How much do you produce - growing all of your food

I recently watched a couple of YouTube videos about some people who grow/produce nearly all of their food.

One couple lived near the sea, allowing them to collect salt and fish. In another video, the family was vegetarian but their main focus was on growing grains (wheat), protein (fava beans) and oil (olives) along with the veggies. I think he was in Israel. His garden work was about 24 hours a month.

For many years I've wanted to see how I would do eating only what I can grow or forage, but with frequent garden failures here at my new house, and lacking any real hunting skills, I think I wouldn't last long. Still, I'd like to try it at some point.

I live in Wisconsin, so we have cold winters and no ocean for salt. I realize that I would have to rely on the store for some things - not just salt but coffee (though I suppose I could live without coffee 🙄) and probably a few other odds and ends.

I'm curious how many people here produce almost all of their food. Where do you live (climate) and how much land do you have? How much of your food are you able to produce and how many people are you feeding?

I don't produce all my own food. If it was just me, I would be a lot closer, with my little gardens, chickens, and meat from my fur trapping. I'd still need to purchase a few things (salt, etc) of course, and have an area devoted to chicken food. But, it's not just me, there's a wife and 5 kids with their own food preferences (they're not interested in eating beaver meat, squash, and potatoes all winter, where as I'd be fine with it) to provide for as well.  

It's definitely more of a challenge with children at home. I would only have to feed myself, since my kids are all grown. I'm sure they would think I'm crazy (and who am I to argue?).

I grow a lot of food- about 40 different types of veggies, 40 different types of fruit, about 5 kinds of nuts and about 6 kinds of mushrooms on my 10 acres. But my main food forest garden is about 1/3 of an acre and I also have a large orchard with many outlying fruit and nut trees. I grow a lot of my own food but I certainly don't grow all that I eat.

In the summer and fall- I grow (and forage) about 80% of what I eat and in the spring and winter around 40%. I'm a vegetarian and substitute mushrooms for meat and eggs which helps, but I still eat dairy which I have to buy from the store. I also have to buy grains, cooking oils, condiments, extra potatoes, extra legumes, vinegar, etc. I live in western Oregon and the climate here is excellent for year round veggie gardening and growing mushrooms. I'm in excellent health for my age and I attribute that to my diet and agrarian lifestyle.

I always have a lot of surplus produce  this time of year and after I freeze, dry and can a bunch, I enjoy giving  away a lot of the extra produce to friends, gleaners and the local food banks. I used to be a market gardener and professional wildcrafter, but I'm retired from that now.

I always advocate that everyone with land (or access to it) should try to grow as much food as they can without using chemicals. It's a great way to live and will keep you healthy and happy. Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese farmer and permaculture philosopher,  was a great inspiration for me- check him out. I'm wishing you the best of luck with all your future permaculture projects!

We live south east of San Diego, California in grow zone 10b. This means that I grow food all year round, and we keep chickens, ducks and rabbits, for meat and eggs. I have a 33k square feet food forest garden and a 42k square feet back yard with animal pens and 20 garden beds.
We produce all of the eggs we need. I preserve eggs with either water glassing or freeze drying. So far in 2024 I have grown 1100 pounds of produce. I still have sweet potatoes, cassava, winter squash and a few pumpkins left to harvest. I estimate that I probably have around 300 pounds of winter squash and pumpkins left. As for the cassava and sweet potatoes, I don’t know how much there is yet, since we don’t harvest those until thanksgiving. We don’t get any frost until December. I also still have some melons to harvest, and my amaranth.
I have an indoor nursery where I grow my seedlings, plus keep plants what can’t tolerate frost for the 3 months we get that. Here I have 2 coffee trees, roses, mulberry cutting and  licorice seedlings, and all of my cold season seedling crops. It’s essential for this to work, since it’s too hot for me to start cold season plants outside, and then later too cold to start my warm and hot season crops.
I am growing gluten free grains for the first time this year, and got 20 pounds out of it. Before that I only got the cassava for flour, so I had to buy nuts. The only nut we grow are pecans.
Right now I still have my 3 kids living at home, but the first one are leaving for Oregon university next fall.
Right now we still have to buy some things like dairy and extra meat. We only produce about 25% of the meat we eat. Once the kids have left, it will be plenty for my husband and I. As for essentials, we keep bees for honey and grow sugar beets for sugar. The seeds from my pumpkins, winter squash, flax and sunflowers, are all pressed for oil. I make my own vinegars,  wine and alcohol. I can’t eat dairy, so I buy cashew and almonds for milk. I then make my own yoghurt, kefir and are trying to learn to make cheese with it.
All in all, we grow and preserve all of the vegetables we need, most of our sugar needs are also covered. I am still not very good at making oil, so right now we still buy oil and we will always need to buy or trade for salt.
The food forest has 22 fruit trees, bushes with berries and shrubs. We have access to fresh fruit all year round. Right now those are melons and strawberries.
If you want to see the final tally, it will be posted on my SoCal Homesteading blog here on permies around new years.

Oh my goodness, I wish I could tour both of your gardens! 😍 I'm getting excited for spring now.

I still have to design and put together my food forest. I know where I want it, but right now it's just an overgrown mess. It's been difficult to maintain anything the last two years. Now I'm anxious to clear out some of the overgrowth and get planting areas set up. I have to pretty much do everything alone so it will be slow.

Still, I feel like I will be able to grow a lot here if I can get a good set up and routine. Unfortunately, I can't have goats. I'm considering rabbits again and I may sneak in some chickens as well. 🙂

If I can figure out to grow enough grain/cereal on my small property, and grow beans of some sort, I feel like I can produce a large percentage of my food.

Kathleen Marshall wrote:Oh my goodness, I wish I could tour both of your gardens! 😍 I'm getting excited for spring now.

I still have to design and put together my food forest. I know where I want it, but right now it's just an overgrown mess. It's been difficult to maintain anything the last two years. Now I'm anxious to clear out some of the overgrowth and get planting areas set up. I have to pretty much do everything alone so it will be slow.

Still, I feel like I will be able to grow a lot here if I can get a good set up and routine. Unfortunately, I can't have goats. I'm considering rabbits again and I may sneak in some chickens as well. 🙂

If I can figure out to grow enough grain/cereal on my small property, and grow beans of some sort, I feel like I can produce a large percentage of my food.

I used a computer program called garden planner 2 to design the two gardens. It was a big help.

Oh, I'm going to have to look for that. That looks fantastic!

I think that you would be hard pressed throughout most of the past 400+ years to find many folks who produce 100% of their own food, outside of certain groups (American Indians, some Amish communties, etc). The trick or goal if you will is to be able to produce enough of the things that you do well to provide for yourself and have enough left over to barter with others for the things they do well. Sort of a divison of labor if you will. This situation seems to be one of the steps that most every society goes through as it grows on it's way to industrialization. Some folks run dairy farms well because they are accustomed to that life, where as someone who prefers to garden may have no interest in getting up at 3am to milk cows, but is more than willing to trade their harvests for milk. Some in a community may be best suited to commerce and have the ability to acquire and sell goods not available locally (salt, gunpowder, etc). I think that if the goal is to be more sustainable, and to leave the earth better than the found it, our communities need to get smaller and more well rounded and we need to be thinking about that gallon of milk costing 2 dozen eggs or 10 pounds of apples vs that gallon of milk costing 3 dollars.

Rusty Ford wrote:I think that you would be hard pressed throughout most of the past 400+ years to find many folks who produce 100% of their own food, outside of certain groups (American Indians, some Amish communties, etc). The trick or goal if you will is to be able to produce enough of the things that you do well to provide for yourself and have enough left over to barter with others for the things they do well. Sort of a divison of labor if you will. This situation seems to be one of the steps that most every society goes through as it grows on it's way to industrialization. Some folks run dairy farms well because they are accustomed to that life, where as someone who prefers to garden may have no interest in getting up at 3am to milk cows, but is more than willing to trade their harvests for milk. Some in a community may be best suited to commerce and have the ability to acquire and sell goods not available locally (salt, gunpowder, etc). I think that if the goal is to be more sustainable, and to leave the earth better than the found it, our communities need to get smaller and more well rounded and we need to be thinking about that gallon of milk costing 2 dozen eggs or 10 pounds of apples vs that gallon of milk costing 3 dollars.

That’s our plan. I already barter with others in our community. Like last year, my tomatoes didn’t give us a lot, do to disease and pest problems. Instead I traded 2 half bottles of my cherry chocolate wine for 25 pounds of tomatoes. It’s one of my best wine, that is aged in oak barrels for a year and then aged in bottles for another year. It ends up tasting similar to Port or Sherry. I also traded prickly pear tunas and paddles for plant cuttings. Every year, my neighbors let me take all of their pomegranates in exchange for produce and a bottle of the finished product. Our previous neighbors on the other side, traded their grape fruits for my Triple strength vanilla extract. There are several others, and I hope to build a network for people to trade with. Like you, I think this is the way forward. Like you I am doing sustainable gardening, and work to improve life for not only humans, but for the wild life as well. I have another thread going, where I talk about the conservation work we do, and how we work with our local wildlife.

Kathleen Marshall wrote:Oh, I'm going to have to look for that. That looks fantastic!

It’s a great program. When I get ready to plan the next season of crops, I put a copy of it on my white board. Then I write down a list of what we need to grow, and use it as a guide for where to plant.

Never been able to calculate 'how much'. I grew all my bread grain (corn bread) for this year. Have eaten about 100 pounds of corn as bread or polenta.

From mid-spring through early winter we grow most, but not all veggies. We eat carrots most days, but my harvests are very hit-or-miss with carrots.

Most dinners we count how many veggies are in the meal, and how many we grew ourselves. Ranges from 6 to 13 total different veggies. Most often 7-8 all summer through late fall. Plus one or two bought veggies. But from early December through March very few. Maybe some squash and potatoes. So those months is mostly bought. And all meat/dairy/nuts is bought.

If I had to guess, I grow somewhere around 25% of my total calories. Easily could expand, but my spouse is uninterested in the garden project and would prefer I grew less!

To give a perspective from people who are space limited, this year I grew 3.5 kg of various things (tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi, beets, even some potatoes) on about 3 square meters of my balcony.

It brings me joy and builds my skills. And I get a few very delicious meals out of it.

I have amole space on my 11 acre farm, but I am far away from growing all my food.
There are pests and disease. Unlucky weather. And mistakes.
My advice is to try your best but accept that you will need to buy some part of your food.

The year that I kept track, I managed about 10 kCals per square foot in my back yard, 24,397 kCals total. A nice supplement, but clearly not the full needs of even one person, much less all four of us.

Full details at:

permies.com/p/1321856

I loved that video
webpage

It has convinced me i need to concentrate more on staples and less on veggies.
Luckily i found sunflowers that do well for me and could save the seeds of. I can make a much larger plot of those next year. But that's the only oil i can think of. Through the landrace forum i'm a member of i gathered some great diverse fava beans, runner beans, climbing beans, snow peas etc. And wheat of extraordinary diversity, which sadly most got eaten by birds. But there are many possibilities of grains where i live. And am eyeing birdresistant wheat (beardy). And potatos and corn both sweet and flour are a great thing too. So it should be possible to convert to like say 80-90% self sufficient life style in future.

At the moment i'd say 50% of the food i eat comes from the garden. Which is pretty bad for the amount of work i put into the garden. Like two days a week. But it will come down after some foresee-able changes.

I'm also working on getting neighbors involved, dossing out plants where i can, like rhubarb and cardoon, trees if i can, like plumbs and peach trees. Handing over produce and pots to neighbor ladies who make marmelades and return produce. As the garden becomes more of a food forest there is going to be more food and nuts hopefully.
As the garden becomes more interesting to young people, it might be some 'free' help could become available.

I'm also working on getting neighbors involved, dossing out plants where i can, like rhubarb and cardoon, trees if i can, like plumbs and peach trees..


Hi-  May I ask what you do with the cardoon.  I grow it - it’s beautiful but I find it much too bitter to eat.  Do you have suggestions or recipes?
Thanks in advance!

These days, we've scaled back and only grow perhaps 25-30% of the food we eat.

But -- this is important -- if times get tough we can immediately scale that up to 50-60% with plenty of surplus to barter for things we don't grow. We have the land, seed/tubers, tools, and skills -- plus the network of neighbours and family. It's a nice feeling.

Having been working on being self-sufficient since 2004, I eventually challenged myself to see if I could indeed produce all our own food, one way or the other. First of all, I live in Hawaii. I have 20 + acres to work with. I get 60 to 80 inches of year per year. I’m an easy drive to the ocean. I can hunt locally.

The main  challenges for me that I learned were….
…the need to give up eating certain things.
…being willing to be flexible ..
…establishing a network where foods could be bartered, traded, or sold.  
… willing to work at it. (Those social media types who claim they only work 10-20 hours a month at it are not factoring in the time needed to create their food system in the first place, make repairs, maintain it. Are they really including the time also  needed to harvest and preserve their food? The time maintaining and fixing their tools? The making of fertilizers—-or do they buy it and don’t convert their cash outlay into manhours?

I actually learned that it could be done without too many inconveniences.

I currently produce or trade/barter/sell/hunt for most of our own food. I grow or raise what I can and use the excess to acquire what I don’t grown or raise. I also hunt. But I do indeed make some purchases and eat out at least once a week where I have to pay cash. Roughly 10 meals a month are acquired via trading.

Spices and condiments are purchased. I don’t want to go through life giving up olives, bacon, chocolate, and other treats. And yes, I have some staples in long term storage for emergencies.

I am employed on my farm. No other income. I don't work that hard, I have lots of leisure but need to be here every morning and evening because of the chickens in winter (their water freezes) and watering veghies in summer.
I can produce about 70% of my food. If there were no pests or if I was a more perfect human being or if the weather would play no games, it could be 100%. But there is something every year.
All brassicas eaten as seedlings by a pest 1. Next year, half bolted in the heat and the rest was munched by pest 2. Potato rot. Then tomato rot. Then sudden frosts. You get the idea.
I am planning to increase what I plant. My father said I am living alone but growing food like I were responsible for feeding the army. But the reality is, you lose such a huge portion of what you plant!

At times, I get huge harvests of one thing, and that is not so easy either. For example, we had a good berry harvest and I am the happy owner of 16 gallons of jams. That is a tad more than a single woman needs to tide her over the winter!

Su Ba wrote:
…the need to give up eating certain things.
…being willing to be flexible .

I think that this is key. It's easier to grow a larger portion of your own food if you eat a larger portion of that which is easy to produce in your area/at the particular time of year.

What we are producing now, for a family of 9: all of our milk, cheese, and yoghurt (from 5 goats), plus some surplus to trade. Every year except last year we produced all our potatoes. We find it easy to grow all our leafy greens and garlic. Other vegetables we've been growing some of, and basically just eat seasonally from the garden as much as possible, although we have been bringing in some bulk organic cabbage and carrots for fermenting and root cellaring, we are working to grow all of our own this year.

We currently eat a lot of non-homegrown organic grain, because it’s easy, cheap, and efficient currently for me to just make lots of bread and dish it out when we need to eat, and everyone eats it. I was thinking about how we could rely more on homegrown foods, and growing more potatoes and having these to replace bread is something that would be good to do - so far I have been serving up soups with a side of roast potatoes rather than a side of bread and we’ve enjoyed this. Having a tray of roast potatoes with some homemade cheese melted on top I think would also be a good way to replace a bread meal too. There are two people in my family who don't eat potatoes though, so that makes it trickier.

Small grains grow well here, but I need to figure out a better system for threshing and winnowing it.

Next year we’re planning to have 2 or 3 more does in milk, so will have a bigger surplus of cheese to replace other foods, or to trade. We also recently bought a pregnant sow and some more chickens, but how “homegrown” pork and chicken is depends on whether you are counting where their food comes from - we are working to eventually grow all our own animal feed, but this is going to take time so for now we use a mix of homegrown and bought animal foods.

It's really inspiring to read about what you are all growing and see photos of your beautiful homegrown food!

Kate Downham wrote:

We currently eat a lot of non-homegrown organic grain, because it’s easy, cheap, and efficient currently for me to just make lots of bread and dish it out when we need to eat, and everyone eats it. I was thinking about how we could rely more on homegrown foods, and growing more potatoes and having these to replace bread is something that would be good to do - so far I have been serving up soups with a side of roast potatoes rather than a side of bread and we’ve enjoyed this. Having a tray of roast potatoes with some homemade cheese melted on top I think would also be a good way to replace a bread meal too. There are two people in my family who don't eat potatoes though, so that makes it trickier.

Small grains grow well here, but I need to figure out a better system for threshing and winnowing it.
!

We did our threshing by putting the grains in a bucket, adding a few old laundry balls, and just shake it with the lid on. The winnowing we did by setting up a strong fan, putting the grains on a large sifter and switching between tossing grains up and moving them around with the sifter. It worked great, probably because we only had about 25 pounds to work with.
The grains we did it with was Texacona sorghum and black seed sorghum. We had it all done in about 30 minutes, which I think is a decent time.
As for bread, you can make bread with many different vegetables and fruits. So far I have made about 25 pounds of winter squash flour plus some made from carving pumpkins, and we still have about 150 pounds of both that we need to harvest. I am not using all of it for flour, but probably 2/3 of it. If I did my math right, we will end up with 740 pounds of pumpkins and squash. If I didn’t use the main part of it for baking, we wouldn’t be able to eat it all. Cassava is another root I use for flour and so are sweet potatoes. Regular potatoes btw, works very well in bread making too.
I use powdered beets, when I want to bake some with a nice red color.

Right now we have things here and there that I grow, but my goal is to become more efficient and produce more on our balcony for us.

Ya'll are an inspiration!

I am just starting to pull yields that last longer than just the immediate nibbling. I have found out how to grow onions this year and have produced three gunnysacks worth of varieties to enjoy through the winter. I have a few sprouts here or there, but I am figuring out my storage. Potatoes are another 'easy' crop that has stored well but I need to scale up my production to last the entire winter.

Reflecting on what I have grown compared to what I have saved, I need to focus on mastering different preservation techniques. I have not attempted canning (bath/pressure) yet but have preserved tomato sauce through freezing in canning jars. This is limited by my freezer space so I can only preserve so much.

I'm partially fond of preserving garlic cloves with vinegar in the fridge, I have had them last a long time without any signs of turning. I can't tell the difference between it and fresh when I cook.

When I lived in town 1/4 acre lot coastal BC Canada, zone 8b/9a, 211 growing days I grew all my own fruits & vegetables (approx 2000lbs for vegetables 4-500 of which were just tomatoes, and that included enough for canned/frozen/dried for winter and many sauces/condiments including bbq sauce, salsa, ketchup, etc), eggs (duck), and provided all our own meat mostly from hunting but we did raise meat rabbits. We did not produce our own grains or dairy.

Now we just moved and live in northern-ish Alberta, Canada almost 70 acres. Zone 3a, 120 growing days. It feels limitless what we will be able to produce in time. For the first time ever I even grew nice, pest free potatoes! Haha I don’t know why that matters so much to me, but I’m thrilled about it. The goal is to produce not only for us, but also local food for the community (we did run the saskatoon berry u-pick this year.)

We have chickens and cows, though I don’t plan to add a dairy cow and milk for a few years at least until kids are in school full time. I’d like to add ducks (we have a great pond - no more pools!), turkey , emu (my favorite meat as I remember it when I tried it as a kid and they are just really really cool), sheep, and eventually a couple pigs.

We’ve started mushroom beds and logs (Winecaps, various oysters, and shiitake so far, hoping to at least see winecaps next year.) Hoping to add more types over the years. More strains of shiitake, lions mane, chestnut, more types of oysters. I love growing mushrooms. Probably my second favorite thing after tomatoes, which is funny because when I first started growing tomatoes 16-ish years ago I didn’t even like eating them. I just loved growing them. I like eating them now though.

We have 3 acres of Saskatoon berries and more than enough raspberries. We have maybe 9 crabapples, a couple cherries, one regular apple variety unknown, caragana. I planted another 24 apple trees this year as well as hazelnuts.

Next year I’m adding pears, plums, sour cherries, haskaps, black raspberry, seabuckthorn, goji, currants, Russian olive, hackberry, butternut, give or take to the orchard. I may put off some to the following year. We also have plans to in future years add hops, Arctic kiwi, grapes, Aronia, Nannyberry, apricots, linden, more hazelnuts, sumac, Jostaberry, gooseberry, etc. Not everything will do well here, but I don’t mind since we have so much space I’ll take some risks.

Our forest (approx 30 of our acres mainly poplar and aspen with some birch, spruce and tamarack) produces firewood, wild rose, sarsaparilla, Highbush cranberry, various mushrooms, and much much more.

I don’t think we’ll ever bother getting into grain. Lots of grain farmers around us. If I did it would more just be an experiment in uncommon grains, scythed… but honestly, we have our hands so full I can’t see getting bored enough to try.

I've not really tried, yet, to grow all our food, but I've been steadily over many years been approaching being able to provide complete family nutrition if we should need or choose it.  

We have been on inner-city lots offering only 4500sf of growspace, first continental high desert then coastal sub-tropics, with poor soil, poor & expensive water, insufficient rain + increasing drought/ intermittent inundation, unreliable & volatile growing season/ deep cold winter at first homestead & heavy pest pressure/ bone dry long summer at the other.  The rainy seasons are opposite, & the palette of plants quite different.  

My strategy has been earthworks & rainwater catchment, soil building, perennials first, edible natives/ Subsistence Hedge, adapted fruit/ nut/ berry with annuals under/ among/ between Edible Plantscape, collecting old rare & breeding new specific, some nursery & starts propagation/ cooperative/ CSA operations.  

The first homestead has been in others' care for a decade-long fallow while we developed the second, which we've just returned to find fallow/ prematurely auto-irrigated/ over-grown after the apprentice disappeared during our sabbatical/ worldschooling/ pilgrimage year, when we were exploring our third startup in yet another climate plus possibilities overseas.  

We're happy to be back to our beds & our foods, especially as in our absence we've reached self-sufficiency in biomass, returned to mostly full raintanks (whole year whole site+), once re-wetted have volunteer crops coming up, & are ready to go rainwater only!   The dream is seasonal nomadism, though since leaving first homestead we've not yet found nor been able to foster mutually-supportive community of like-minded folks!

I just want to give you an update with the total amount we have grown in 2024. This is from a 33k square feet forest garden and a 20 bed raised bed garden.
2024 has definitely been a good year for us, even though lack of frost meant no plums or apples, and a hot spell chocked my elderberries into drying all the berries.
We had a fantastic harvest of tomatoes, pumpkins, winter and summer squash, and sweet potatoes. All of it has been grow without chemical fertilizers or organic pesticides. Instead I just removed and discarded sick plants. All of it was also grown as polyculture, which I love. It has also payed off mixing mushroom sparn, into the topsoil, before planting seedlings. While I hope, that I eventually will get mushrooms too, it has already paid off, with larger healthier plants.
In total we have harvested 2206 pounds of produce, herbs, grains, nuts and seeds. It’s equivalent to a metric ton. In calories i passed 560.000 this year. I hope these numbers will improve as the forest garden matures.
I have added a copy of the excel spreadsheet I have used to keep track of it all. My expenses was 300$ a month on water, and 200$ on seeds.

Ulla,

Could you share with me the techniques of growing tomatoes, mushrooms and sweet potatoes?
Also, if you spent $300 per month on water - how much water total have you used in watering season?

Wow!

Especially all that butternut squash!

Well done.

Roughly, assuming a 2000 calorie/day diet, you need 730000 calories per year. That's about the minimum for a decent diet.

Grains give you about 1200 calories/pound, so a minimal, poor-quality diet requires 608 pounds (275 kilos) of grain, or about 11 bushels of corn (if you ate nothing else).

I grew 4+ bushels of corn on 3000 square feet this year, about 430 pounds. That's 268800 calories. About 39% of my yearly minimal needs. We will see if I manage to eat all that corn. I doubt it. I ate about 80 pounds of corn in 2024.

Thom Bri wrote:Roughly, assuming a 2000 calorie/day diet, you need 730000 calories per year. That's about the minimum for a decent diet.

Grains give you about 1200 calories/pound, so a minimal, poor-quality diet requires 608 pounds (275 kilos) of grain, or about 11 bushels of corn (if you ate nothing else).

I grew 4+ bushels of corn on 3000 square feet this year, about 430 pounds. That's 268800 calories. About 39% of my yearly minimal needs. We will see if I manage to eat all that corn. I doubt it. I ate about 80 pounds of corn in 2024.

When you get older, you don’t need as many calories, but yes I am not producing enough yet. Once we start really harvesting avocados, and when our fruit trees, berries and perennials mature, the numbers will go up. They will also go up, once I starts growing/making sugar and oil.
A lot of what I grow are also for our chickens, ducks and rabbits, so it gets turned into eggs and meat. As for eating it all, note that I make a lot of it into flour and or starch for baking, and I have a freeze dryer so some has been put away for leaner years. As for corn, we only grow corn as feed for the birds, since we are two who are allergic to corn.
Feed prices has and are going up, so I grow a lot of feed for the animals, and some for the wildlife.

Timothy Norton wrote:Wow!

Especially all that butternut squash!

Well done.

The butternut squash was purely luck. I had to buy nearly all of my spring and summer starters, because I got sepsis in January (my fourth time), and it usually takes about a year to get completely over it. Since we got them from a local nursery I have no idea what kind they were. It was the same with one of the melons. Best melons we have ver had, and I can’t find out what it was. I asked our nursery, and they said they don’t keep the information. That said, any kind of pumpkin, squash and the likes, love that part of the garden. During monsoons the rain washes through our chicken pen and end up there. The only thing I do, is to put all of them in gopher netting (the soft kind), so rats and gophers don’t eat them.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:Ulla,

Could you share with me the techniques of growing tomatoes, mushrooms and sweet potatoes?
Also, if you spent $300 per month on water - how much water total have you used in watering season?

We live on the edge of crest national park, which is part desert (zone 10b) That lets us grow food all year round, but also in need of a lot of water, so on an annual basis we probably spend about $3k on water. We are actually in the middle of planning water harvesting, but can’t agree what method will work best. It’s our biggest expense. Water has and will always be very expensive in California.
So Tomatoes. I start determinate tomatoes indoors in March and plant those in raised beds. I also grow some semi determinant and indeterminate tomatoes starts, and those gets planted in the forest garden. The plan is for them to self seed eventually, so I don’t have to replant every year.
Mushrooms are new for me. It’s the first time I am attempting to grow them. There is a great video series about it here on permies, and north spore also have a lot of good videos about growing mushrooms inside and outside. I am using two methods that northspore recommends for beginners. The first is winecap mushrooms using a lasagna method of wood chips, sparn and straw. The second is their grow together method, where you mix grain sparn into your topsoil before you plant your vegetables. I planted 3 types of oyster mushrooms for that. It improves soil quality so you get larger, healthier plants. So far I haven’t seen any mushrooms, but I can see the mycelium spreading out nicely. I hope we will get some in early spring.
As for sweet potatoes. We have two 4 feet tall raised beds. In February I take 3 sweet potatoes and lay them down on potting soil, so they are halfway covered. I will add a picture so you can see. I don’t harvest the slips until they have set roots, which they will do if you start them in soil instead of water. Once ready I transplant them into pots and let them grow until the soil temperature reach 60F. Then I plant them all. I do add some potassium phosphate first though, plus compost with rabbit manure. Then it’s just a question of giving them plenty of water. At this time, any potatoes left in the bed from the previous year will have started to grow too, and those sweet potatoes get very large. We usually harvest in December. Then I add more rabbit manure and compost, and plant beets, parsnips, carrots and other root vegetables.

Thank you Ulla.
Do you use shading for all your vegetables?
Could you tell me in approximation what amount of water $300 produces in your area?
I will try to plant sweet potatoes using your method.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:Thank you Ulla.
Do you use shading for all your vegetables?
Could you tell me in approximation what amount of water $300 produces in your area?
I will try to plant sweet potatoes using your method.

I don’t know how much water we use for the sweet potato bed, but it’s a large bed. We mostly use drip irrigation with a few micro sprays too. My husband says that we use 11 GPH with 5 pr bed. I suck at math, so I don’t know how much. They do need a lot though.
As for shade, I only use shade over my herb beds. The rest usually don’t need it. I might have to add some shade for our coffee plants and raspberries next year, but I haven’t decided yet.
I do use cut straw for mulch around the plants, to prevent evaporation and weeds. The straw mulch also protects the plant roots from overheating.

Thank you again Ulla.
It looks like your climate is very different than mine in the foothills where growing vegetables and fruit bushes requires way too much effort - the sun and hot wind scorches them, no matter how much water or mulch I use, but fruits do well - especially these that enjoy 1000 chill hours that I have.

Ulla, I'm also curious about your sweet potatoes. You make your slips in the raised beds but then plant in the ground is that correct? I saw on your list that you harvested 418 Lb containing 176,396 calories.  How large was your planting area only, not counting the area covered by the sprawling vines?

I harvested 75 Lb this season in an area of approximately 50 sq ft for about 1.5 LB per sq ft, but I grow them in pots to protect from voles and to make harvesting easier.  They are one of the two highest calorie producers in my garden, the other being peanuts, but I don't get that good of a return from the peanuts.  

My other very high calorie crop is pecans, and walnuts, but I let the squirrels take most of them. They of course eat a lot, but they also plant a lot.  

I figure I produced just under 1/2 a million calories this year, counting the nuts which is way, way short of what the two of us need. Too bad most other vegetables and fruits just don't have all that many calories.

Mark Reed wrote:Ulla, I'm also curious about your sweet potatoes. You make your slips in the raised beds but then plant in the ground is that correct? I saw on your list that you harvested 418 Lb containing 176,396 calories.  How large was your planting area only, not counting the area covered by the sprawling vines?

I harvested 75 Lb this season in an area of approximately 50 sq ft for about 1.5 LB per sq ft, but I grow them in pots to protect from voles and to make harvesting easier.  They are one of the two highest calorie producers in my garden, the other being peanuts, but I don't get that good of a return from the peanuts.  

My other very high calorie crop is pecans, and walnuts, but I let the squirrels take most of them. They of course eat a lot, but they also plant a lot.  

I figure I produced just under 1/2 a million calories this year, counting the nuts which is way, way short of what the two of us need. Too bad most other vegetables and fruits just don't have all that many calories.

We live in grow zone 10b, so we grow food in our beds non stop. 90% of the annuals I grow get started indoors in a shower converted to plant nursery. I start my sweet potatoes laying down in soil. It does not have to be a planter, it can be any box where they can lay down in moist soil. After a while they start to produce slips. At this stage most would pick them off the potato and put them in water to produce roots. I don’t do that. Instead I wait until the slips has produced roots, which can happen because the potatoes are half buried in soil. Once they are long and have produced roots, I remove them from the potato and transplant them in pots. They then grow in pots it’s warm enough to transplant them outside. Then I use about a week to harden them off before I plant them in one of our tall raised beds. These two beds are 4’ wide, 6’ long and 4’ high/deep. So the surface planting area is 24 square feet. What increases my yield is that it’s 4 feet deep. It means that the production area is 96 cubic feet.
Since we grow a lot of sweet potatoes, I usually leave any that’s smaller than a carrot, in the bed. There they go dormant until things start to heat up. Then some of those will start to grow and produce as well, so that I get sweet potatoes both from the new slips and from the potatoes I left in the bed. This method also insures that my sweet potatoes have a very long growing season. I start them indoors in the beginning of February, transplant in April or March, depending of the weather, and if my cold season crops are ready to harvest.  Then I harvest in December. This gives them 9- 10 months to grow big.
I have two gardens. One is a raised bed garden with 20 beds, the other is a food forest garden. I usually don’t grow sweet potatoes in the forest garden, unless I have leftover slips. This year we also planted slips in one of our 1’ tall raised beds. They are 4’ wide, 8’ long and 1’ tall. In that bed we only got 40 pounds, so having a really tall bed make a big difference. This means that if you grow in the ground, you have to dig deep, to loosen the soil, before you transplant.

I start my sweet potato slips in trays of wet sand in an unheated cold frame in early to mid-May depending on the weather. I pluck the slips off when they are five or six inches long and plant immediately. I don't worry if they have roots or not, I just keep them well watered for a few days and they take right off.

I've wondered about productivity of sweet potatoes in warm climates as they are technically perennial. Here the bulk of growth is June to mid-September. This year June and early July were weirdly cool and cloudy, so they were slow to take off good, but I got a pretty good harvest despite that. They of course don't survive winter only growing in that three to four-month window but still, they are one of the easiest and most productive crops I've ever grown.  

Have you grown peanuts? They also like a long warm season. I've never seen such numerous and large nitrogen nodules on any other plant, so they are great for that too.