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I know some you out there grow a lot of your own food. I was wondering how much is needed, space, time, money and what kind of return you see. I am talking about for my own family's consumption vs buying in the grocery store. In particular, we are a family of five, and;
we eat....Tomatos, corn, zuchinni, onions, peppers, carrots, green beens, and anything that grows really good would be ok.
Sq feet wise, how big of a garden would work for me? The absolute largest I would want to do would be about 60ft/30ft
I know some you out there grow a lot of your own food. I was wondering how much is needed, space, time, money and what kind of return you see. I am talking about for my own family's consumption vs buying in the grocery store. In particular, we are a family of five, and;
we eat....Tomatos, corn, zuchinni, onions, peppers, carrots, green beens, and anything that grows really good would be ok.
Sq feet wise, how big of a garden would work for me? The absolute largest I would want to do would be about 60ft/30ft
How much is involved in canning our own vegi's?
Can I still do better just going to the store?
<disclaimer> I am on my first year of a Maine garden. I was an Extension Service Master Food Preserver several years ago. I raised a family of 5 kids with a huge garden and (eventually) some food stamps. your mileage may vary</disclaimer>
Any size garden will help.
First year gardens often are not terribly productive -- think of it as a learning experience -- on account of getting to know your soil, your micro climate, developing your personal green thumb.
There are many ways of laying out gardens (almost as many as there are gardeners I think!) and that can affect how much space you need; the kind of soil you have can affect how you lay it out (little top soil or lots of rocks might call for raised beds). I tend to plant gardens that turn into jungles, and when I go to pick I have to pick place to put my feet as I harvest.
Corn takes a LOT of room to produce a reasonable crop. I would drop it off your list. There was an article on MSN, talking about just this issue, what is the most profitable to grow vs buy. Potatoes and carrots generally land on the "buy" side of the equasion. You might want to read [url="http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/SaveMoney/SaveMoneyDyn.aspx?cp-documentid=7644717"]
Also how much you save will depend as much on how you shop as on what you grow. If you are interested in organic or unsprayed or local foods... if you buy on sale and plan meals around that (fresh or canned/frozen), if you buy generic or house brand vs name brand... whether you have a farm market that you pass on your normal route and buy from in season...
Canning/freezing is not difficult however most veggies require pressure canning to be safe and these days the USDA is recommending pressure canning, I believe, for even tomatoes unless you add a bit of lemon juice. It seems the new varieties are not as acid as in the old days. If you make sauce or any tomato concoction with onion, pepper or other added ingredients you definitely need to raise the acid level or pressure can. Water-bath canned salsa is one of the most regular contributors of food-borne illness reports in the southwest. The Ball Blue Book (which is usually available with canning supplies during the season, in places I have lived before) as well as the Extension Service publications can be a good guide here.
All this being said, I think anyone who is at all interested and has any dirt at all should plant something to eat. It brings "good mojo;" nothing beats FRESH for taste and nutrition and you can't get more fresh than pick and eat! Not to mention that the economic slide we seem to be on is going to be constantly changing that balance point of whether it is more economical to grow or to buy...
I grew up in a family of 6. We had a small farm and grew almost all our own food - meat and veggies. We had several acres of fields and a lake to draw water from. We also sold some of the produce. Your space - 1800 sq. ft - isn't particularly big, but should produce enough to help with food costs.
Tomato is easy. Keep the plants from touching the ground. Each plant should produce dozens of tomatos.
Corn - easy, but make sure there is a fairly large space. Corn pollinates from the air if I remember right. Long rows won't pollinate as well as a squarish area. Also keep the corn to the north side so it doesn't cast shadows on lower growing plants.
Onions and carrots are easy and generally grow pretty well. So do beans. A 60' row of beans will produce lots. Peas are easy to grow, but take some time cleaning out. Zuchinni is a wead - it will grow anyplace and typically quite well, although we always fed ours to the chickens. Same with winter squash - very easy. Storage is just in a dry cool space. We also grew broccoli - very easy and produces very well.
We always had trouble with green peppers. Potato grows well, but takes long rows and some work keeping bugs off, dirt mounded up and harvesting.
can't speak to canning, as my mother did all that. Be carefull though - the pressure cooker can be hazardous if it isn't working correctly. We froze much of our foods. We actually had two 8' freezers that would be filled by each fall.
BTW - this is all from memory. My current house is on a wooded lot and doesn't allow for good veggie gardening. You will need good sunshine for best results. Also- deer can become a problem. My parents still have a garden and lost much of it to deer last year. I am getting a hunting license this year and will hopefully be filling the freezer with venison.
[quote=starwalker;3971598Any size garden will help....All this being said, I think anyone who is at all interested and has any dirt at all should plant something to eat. It brings "good mojo;" nothing beats FRESH for taste and nutrition and you can't get more fresh than pick and eat! Not to mention that the economic slide we seem to be on is going to be constantly changing that balance point of whether it is more economical to grow or to buy...[/quote]
Excellent post, starwalker! My first impression was that 30' X 60' "max" (1800 sq ft) was a little on the small side for a family of 5...but as you point out, "any size garden will help". If they expect to raise a significant amount of their own food, a bigger garden would be required. We have done about 1/8th of an acre, which is roughly 50' X 100' (5,000 sq ft) and that was just for 2 adults and our one daughter who was still at home at the time. For 5 people, probably 100' X 100' (1/4 acre) would be more realistic IF they expected it to contribute most of their produce.
But as starwalker points out, a first garden can yield mixed results due to the learning curve, and the last thing you want is for a new gardener to take on too much at first, or to become discouraged. So go with the 30' X 60' max or even a little less, and grow with your skills.
I also used to turn all my garden plots by hand (spading fork) so when starting a new area, or prepping the existing garden for planting, there was a natural growth and progression. there is only so much that one can turn at one time, and that proved to be a reasonable amount to plant at a time.
This naturally made succession plantings work well...
I honestly have no idea how much we had under cultivation when I was feeding the big family; we bought a place in an intentional community where the entire grounds (160 acres) were held in common and you used the part around your home as you needed. The place we bought had been a market garden for a small truck farming operation. they bought their own land, up the road, to expand.
I do know we had 2, 50'x50' strawberry beds, a large asparagus patch and I routinely planted 250 sauce tomato plants and a 150 of the "eating" varieties for fresh and canned tomatoes.
Regarding deer... I had problems but only late in the season, and at the beginning of hunting season. the land was posted and the deer knew where to safely hang out. They loved my pepper plants but did not like tomatoes so I planted the pepper patch surrounded by 'maters. Silly me, I just teed them off... that fall I found that not only had they eaten the peppers but they had had a kick off party in the 'maters on the way in and stomped most of them into the ground.
I did not endear myself to them with my (successful) attempt to protect my carrot crop either. I found out the hard way that they not only eat the tops (no biggie, except to the rabbit barn's inhabitants) but will paw and DIG down 5 inches or so to eat root as well. That year I only got half my carrot crop... the BOTTOM half! Next year, just before hunting season, I rolled welded wire (stock) fence out over the carrot rows, held down with strategically placed rocks. The tops protruded through the holes and I didn't mind if they were eaten (they were) but the could not dig to get the roots.
Excellent information. We do grown tomatos, carrots , Zuchinni, Peppers and some other fin stuff to grow like hot chile peppers ect. We have excellent soil, everything we stick in the ground gows rather easily........the area was once a food producing farm. I was really curios as to the area I have available...and canning. I think your suggestions are right on....and bit will help. I figure I want to start learning to become profecient at this as maybe in the future it will be more necessary.
I grew up in a family of 6. We had a small farm and grew almost all our own food - meat and veggies. We had several acres of fields and a lake to draw water from. We also sold some of the produce. Your space - 1800 sq. ft - isn't particularly big, but should produce enough to help with food costs.
Tomato is easy. Keep the plants from touching the ground. Each plant should produce dozens of tomatos.
Corn - easy, but make sure there is a fairly large space. Corn pollinates from the air if I remember right. Long rows won't pollinate as well as a squarish area. Also keep the corn to the north side so it doesn't cast shadows on lower growing plants.
Onions and carrots are easy and generally grow pretty well. So do beans. A 60' row of beans will produce lots. Peas are easy to grow, but take some time cleaning out. Zuchinni is a wead - it will grow anyplace and typically quite well, although we always fed ours to the chickens. Same with winter squash - very easy. Storage is just in a dry cool space. We also grew broccoli - very easy and produces very well.
We always had trouble with green peppers. Potato grows well, but takes long rows and some work keeping bugs off, dirt mounded up and harvesting.
can't speak to canning, as my mother did all that. Be carefull though - the pressure cooker can be hazardous if it isn't working correctly. We froze much of our foods. We actually had two 8' freezers that would be filled by each fall.
BTW - this is all from memory. My current house is on a wooded lot and doesn't allow for good veggie gardening. You will need good sunshine for best results. Also- deer can become a problem. My parents still have a garden and lost much of it to deer last year. I am getting a hunting license this year and will hopefully be filling the freezer with venison.
shadowfax1997 Your post is exactly what I would have written and sounds just like what we used to do when we fed a family of four plus my mother and stepfather. We grew pretty much the same things you mentioned in about a 4500 square foot space. We had 10 rows of beautiful corn (I'll tell you the secret to great corn sometime), tons of beans,wax beans, beets and beet greens,8 rows of potatoes, carrots, radishes, zucchini,broccoli,edible snow pea pods, cauliflower, peppers, cucumbers, pickling cukes, peas,spinach,zucchini (one hill) ,summer squash,butternut squash, leaf lettuce, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, gourds and pumpkins for fall, we also maintained a small herb garden with a variety of different herbs.
It was a lot of work harvesting and freezing all of that stuff. Making pickles,pickled beets, hot dilly green beans(these are real good). We tried to stagger planting times so things came in at different times. We found freezing beans whole was far easier than snapping them before hand. They snap quite easily when frozen so why bother doing it before you freeze them? We also had a bean frencher that cut them into strips for freezing. This is great if some of them get kind of big before you get to them. I had bins in the cellar for the potatoes(about 400 lbs), squash, a few pie pumpkins, and the carrots.
One year I mistakenly poured sand mix mortar mix from two unmarked pails into the sand for the carrot bin. We had no carrots that winter and I had to chisel the hardened mortar out of the bin. We never did try to figure out if we saved much money doing it. It's more like you defer money spent from winter, when most people have less cash due to heating costs and higher electric bills to summer when you have a bit more to spend on things.
It does give you a feeling of security to have two big freezers full to the top with food, walls of pickles, bins filled with spuds etc. (then you'll get paranoid about long power outages ruining all that work so you'll buy a generator).
It is satisfying. Plus when you go to the county fairs you can say..."mine are as good as those" when you see the blue ribbon winners.
Now with just two of us here we have pretty much retired from large scale gardening.
I always wanted to get some liquid nitrogen and try flash freezing stuff. Have you ever tried that?
No I have not tried that, yet.
I have had CO2 bottles around a lot though.
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