Self-Sufficient Veg: What’s Achievable?

Kerr’s Pink & Pink Fir Apple

This is the space and time question.

You aren’t going to completely feed a family of five with just 10 square feet of garden (1 square metre) or 100, or even 1000 square feet. And certainly not on one hour’s work a week. So what can you achieve?

First, assess what useable growing space you have; how many people you are trying to feed; what are they like to eat and how much time will you all be able to spend gardening – particularly in spring when the workload is highest.

Vegetables need light and water, they grow poorly in shady areas and they get thirsty if large nearby trees are stealing their water. Bear these things in mind when planning where to grow crops.

Any shade reduces the energy supply to a plant and hence their crop, I would say more than 25% shade during the main growing season from April to September will make it difficult to grow a successful crop of many veg. Some crops, particularly leafy ones like spinach and lettuce, do like moisture so a bit of shade may do as much good as harm to them. Also growing vertical crops like pole beans can be a way of catching the sun – but take care they then don’t shade other crops.

I really like trees but unfortunately vegetables don’t. If you have any trees 10 feet (3m) or more high within 10 feet of your veg plot then you’ll probably need to dig down a couple of feet (0.5m) and chop off their roots where they invade the veg plot. Apologising to the tree and promising to water it in compensation would do no harm and might do some good, especially if it’s a rowan or holly.

If you have a small concrete space then you’ll have to make do with pots in the sunniest spots and window ledges. Herbs are an excellent crop for even the smallest spaces, they are mostly perennial (live for years), take little work, you don’t need to grow much to be useful, they cost quite a lot to buy fresh and they dry well for storage and year round use. Chillis also grow well in smallish pots.

With a little more space for larger pots at least 15″ (0.4m) tall and across and grow-bags you can grow summer salads (lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, green onions, radish, cucumbers), shallots, strawberries, possibly courgettes (zuccini), potatoes, carrots. I’ll write more about growing in tiny spaces and ’square foot gardening’ another day.

Having a little open ground, perhaps 10 feet (3m) square, makes all the above even easier. You should be able to add dwarf beans, beetroot, turnips, leeks. Up to this size of garden your time should not be a constraint, a couple of hours of daylight work each week in April and May should suffice with a dribble of time the rest of the year.

As the space available increases you can be more and more self sufficient. Generally the last things to add to your garden are crops which are cheaply available from storage like maincrop potatoes and onions, or which take significant space, or too much time.

Once you have about 500 square feet – 20 feet by 25 feet – (50 square metres) per person you have enough space to grow about 90% of vegetables for one person all year round except maincrop potatoes and winter brassicas which take quite a lot of space. Double that and you’ve room for the maincrop potatoes and winter brassicas. This size of garden takes a fair bit of time, especially in the first season when you are preparing the ground for the first time, you’ll probably need to spread the work of getting the veg garden established over a couple of years.

Putting veg production and consumption in the wider context of the food and land we need I found this post at The Oil Drum (TOD) interesting:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3090

Note that it’s written from a South Asia perspective so the balance of food is different from cooler regions, for example, we northerners tend to substitute potatoes for grains. He says the proportion of the total one acre of land needed to support one person in fresh fruit and veg is a mere 12.5% and the space needed for one person’s veg is 250 sq. m. ( about 2500 sq. feet, 50′ x 50′ ).

That is close to my experience, but I think veg is a much bigger proportion of my diet – even though I eat meat and fish – and I think I get a lot more productivity from my space than commercial growing typically does.

In a sense, that’s the rub – the less land you have to work the more attention you can give it and the greater its productivity can be.

While you’re at TOD do have a look around. Peak oil has / will happen sometime between 2005 and 2012 (95%+ probability IMO), it may change just about everything you take for granted. TOD main site:
http://www.theoildrum.com

Next up will be the three things to know that make near everything else about growing veg make sense.