Wondering about the "easy" part

I heartily support the idea of showing non-gardeners that it can be cheap and easy to get out and start gardening, even without preparation and experience.
But the framing around volume - growing enough food to feed yourself - that is built into the name of GAMCOD makes me question the "easy" part.

I'll use three examples Paul listed of 2024 GAMCOD participant results:
Rebekah
Calories: 34,323
Time spent: 49 hours

Stephen:
Calories: 20,570
Time spent: 32 hours

Mike:
Calories: 14,326
Time spent: 4.65 hours

Extrapolating to 730000 calories (although I think the average physically active gardener would actually need more than 2000 per day) and using an 8-hour work day means that to grow a full diet using whatever methods and conditions these people had would take this many work days:
Rebekah: 130
Stephen: 142
Mike: 30

This is extrapolation, not what would actually happen if these people had tried out what they were doing at scale, of course. Based on my experience over the past few years of actually working toward growing a full diet in former hay field (so some topsoil, but not heavily built up with mulch and stuff), I would say Rebekah and Stephen are higher than what I've experienced and Mike is lower. But even if you're as efficient as Mike, to me it doesn't seem reasonable to say that 30 days of work in a year constitutes "little effort." Maybe others have a different perspective.

In summary, I think GAMCOD is helping show that growing some food (more than a nibble quantity) is accessible to a beginner and "easy" in the sense that it can be done in an amount of time that can be snuck into evenings or weekends without too much trouble. If that removes a roadblock for current non-gardeners, I'd say that's great! So far I do not see it proving that it is easy to grow all your food. If you want to do that in fairly non-mechanized ways, it seems to take a lot of work and time per person. That does not mean that spending your time that way is miserable or drudgerous or a waste, but it's still work.

My guess is that all three of these people will get higher calories this year with less effort.

With the better numbers, mike should be able to feed himself, with food left over with 100 hours of effort and a half acre.

Further, I wonder if these same people will look to their old plot and put in a quarter of the effort to produce double the calories.  

And it is possible that some people will map out 200 square feet of existing perennial polyculture and beat those numbers even further.  

And suppose, over the next ten years, a thousand people try this and then we make an updated movie of people showing even more calories with even less effort - on dirt.  But showing even better results with old plots and old perennial polyculture plots.  

Further, a lot of people eat a lot more than just growies. And a brand new gardener will be happy to grow a third of their growies-foods on their first year.  I wish to simply paint a picture of what you can do with 200 square feet and talk about extrapolating that out to a full acre.

Even more:  if a first time gardener grew 50,000 calories their first year with very little effort, I would call that a huge win.  Not only do they put a LOT of food on the table, but they now know they can easily 10x that the next year.

Nearly all of the gardening advice i see is focused on one or more:

  - spending an enormous amount of money
  - spending an enormous amount of time
  - growing hardly any food
  - starting with amazing soil
 
Some people have a tenth of an acre of grass.  Some people have 200 acres of weeds.  Some people have deer concerns and some don't.  



I just now asked google "how much does the average american spend on food per month per person"

On average, Americans spend around $832 per month on food, with roughly $504 spent on groceries and $328 on food away from home.  

Suppose mike is gonna get half his calories from his garden.  $416 per month is $4992.  I'm gonna call it $5000.

I'm gonna pretend that next year, mike gets 20,000 calories in 3 hours.  About 100 hours to get half his calories.  He is sorta paying himself $50 per hour.

Now, shift into a mindset of more perennials, some walking onions, build the soil ....   I think he can triple that.  $150 per hour.

And does he get any bonus credits for the time to drive to the store, wait in line and whatnot?  Maybe some monies for less wear and tear on his rig?

Is it possible that the cost of all food is on the brink of becoming far more expensive while income does not grow to match that?  

Does this means that mike would be, kinda sorta, paying himself

     $300 per hour

??

Oh sure, there are a thousand variables.  And no matter how easy we make this, there will be millions that can't do it.  I'm hoping that there will be millions that do do it.  

Do do.  

:)

to me it doesn't seem reasonable to say that 30 days of work in a year constitutes "little effort."  

100 hours.  So this is 3.3 hours per day for 30 days for half of all the food you eat.  Seems like "little effort" to me.

And with skill, perennials, improved soil, that drops to 10 days of work at 3.3 hours per day.  Even easier.




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And the first step is get the first plots done.  People trying to meet these criteria.  People comparing notes and trying again.  

These same people have met dozens of others who cannot comprehend any of this.  Citing "facts" that it is too expensive, too hard, too many requirements, requires too much knowledge ...  



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If you think it is easy ...   or if you think there are too many challenges  ...   you are right.  


And there are a few of us that just want to show how easy it can be.

Thanks for the reply, Paul.

paul wheaton wrote:if a first time gardener grew 50,000 calories their first year with very little effort, I would call that a huge win

As I said above, I'm absolutely with you there! I hope these GAMCODs encourage just that kind of response.

I want to highlight that I was saying the numbers I calculated above align with my experience from having given this a go myself for a few years in a row - I'm not just making guesses from an armchair and saying it seems like it "ought to be a lot of work." In my experience, it has been a lot of work to try to grow all my food. Good work that I am content to do.

I'm sure I have plenty to learn about gardening, and about permaculture approaches to it.
Perhaps there are big technique things I'm missing that would make it easier. Hopefully I can pick up some things from people's demonstrations this year that will make my gardening easier in the future. I'm excited to see what people come up with!

These calculations on paper about how it could go in theory at full scale don't compel me like real live examples do. So I would be by far the most interested in examples of people who are actually growing all their food in 100 hours (or whatever it turns out to be). Have you considered making a version of this challenge for doing that?

My energy levels are seriously diminished, and still falling. So when I tried my GAMCOD bed last year my focus was on easy as a priority, with cheap as a close second.

I still have to get my head around sorting out all the numbers and videos and photographs so I can update my thread, but I can pretty much guarantee that my yield was below average whilst my hours were WELL below average. Most of the work was to put old roof tiles around the edge to mark the bed out and make it permanent and easy to clear around, a couple of hours work. The most expensive bit by far was to put in drip irrigation, which took around two hours including digging the trench to bury the pipe where it crossed the path. But apart from that there was very little work, and more to the point that work isn't going to be re-done for the foreseeable future. From my point of view, my other half did most of that work for me so it didn't impact my energy very much at all.

To clear the bed, we basically just smothered in cut grass thickly enough that nothing could grow though it. Planting obviously had to be done, weeds were taken care of automatically by the mulch, watering happened by switching the tap on when necessary. Then all that was needed was to pick stuff as I walked by. I pulled corn stalks out to use to light the fire. Other crop residues and any weeds that had managed to put in an appearance by the end of the growing season were just smothered with more cut grass to prepare for the next planting. Scraps from the compost caddy in the kitchen would be put under the mulch when I needed to empty it - does that count as time? I'd have to empty it somewhere. Pee gets tipped on any empty areas, but I'd have to empty it somewhere. Same with ash from the rocket mass heater and egg shells - it takes no longer to put it on the GAMCOD bed than anywhere else. The cut grass gets cut anyway and we do spend a few minutes raking up a big builders bag full and fetching it over. But there's no digging, no weeding, no raking, just mulching, adding stuff that we need to get rid of anyway, planting, turning the water on once a day in hot weather, and then harvesting.

I think the aim of the experiment was truly cheap and easy, but I think the prize (which I don't qualify for as I'm the wrong climate) is based on calories so I think there has been a tendency to focus on maximising the calories rather than minimising the work.

Here's a little video of my other half prepping soil by smothering it in cut grass, which had to be cut anyway. No digging - it just has to be applied in time to smother the weeds, and the soil softens up nicely underneath so planting is easier too.



I must get my head together to write up the rest of the thread, I've been putting it off for months. Soon, I promise!