.” I was . . . honestly rather shocked! Her evidence was extremely strong, though. In retrospect, since she is a doctor in the British Isles, and her patients therefore probably mostly had ancestors who ate a strong meat-based diet, this makes perfect sense. If she had been practicing in a country where most of her patients had ancestors who ate entirely or mostly plants, she probably would have seen evidence that indicated the reverse.
I am starting to think that looking at what most of your ancestors have eaten in the past three thousand years or so is probably wise. More likely than not, that is what your body needs.
I do great with dairy. I can live without it, but I digest it well and it makes me feel great. I don’t think I’m an obligate dairy-eater (is there a word for that?), but it works very well for me.
My husband actively and strongly craves dairy if he doesn’t get it every day. He doesn’t seem to need meat, but he probably does need large quantities of dairy. When you look at his ancestors, they came from a part of the world where milk / cheese / yoghurt was a huge part of their diet all the time, so no surprise!
I love eggs, but I don’t crave them or miss them very much when I don’t have them. And sometimes when I eat them, they don’t digest well. When you look at my Scottish ancestors, they didn’t raise poultry, which meant they didn’t have eggs, either. My body likes cheese much better. Usually if I want eggs to digest well, and not give me rotten-egg burps for the next 24 hours, I need to eat them with cheese or with beef.
It’s been ten years since I read the GAPS Diet book, so take my memory with a grain of salt, but there was something that author said that stood out to me because it was so stunning.
She said she works at a clinic for helping anorexics recover. She has a theory that schizophrenia and anorexia are almost the same thing: anorexics literally do see hallucinations (they think they are fat, when they are actually starving). So she started feeding anorexics the same diet that she had found helped schizophrenics recover their sanity. It did all the same things for anorexics, too! At the core of this diet was bone broth, closely followed by fats from grass-fed animals.
She said this was the pattern she kept seeing over and over again with patients who were sent to her with anorexia nervosa:
They were healthy teenage girls. They decided to become vegetarian or vegan because they felt sorry for animals. Within a year, they became anorexic.
It was the author’s theory that their brains were no longer working properly (and thus they started to become prone to hallucinations about being fat) because they were not getting nutrition that they needed for proper brain functioning in their diets. I believe she may have theorized that mental health deterioration from veganism could take a lot of other forms too; anorexics were simply the ones she worked the most with.
I am absolutely certain this is not universal. I am absolutely certain that people whose ancestors have eaten nothing but plants for thousands of years can eat a vegan diet and be healthy. And more power to them!
I think we would all be wise to see what our personal ancestors ate, and be open to the idea, even if we don’t like it, that that very well may be what our bodies need.
To enter myself as another datum, my ancestry (to whatever extent modern commercial genetic testing [I use myheritage.com] and family yarns are accurate) is about equally divided between the British Isles and the Nordic countries and I’ve never met a food that didn’t work for me (except maybe coffee to which I’m mildly allergic or chemically sensitive or something). When I ate meat, I did fine. When I stopped eating meat 32 years ago, I continued to do fine. I digest dairy fine. I have none of the normal food (or drug) allergies.
It occurs to me that I eat a lot of fermented food – I’ve read people assert a causal link between that and all kinds of health marvels that I doubt, but food processing in the gut could be linked. (Though, I guess before about 20 years ago it was limited to yogurt, cheese, cider, and sourdough bread.)
It will be hard for me just to taste as many squash as I need to continue working on my 5 squash breeding projects lol.