Day 14: Planting Your Garden I—What And How Much To Plant
Dear Student,
Mechanized, modern-day, commercial farming practices claim to be the most productive in history.
A single modern farmer can produce thousands of acres of corn and provide food for thousands of people… right?
Wrong.
True, with the aid of mechanization this farmer does cultivate thousands of acres, but to say he does it on his own is misleading. A modern farmer relies on much more to succeed than the humble farmer of yesteryear.
Hundreds of workers built his tractor in the factory, hundreds more drill and refine the oil that powers his machinery, many more make his chemicals, pesticides, and fertilizers, and the massive distribution system that sends his produce around the world to be processed and then sends it back again to his local Walmart (for him to purchase at much inflated prices) takes another several hundred… or thousand. And if any one of the many links in his far-flung chain of production fails, he can no longer produce or sell his product.
Worse still, the vast majority of conventional farmers would starve if they had to try and survive on the crops they produce. Modern commercial crop farms only provide one or two commodities (a dangerous practice called monocropping—the same method that has led multiple populations to famine throughout history), usually corn or soy, and humans can’t live on that alone for more than a short while.
Today’s farmer also uses the space in his fields much less efficiently than the smart homesteader. The huge tractor he drives is bulky and wide, necessitating wide distances between crop rows for it to drive through so he can regularly the spray the crops with chemicals. He also loses large areas at the end of each crop row where his tractor needs space to turn, meaning fewer planted crops.
These spaces between rows also provide ample room for any interested weeds to grow, meaning even more chemical sprays to try and keep these in check.
This total reliance on outside services and inputs for the conventional farm to function, and the need for environmentally damaging chemicals just to be able to bring crops to maturity, is a perfect example of unsustainability.
Compare all that against a well-designed, integrated backyard farm that can produce a myriad of nutritious foods with practically no outside input beyond your own efforts.
If supply lines are cut, you can continue to grow your food with no issues. In fact, if supplies are cut, you can still grow and the price of your produce will increase due to increased demand.
I’m often asked how much space one needs to be food secure… 1, 5, 10, 100 acres?
Embarrassingly little space is needed. Many schools of thought have settled at a quarter-acre being the smallest reasonable homestead size.
And for just an annual vegetable crop, a family needs as little as 1,000 square feet, keeping them supplied year-round with all the basic nutrition needed to survive. Yield will vary according to climate, and this assumes good soil, some experience in vegetable growing, and some off-farm inputs. The output would be a restricted yet balanced vegetarian diet.
This goes to show you how self-sufficient you can be in little space. It takes significant effort at that scale, though, and you’d have to follow the intensive sustainable farming practices outlined later in this course to achieve enough output in such a small area.
Using methods like trellising, succession planting, and greenhousing, the average family of four could be vegetable self-sufficient at home with a garden of 1,000 square feet in many climates (2.2 % of an acre, a patch 33 feet by 33 feet or the size or a very small urban back yard).
For real variety, though, you’ll need more space or a more intensive growing system.
In conjunction with a chicken coop and/or small aquaponics system, for example, we meat-eaters can get our fix of animal protein, too—all on a tiny area of land.
Bottom line, if you have nearly any sized lawn or dirt patch outside your home, you have plenty of space for some self-sufficient farming. With an acre of land and the time and interest to manage it, you can produce enough nutritious vegetables for a small community.
How’s that for productive farming from a small farmer?
Join a local grower’s group if there is one in your area; if there isn’t, consider starting one. These groups provide a forum to meet likeminded enthusiasts and swap information and ideas—and even your own excess veggies for those that you didn’t grow this year.
What Crops To Choose For Your Garden?
The crops best suited for your garden vary by region and by your experience as a gardener.
If this is your first time at gardening, I recommend you initially get a list of the crops suited for your area from your local agricultural extension office, online, or from local farmers groups or organic co-ops (who are also good sources for seeds).
The beginning gardener should choose no more than six crops for their first attempt.
Make life easy for yourself and choose vegetables that are not too difficult to grow to begin with. With practice, you’ll be able to grow all kinds of amazing things, but everyone should start with the basics. (And remember, perennial crops are much less work in the long run!)
We will cover some of the most common crops in this lesson, but you will have to do a little homework yourself to see which varieties do best in your climate profile.
Crops fall into three broad categories:
- Salads and leafy greens, celery, tomatoes, peppers, and other low-calorie vegetables.
These provide plenty of micronutrients, have a high water content, and low-calorie count. Great for salads, sauces, and soups, they provide variety, taste, and texture… but they don’t offer enough nutrition on their own for self-sufficiency.
- Starchy, energy-dense crops.
Corn, rice, taro, and below-ground crops including potatoes, turnips, yams, beets, sweet potatoes, cassava, turnips, carrots, etc. These provide bulk starches, vitamins, minerals, and fiber.These nutritious and calorie-dense vegetables are a critical part of your self-sufficiency plan and can be easy to grow. In fact, potatoes and skimmed milk is a nearly complete meal in terms of nutrition, and generations of Irish survived and thrived on it until that pesky blight destroyed all spuds in the 1850s (beware the dangers of monocropping!).
- Peas, beans, and lentils.
These leguminous (nitrogen-fixing) vegetables are both essential for the sustainability of your garden and for a balanced diet.
They help your garden by collecting nitrogen from the air and balancing it with soil bacteria, which means that with proper crop rotation, you can grow healthy crops year after year without off-farm fertilizers and manures. They also help keep this year’s crops healthy when planted next to leafy greens (category 1, above), which typically need lots of nitrogen to stay happy.
Diet-wise, these amazing veggies provide essential protein in your diet, without which you’d need animal products to survive.
How Much To Plant
I won’t go through the process of listing vegetables and yields achievable, as climatic and regional factors make these too variable to generalize. Seed catalogues will often give you a rough idea of what yield to expect from what particular crops, as well as telling you when and how far apart to plant.
It’s not difficult to estimate how much of what plant, but it all depends on you as an individual…
I love potatoes but can’t stand celery, I could eat a pound or more of potatoes per day, so my potato provision for the year would be 400 pounds—for me personally.
I would plant early, mid-season, and late varieties for maximum crop extension. My celery provision might be 5 pounds to give away or for my daughter to sample.
I can easily work out how much space I should devote to each vegetable after I estimate how much of each I will eat this year. That’s where you need to start.