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Podcast 701 - Permaculture Smackdown 31 - Strategies for growing enough food for your family- Part 1

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Summary

part 1 of a 3 part podcast

Paul, Liv, Beau and Samantha discuss strategies for growing enough food for a family.

Paul feels growing food for the family needs to be fun and delightful.

Liv grows a lot of veg and raises livestock. The livestock occupies 25 or 30 acres. The veg is grown on about 12,000 sq ft.

Beau focused on stuff that they like which last well through the winter. They've scaled back on the food production in the last few years and grew more herbs, as the herbs can be bartered for meat with neighbors.

Samantha has about 5 acres of paddocks for sheep. She grows chickens, geese, ducks and sheep and barters for pork or beef for variety. She helps a friend who grows tons of veg, and she helps him and gets veggies from there.

Paul thinks people tend to set out to grow 47 things and then decide that gardening is too difficult. For beginners he suggests picking 3 staple foods and grow a lot of those. Then you can add a small garden with more variety.

Samantha would pick carrots, onions and garlic as she uses a lot of those. Once you know how a plant grows, it's easier to manage. Kale would be good as it copes well with frost. Regular onions do take more work but it's great when you have bags of onions all winter.

Liv agrees that 3 crops to begin with is good. She would grow potatoes, onions and beans; she likes things that store easily.

Beau suggests devoting maybe 30% of your time to extras which interest or excite you. Those extras can have more fails but you can get unexpected success. He has 2 lists: his wife is more annual-focused: Butternut squash, green onions, Corn and sweet potatoes. Beau himself lists apples, mushrooms and the 3rd is tricky.

Paul would choose apples, sunchokes and kale; beyond those, apricots, hazelnuts and onions. Walking onions, while more work to cook with, grow like crazy with no effort and can be harvested for months.

It's important to grow things that people will eat.

Relevant Threads

Gardening for Beginners forum

Ducks and Geese forum
Chickens forum

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COMMENTS:

Rebekah Harmon

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I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around 3 crops I would be happy to eat every day! Unless it was a category of crop, like "greens" that included cabbage and lettuce and lambs quarters....

I'm really curious if everyone else can happily choose 3 crops to go bonkers on, or if it's more like 5?

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Jeremy VanGelder

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My boys can eat an apple a day. So that's one crop. We eat potatoes and beans about three times a week, each.

Probably a big help to this would be varying the meal that you eat a certain crop. Potatoes in breakfast are quite a bit different from mashed potatoes with dinner. Speaking of breakfast, I could eat oats every day.

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Rebekah Harmon

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So maybe 4 for you, Jeremy? Apples, potatoes, beans and oats?

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Andre Wiederkehr

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I'm thinking about the idea to focus on three main crops. I think it's a valuable idea for a "first year project" - a base to get started on growing food without being overwhelmed.

If someone was going to take this approach on, I would examine what it means for them to be a big part of your diet. A lot of this has to do with definitions: are we talking about the fraction of your grocery bill, or of your macronutrient needs (carbs, protein, fat) or micronutrients needs?

It's relatively easy (and a great start!) to grow all the summer greens you eat, and this will meet important micronutrient needs and save a lot of money (assuming you are currently buying those greens).

But if we're talking macronutrients, it seems to me that people rarely appreciate just how much food is needed in that category, especially if you're physically active. Based on this past year's yields that I experienced, 20% of a 2000 calorie diet for one person looks like 480 row feet of potatoes or dry corn, 650 row feet of dry beans, or 60 butternut squash plants (I actually grow these things in beds, not single rows). I haven't had much success with raspberries at any scale, but supposedly you can get a gallon per meter of row (https://www.ontario.ca/page/growing-raspberries-and-blackberries-home-gardens), which (surprisingly to me) makes them competitive with corn or potatoes in terms of row feet (not in area, since the rows are wider). But I think they'd be a lot more work to harvest. You might notice that the examples I gave are what I would think of as staples (foods dense in those macronutrients: a tighter definition than they seem to be using in the podcast). I don't think living on beets or kale as a major energy source would be very easy or the most pleasant because they're not very dense that way - 400 calories there looks like a couple of pounds. If others have tried such things, I would be very interested to hear how it's going and how you do it.

Anyhow, such yields are all very contextual depending on your gardening practices, varieties, soil quality, local climate, and other factors, but I guess I'm trying to recognize that this will be a significant amount of work. I think it's manageable and can be very life-giving, but it won't be a small endeavour.

paul wheaton

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Grow as many as you want.

The point I was attempting to make is that if people try to do more than three, they get overwhelmed. So, start with three where you will have far more than you can eat. And a side garden with a small amount of everything else.

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