My question is WHAT would you grow to feed a family for a whole year? I can only eat so many salads in the summer. We raise chickens for eggs and meat. I plan on growing potatoes this year and enough tomatoes for canning speghetti and pizza sauce.
How much land does it take to feed a person for a year?
- Thread starter fancie217
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enjoy the ride
Sufficient Life
PamsPride- you make a really good point. If I stopped to think about and write down what I really do eat before I bought seeds and such, I probably would grow more of what I do eat and less of the "oh that sounds interesting" or "everybody grows those even though I don't like eggplant" plants.
I always run short of some things and waste too much of other. I eat a lot of onion/scallion/leek/shallot stuff and very little of radishes/kale/collards stuff. It's just a planting habit taking control.
I always run short of some things and waste too much of other. I eat a lot of onion/scallion/leek/shallot stuff and very little of radishes/kale/collards stuff. It's just a planting habit taking control.
Beekissed
Mountain Sage
You can grow sweet corn, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuces, broccoli, cabbage, pumpkins, squash, beans, etc.
Other than meat or grains (which you can grow shoe peg corn for grinding into cornmeal), you've pretty well got your meals for the year. Veggies and sweets all in one garden!
Then you turn a weanling pig(for all you pork lovers) into your garden plot and let it eat all the left overs, feed him all your canning residues of peelings, etc., a little whole grains, and you've got your meat to go along with the veggies.
THEN, you get some chickens to come in and finish up the plot, put some rabbits over top the chickens in the coop, and produce more meat to supplement your pork.
Down the road, after you've planted blackberry, raspberry, and grape vines you will have another source of food on your acreage. Or even fruit trees.
Voila'!! Food for the year for your family!
Other than meat or grains (which you can grow shoe peg corn for grinding into cornmeal), you've pretty well got your meals for the year. Veggies and sweets all in one garden!
Then you turn a weanling pig(for all you pork lovers) into your garden plot and let it eat all the left overs, feed him all your canning residues of peelings, etc., a little whole grains, and you've got your meat to go along with the veggies.
THEN, you get some chickens to come in and finish up the plot, put some rabbits over top the chickens in the coop, and produce more meat to supplement your pork.
Down the road, after you've planted blackberry, raspberry, and grape vines you will have another source of food on your acreage. Or even fruit trees.
Voila'!! Food for the year for your family!
A lot of what you need to know goes towards how long the product will keep.Canning ,smoking,and freezing will alter what is needed to feed a person for a year.Crops can be grown almost year round in most places ,depending on the work you put in and weather,Fish and meat can last for a couple of years if repaired properly. Onions ,Potatoes,and other root crops can last 6 months in cool dark storage.You can also dry fruits and veges . I have 3 and sometimes more mouths to worry over. We plant 1 acre of garden and have chickens ,ducks turkeys ect...It would be no problem for me to never go to town again.I'd say 1/2 acre under normal circumstances.
me&thegals
A Major Squash & Pumpkin Lover
For me, the tougher question is what NOT to grow! The seed catalogues are like a siren's songPamsPride said:
So, you've got your perishables like salad greens. Then, you've got your long-storing things like carrots, beets, onions, pumpkins, squash, potatoes and pretty much any root veggie. And then there's everything else that can be canned, dried or frozen, like all fruit, tomatoes, peppers, cooking greens, herbs, sweet corn, etc.
If you do honey and maple syrup, your sweeteners are taken care of.
If you have chickens, you've got meat and eggs for the year. And so on...
In our house, we get dairy from family, some ground wheat and corn from family, and mainly buy herbs, spices, other grains, sugar, stuff like salt and BP, BS, etc. Otherwise, you can really get a lot of food off a pretty small space, especially if you grow multiple crops. So, for example, I will grow spinach in one space very early spring. When that bolts, I will rake it out and start maybe carrots. When they're done, I'll pull them out and finish with something for fall, like more greens, radishes or some fast-growing root veggie like beets or turnips. So, 1 piece of ground with 3 crops. It gets to be fun to see how much you can get
ETA: Even with very long-growing items like squash and melons, you can start really fast-growing things around them that are ready to pick before the vines start taking over. Or, for upright-growing things like corn, you could let beans climb up the stalks or squash fill in the gaps between plants and rows.
Beekissed
Mountain Sage
Kill a deer or three and you have a good start on food for a year. Nothing quite like making a soup or stew from food you have harvested entirely from your own land.
If all the predictions are true, a person will feel more secure if they can have their own independent food source.
Word to the wise.....this would be a good year for saving your own seeds. I have a feeling that seeds will become a hot commodity in the following years.
If all the predictions are true, a person will feel more secure if they can have their own independent food source.
Word to the wise.....this would be a good year for saving your own seeds. I have a feeling that seeds will become a hot commodity in the following years.
me&thegals
A Major Squash & Pumpkin Lover
Yeah--seems like I've been hearing that frequently lately about canning jars, too! Used to be able to get them no problem on freecycle, but no more.
freemotion
Food Guru
So many variables! Also consider how active are the 4 people you are feeding, and what types of activities.....The average kid in my town doesn't do a fraction of what I did at that age, and I didn't do a fraction of what my farmboy dad did at the same age.
Also, what you consider to be the basic necessities.
And how much is used/wasted. Will you kill and cook older laying hens? Will you use the feet or toss them?
Do you have wild foods available, like Bee said, deer? Or in my case, mature oak trees that could raise a few pigs on acorns? Or would you consider eating the acorns yourself?
And what is considered humane varies from person to person. And on how desparate the situation....I suggest we don't get into that here!
Oh, and check out www.themodernhomestead.us for some great articles....and the book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Both experiments in eating primarily what they produce, the first for many decades, the latter for a year, both interesting reads. I try to copy a lot of Harvey Ussery's way of doing things. With the chickens, at least, it is MUCH less work and healthier and happier for the hens. He also posted an amazing article recently about the Vermont Composting Company, which uses chickens in their composting operation and sells the eggs. They buy something like 250 lbs of grain a year for 1600 hens!!! And don't always use it all....it is for the baby chicks, 600 new ones each year.
We can copy these things on our homesteads and need less land for grain. Vermont has very cold winters, too. There are many more examples, I'm sure, but this one fascinated me.
Also, what you consider to be the basic necessities.
And how much is used/wasted. Will you kill and cook older laying hens? Will you use the feet or toss them?
Do you have wild foods available, like Bee said, deer? Or in my case, mature oak trees that could raise a few pigs on acorns? Or would you consider eating the acorns yourself?
And what is considered humane varies from person to person. And on how desparate the situation....I suggest we don't get into that here!
Oh, and check out www.themodernhomestead.us for some great articles....and the book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Both experiments in eating primarily what they produce, the first for many decades, the latter for a year, both interesting reads. I try to copy a lot of Harvey Ussery's way of doing things. With the chickens, at least, it is MUCH less work and healthier and happier for the hens. He also posted an amazing article recently about the Vermont Composting Company, which uses chickens in their composting operation and sells the eggs. They buy something like 250 lbs of grain a year for 1600 hens!!! And don't always use it all....it is for the baby chicks, 600 new ones each year.
We can copy these things on our homesteads and need less land for grain. Vermont has very cold winters, too. There are many more examples, I'm sure, but this one fascinated me.
me&thegals
A Major Squash & Pumpkin Lover
FM--What an interesting article! I vaguely remember a similar paradigm shift by an Asian farmer. I think they were growing rice, but in the paddies, they put in fish. The fish fertilized the rice and ate algae or something else that sometimes affected the rice. Plus, I think they had ducks in there, too. All worked together to keep the others healthy and all were used for food. It would be quite a fun puzzle to try to create such efficient ecosystems
patandchickens
Crazy Cat Lady
If you look at the *older* (like, 1970s) books on Permaculture, that's what it is intended to do, in large part -- fit all the pieces neatly together with no gaps and nothing falling through the cracks and nothing unused. You have to have a very high tolerance for silly nomenclature and numbered outline form and pretension, but some of the books, e.g. Bill Mollison's original books, have some really neat ideas in them.
(e.t.a. - my impression is that the permaculture movement *today* seems quite, uh, not to everyone's tastes in a large number of ways, but there really *are* some excellent ideas buried in there)
Pat
(e.t.a. - my impression is that the permaculture movement *today* seems quite, uh, not to everyone's tastes in a large number of ways, but there really *are* some excellent ideas buried in there)
Pat
