Mary Cook

I see this is an old post but...
First of all, I DO have to do all my food growing on one acre, and I live in zone 6 (West Virginia). My leasehold is probably 10 to 12 acres bur my land, like that of everyone else I know around here, is 90% steep wooded hillside. I have a one-acre clearing on the ridge.
Second I'm in strong agreement with the several people who questioned the obsession with calories. Yes, you need a certain amount of calories but you also need protein, fat, vitamins and some trace elements. Cindy Conner's book Grow a Sustainable Diet goes into this--and she's in VA, maybe zone 7.
i grow about half the food for my two person household, and I don't use the whole acre--I have a main garden that is 40 X 65 feet, and flat space for growing corn and sorghum and rotations of tomatoes (the only part that gets tilled) that is about 25 X 50 feet, and another plot with six more 12 foot beds (the main garden has 24 of these). In addition I have a chicken coop and an orchard, some persimmon trees--some wild and some grafted. The surrounding woods supply firewood and the shade is good for one crop--mushrooms.
I consider the most important staple crops to be potatoes, because they're full of nutrients (including calories), easy to store, and can be cooked so many ways. Sweet potatoes are also high calorie and very easy to store. Tomatoes are important for us, we eat a lot of spaghetti and pizza. The chickens are close to a must. I also grow onions and garlic and other alliums; hot and sweet peppers; bok choy and kale; dent corn mostly for the chickens; pole beans and sometimes dry beans; cowpeas; strawberries; lettuce, spinach and radishes; sugar snap and snowpeas; summer and winter squash; celery; swiss chard; sunflowers, for the chickens, plus I grow a few herbs and allow some wildflowers to remain in the garden (I also have a flowerbed). I have blackberries and raspberries at one end of the flat plot. I have a few apples and pears and peach trees, and have had problems with squirrels stealing the fruit. I've had no success with any kind of nuts except peanuts--I expect if I did get a crop the squirrels would take them. I also have two goumis in the orchard, partly for nitrogen fixing. Wild birds take some but my chickens don't see that interested. I use them for syrup.

Two comments. I'd add to the Household Goods category, share occasionally used items with friends, neighbors or family (every household doesn't need it's own rototiller, truck, washing machine, lawnmower,or chickens).
And on the overall question, or statement, that many people taking small steps is better than a few trying to go to zero waste, I don't see this as a choice; seems to me the way it works is that people take a few small steps, perhaps after seeing friends or a neighbor taking them; then when they see that wasn't so hard, and they saved money, they take another step. The person going (close to) zero waste has probably been on this path a long time.

Dave--I question a couple of things you said. Your conditions are no doubt different--I'm in WV, zone 6, clay soil. But here are my two points: you can start your slips when they sprout in January, but you need warm temps to set the plants out. They languish if the air and soil is just above freezing. These days I wind up potting up the first slips I get, which gives them a nice head start when I can plant them outside; and if it's warm enough I can plants the ones still rooting in water as well but they take longer to get moving. Someone said sweet potatoes take the first month to establish roots, the second month to make vines and leaves, and may start on the tubers in the third month, which seems more or less true to me. I sometimes find that slips I started with the sprouted end of the sweet potato suspended in water, then pricked off the starts and put a bundle of them in water to make or extend their roots, after a couple of months may turn yellow or purple and stop making more leaves. Adding fish emulsion just makes it worse, somehow. But potting them in decent soil  cheers them up, and then when it's warm enough to plant they don't dither a whole month before growing their vines.
The other thing is you said tuber formation depends on cool temperatures and not days. I question this because of this year's experience.  We had an extended drought which reduced my potato harvest a lot but the sweet potatoes did pretty much normally, harvested before frost in October. But I had three plants from a very late planting after I failed to give away the last three slips I'd started--might have been early July. I dug them just before the first killing frost which was very late this year--mid November. I found one tiny tuber. I expect they failed to produce because they didn't get enough days, went in too late. Maybe it's a combination of cooling soil temps and # of days.

Mostly I want to respond to Liz Smith who posted this thread on the Dailyish--I don't know where she lives, but--are you sure you can't grow them? I thought my WV location in zone 6 as too cold, for years, or that you had to have sandy soil. But now I grow them every year without difficulty. I think you might have to be allergic to regular potatoes to want to go to all that trouble to save the starch, or the cubes...or maybe have iffy conditions. I don't mind relying on each year's crop, or doing without sweet potatoes from May to October, As for keeping them, I saw on another thread that people have trouble keeping them from spoiling, and someone in my own county told me hers rotted--and this mystifies me. What I do I dig them, wash them (everyone agrees you shouldn't wash them but I don't want to put dirty tubers on my pantry shelf). and when they're dry they get put on a pantry shelf--if there are too many, some go in a box upstairs. I have virtually never seen a rotten one--even the ones that got cut in harvesting heal over nicely. They do start sprouting too early  on the pantry shelf--this year's are already sprouting, Dec. 27-- but that makes it easier to get a good lot of slips in the spring. They are usually not available around here, and the catalogs want too much for them.

Dunno about faucets--on the coldest nights we keep a bowl in the kitchen sink to catch the occasional small amounts of water going out, to dump all at once, to not have the outtake pipe freeze. And stop the water that goes to the greenhouse.
But on winter depression, I've heard and think there's truth to the idea that you benefit from walking outside, preferably in the morning, preferably when there's some sunlight.
Tasks help but I don't know why they gotta be bite sized. Maybe so you get the dopamine of crossing them off the list...unlike my winter task of raking leaves off our one-mile lane, bagging and bringing them home and chopping most to make leafmold. Once winter sets in that slows way down as I can only do it on days when it's warm and dry enough. I now have a new project I started last winter, clearing a space where I will hopefully plant a standard apple tree in the spring. I notice that tasks I do all year tend to expand in winter--housework, cooking, time online.

OOh, redbud! I am very pleased by that suggestion, because it happens that most of the trees growing wild in my chicken run are redbuds--so I don't have to plant them! I also have autumn olive, but not reachable by the chicken run. I have two goumi bushes in the run, and am surprised by how few the  chickens eat--most years I get most of the berries but one year migrating birds took em all. Wild birds always take some. My chickens used to be free range, but the predators got completely out of hand so we made a big yard around their coop and the orchard with four foot high fence, and have not had much trouble with either predators or escaped chickens since (we did replace a rooster who was leading part of the flock into sleeping high in the trees instead of in the coop). I've also been pleased that only one part of the run gets denuded to bare earth--the orchard fills with shoulder-high weeds, which helps protect and feed the chickens but is a bit of a pain to walk through. I grow corn and sunflowers for the chickens, and they get most of the grain when I grow sorghum. For the corn, they don't prefer whole corn and I don't yet have means to grind it, so I soak it in whey--thus feeding that to them too. We realized how much difference protein in winter makes when we had leftover cat food after our cats died, and fed that to them, and had eggs all winter. Now we mostly rely on sunflower seeds--I don't grow enough but they're pretty cheap to buy. I give away extra eggs in spring and summer and avoid any concern about whether I break even by never doing a calculation of input and eggs not bought (plus one or two cockerels a year for meat).

No, West Virginia. I see I quite failed to proofread that post.

My husband cuts hay--low quality weedy hay from our clearing--with a scythe and then makes a haystack with it. One winter we had one of those and also a square stack of square bales of hay that wasn't good enough for a friend's goats. We covered that stack with a tarp. In the spring I found the hay under it was well on the way to rotting--I'm using it for mulch so that's not catastrophic, but it still doesn't last nearly as long as fresher hay. But what was interesting was that the uncovered haystack was in much better shape. I think it's because a properly constructed haystack sheds water, whereas bales do not, and the tarp is an inadequate covering.
We're talking about building what my husband calls a barn, which would house no animals but have multiple uses--storing hay in a loft, shelves for drying onions and beans and peanuts etc (have to figure out how to make those mouseproof) and downstairs we'd have a permanent set for a boiling pit for maple syrup, sorghum, possible tomato sauce if I ever had enough tomatoes at once; and a stovetop for a canning kitchen. I think he wants to also have a cement floor for a car-fixing station.

Yeah, Ra, durable is what makes it worth the approximately $25 for those Darntough socks--they have an unconditional lifetime guarantee, can't beat that. Merino wool, nylon, maybe acrylic. Now I just have to choose which pair I want.