People are planting more vegetable gardens | Hacker News Reader

People are planting more vegetable gardens

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232 pointsNoRagrets240 comments

I'm planting a garden because I plant a garden every year. Well, I've been doing it for the past 25 years or so anyway. I've gotten quite good with production. I shudder at the thought of a bunch of noobs going out and starting a garden, but hey, I was a noob once too and I learned. My biggest advice for a beginner is to consider your approach to pest control. That means identifying the pests in your area, both bugs and animals, and whether you want to use chemicals or natural methods. Seeing as how I eat produce I prefer using natural methods but you have to realize they're not as effective and you will suffer losses. Sometimes those losses can be severe - you'd be amazed at the amount of damage squirrels, rabbits, crows, and various beetles can do to a garden in short order! The cool thing is you're going to learn about all kinds of new insects you never even knew existed happily munching away on all your produce! Enjoy!

This is good advice for dealing with squirrels and rabbits: Irish Spring - https://homeguides.sfgate.com/use-irish-spring-soap-repel-ga.... I first heard of this a few years back and it works wonders!

Can confirm, this works (at least for the rabbits).

I'd never skip on the opportunity for fresh organic meat and would totally welcome rabbits and squirrels to my garden if I had one xD

I'm not sure where you live but I'd think twice (and probably still do it) about eating rabbit from anywhere where people routinely put pesticides on their lawns.

I've always been a bit curious -- you cook the rabbit. Which pesticides (etc) survive the cooking process to the point where you'd need to worry about them?

Most pesticides survive the cooking process. As a rule of thumb, cooking kills most biological baddies (bacteria, worms, etc) and doesn't do much for anything else. If your threat model includes pesticides, botulinum toxin, or a number of other contaminations then you probably need to just avoid that food source, or at least limit exposure.

Conies, while they aren't a 'meat breed' and don't have much meat on them are delicious. My dog agrees. According to her, the head is the tastiest part.

Urban gardens are a thing. Urban squirrel isn't recommended for the menu.

It is generally considered unsafe to eat wild rabbit until after the first hard frost due to tularemia. If you do harvest wild rabbit, pay close attention to the internal organs and discard any meat where the internal organs are discolored or spotted. Also, pay close attention to the tick/flea load on the animal. At least, that is widespread country wisdom around these parts, YMMV.

Pests is the first lesson I learned after starting a top-floor balcony "garden" a bit more than a year ago.

Who knew so many different creatures would find their way up to my balcony :(

Another thing I noticed is how sensitive plants are to temperatures. A couple of days over 35c killed my tomato and severely injured my jalapeno!

It is much more forgiving if you have the space to plant in the ground. The much higher thermal mass and lower surface area of the ground means the roots are able to stay in a cool medium through much hotter weather, keeping the plant cool.

If you buy plants from a nursery they will be covered in pests usually, especially later in the season. It's best to grow as much as you can from seed.

Any suggestions on dealing with Voles eat all the roots to my plants?

Bury chicken wire or another metal mesh under a raised bed.

> My biggest advice for a beginner is to consider your approach to pest control.

My co-founder, who's a passionate farmer by profession and a recovering software engineer by education, bugs me to no end to start a business in Hydroponics (growing plants without soil) [0]. He is a sucker for organic farming and absolutely swears by it. Keeps binge watching YouTube videos on the topic for hours on end.

He means to do a hydroponic setup up at his house this fall once he's relatively free of his current short-lived personal obligations.

Fwiw, YC has funded at least one Indian startup doing hydroponics at scale, and they offer a DIY take-home kit, too: https://www.urbankisaan.com/homekits

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics

> He means to do a hydroponic setup up at his house

Why would someone use a hydroponic setup in a house, instead of planting as normal? I think hydroponics are cool, but other than that I'm trying to understand the value proposition. All hydroponics setups (including the ones linked) tend to be very expensive.

There are aspects where it is more efficient. For example, look up aquaponics (a variation of hydroponics where the water circulates in a closed loop between a hydroponic setup and an aquaculture setup). It is one of the most water-efficient ways of growing vegetables and raising fish for human consumption, very popular in arid places such as Australia, where you might not be able to otherwise gain access, economically, to the amount of water required. Another clear advantage of hydro/aquaponics over in-soil agriculture is obviously weed control, due to the fact that weeds are either non existent (floating raft systems) or way easier to deal with (bio media beds) compared to gardening in soil. Finally, I see you wrote "setup in a house" but I just wanted to say that you can (and most commercial operations do) grow in a greenhouse, you don't have to rely on artificial lights. Having said all that, yes you are right, the initial setup cost is higher compared to traditional agriculture.

>due to the fact that weeds are either non existent (floating raft systems) or way easier to deal with (bio media beds) compared to gardening in soil

Gardening in soil also has essentially no weeds to deal with. The problem is most people till, and destroy any soil they may have had, so they are gardening in dirt.

Yes, I like no-till gardening, especially where it’s combined with other techniques like mulching, cover crops etc.

In traditional agriculture no-till is associated with increased use of herbicides but in regenerative agriculture and permaculture there are other ways to deal with weeds that don’t require the use of chemicals.

The book “The Market Gardener” by Jean-Martin Fortier is a good resource about those topics.

>The book “The Market Gardener” by Jean-Martin Fortier is a good resource about those topics.

It is? He doesn't do no-till, doesn't do regenerative ag or permaculture. He just grows lettuce conventionally and sells it at high prices to a couple of hipster restaurants in Montreal. I never read the book, but it seems weird he would advocate stuff he won't actually do himself.

If by

> He doesn't do no-till

you mean he uses a BCS power harrow, then your definition of tillage is much broader than mine, which is absolutely fine. To me, permaculture is not an ideal but a business opportunity, so I tend to focus on the commercially viable ways of practicing it.

It isn't my definition, it is the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillage

I'm not sure what you mean about ideals vs business opportunities. It isn't a question of making money or of practicality vs ideals or something, he simply isn't doing any of the three things you listed. As far as I can tell, he has never mentioned any of the three things you listed. His "farm" is even named after a tillage implement which he promotes constantly and is possibly most well-known for. He's a conventional organic gardener, he has no soil, he has captured no carbon, he has no plan for building soil or capturing carbon, so there's nothing regenerative about it. He imports all his fertilizer, so it isn't permaculture. He plows, broadforks and then harrows multiple times a year, so he's not even minimal tillage much less no-till.

Many crops are sensitive to light cycles and can be profitabl grown indoors year round using hydroponic methods. Consider, for example consider June bearing strawberries or basil. Also, many apartment dwellers do not have access to a plot of ground in which to plant a garden. Also, yields can be higher for hydroponic systems.

> Why would someone use a hydroponic setup in a house

Clean and much lighter. This later point can be essential in old houses. Must be noted that It's not all laughs and fun with hydroponics. You need to find the correct point with watering (or automatize). Otherwise, hydroponic pots can turn on "cereal killers".

Personally I'm not into hydroponics as I have a house and a large yard (2/3 acre) but I have a friend who lives in a condo and doesn't have much of a yard to speak of. His whole basement is devoted to hydroponics. As such he's growing as much or more food than I am! Yes there are significantly higher up-front costs, but he doesn't have to worry much about pests. He also loves to build his own automation solutions so he has fun with that, too. So while it's certainly more expensive, I suppose it's cheaper than buying a house!

Farmbot.io has had me intrigued for years

This is the one written in Elixir with Nerves, yeah?

Yes

It absolutely stunned me when I got my first few houseplants that a totally effective way of getting rid of spider mites was to literally just brush them off the plant. I just took my finger and brushed them.. then they were gone forever!

damn them cabbage white butterflys!

I always remember that the plant will recover and releaf for the winter season in those cases.

I've been picking off the green caterpillars and squashing them, but I've also ordered a butterfly net (unfortunately to my work address which is shutdown due to the lockdown here). Today there are tens of them fluttering around and I might makeshift some butterfly net out of clotch material and number 8 wire.

Here in England I planted a bunch of stuff for the first time, and was quite shocked to find that the local snail population went over it all like a very efficient lawnmower.

Did you build a greenhouse for your produce?

I use a greenhouse for the cold crops which are planted in March. Where I live you need to protect against frost until the end of April.

Square foot garden is perfect for noobs. Plant companion plants. I had great success with it even as a noob.

Agree on pests. You have to keep on top of it.

I'm not planting a garden because I fear shortages, I'm planting it so I don't have to make as many trips to the store.

> I'm planting it so I don't have to make as many trips to the store

Another correct reason. Is better to spend 2 hours working in the garden than driving to the market. More time to live.

I do it because some things are wildly overpriced at the grocery. Like, there's no use in planting cucumbers when they are $0.50 at the grocery. But fresh herbs are like $3 a bunch and berries can be $3-5 a lb, so it can make good financial sense to plant some of these.

An herb garden and planter will produce easily $100 worth of herbs over a season for nothing more than 20 minutes of planting, then regular watering and tending. I had so much basil last year that I literally ate it in salad.

Berry bushes can be a little more expensive, like $20-50. But they also yield crazy amounts of fruit over the season and grow in like 95% of the USA.

It's a good investment, and it's a nice way to get some out doors time everyday.

I focus on foods that are expensive or you simply cannot buy. For example, carrots straight out of the ground taste significantly different than store bought. Despite carrots being one of the cheapest foods I still grow some. Otherwise you nail it with herbs and berries. I estimate a couple basil plants save me at least $50 a year.

Another good item I always recommend is to plant the green onion stubs. About 3 square feet of green onions is enough for my family all year.

> carrots straight out of the ground taste significantly different than store bought

I'd grow a garden today just for the tomatoes. Store bought tomatoes are nothing like the ones I remember growing years ago. But another issue I noticed is that even with the best of soils and care, whatever grows from seeds and seedlings I can procure now still tastes closer to supermarket vegetables than home grown. I'm not sure if the genetic material is to blame or the garden/practices (from my perspective the same as in the past).

Which seedlings are you getting? If you're able, skip the ones at the building supply store's garden center and see if you have any heirloom seedling sales/exchanges in your area (though maybe not this year...).

The fruit we get from the heirloom plants is head and shoulders above the others— Brandywine and Cosmonaut Volkov are two particularly delicious beefsteak-type "slicing" tomatoes.

If you're up for starting your own seedlings, there are also obviously loads of places to order specific varieties of seeds online.

> If you're up for starting your own seedlings, there are also obviously loads of places to order specific varieties of seeds online.

Just be careful where you buy seeds from. I have ordered some lemongrass seeds on Amazon (before learning how to grow more from an adult plant). Those came from China, were seized by customs, sent to a lab, then promptly destroyed. I got a letter in the mail, with the results of the analysis.

There was no indication anywhere that they would come from overseas.

I shudder to think what would have happened if the supplier also sold something like marijuana and my packet was "contaminated".

Lemon grass: go to your local asian market and get lemongrass stalks with the bottom bulb intact. It doesn't need to have roots showing. Place in a jar of water and they will sprout roots in a week or so. Then plant in a pot, it will grow into a big grassy plant.

> It doesn't need to have roots showing

Oh wow, I thought it would be worthless without roots! The more you know...

Thank you!

As long as there is some woody material at the bottom it will work most of the time. So get a couple of stems in case a few don't root.

Are getting seeds from seed exchanges also better than the seeds at the building supply store?

I'm 5 days into gardening and that's where I purchased my seeds.

It depends. Some people know their plants; other just want your data (aliexpress, ahem...), and will send you anything instead to justify the order. You could end with invasive species (just because there is plenty of them), or sowing canary's food.

For a newbie, is safer and easier to start with commercial packed seeds.

Oh yeah, that's true. Even at an exchange, seed fair, whatever, I would probably still only buy seeds from an actual vendor. I'd never considered buying something like seeds from an eBay seller. But yeah, lots of organic heirloom varieties are packaged for commercial sale, eg:

https://www.seedsofchange.com/seeds/vegetables/tomato/organi...

Seedlings are different since with a bit of experience you can tell what most plants are, at least within the broad family— you might end up with hot peppers when you expected sweet ones or something, but you're not going to get marijuana when you thought it would be tomatoes.

Indeed, good tomatoes seem to be unavailable in stores at any price (even before all of this).

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2012-jun-30-la-sci-tom... (Why supermarket tomatoes tend to taste bland [2012])

FWIW, in the summer time you can usually get great tomatoes at farmers markets and produce stands. Though I haven't grown my own yet, so I can't compare.

My parents were freaks about growing their own. Yes, a good road-side stand could be just as good, but depending on where you are, harder to find.

But as far as anything in any typical supermarket, well, there's just no comparison. Sometimes the "heirloom" tomatoes are less bad.

Of course they don't substitute for fresh, but canned tomatoes are pretty good for a lot of cooking. They are harvested relatively ripe compared to store fresh.

I shall work on my bacon and canned tomato sandwich recipe... ;-)

(My wife claims that canned San Marzano tomatoes are the bomb, when cooked tomatoes are needed.)

Be warned that for all intents and purposes "San Marzano" has become a meaningless phrase that people slap on their random tinned tomatoes because they know food network audiences are looking for it.

True, for all I know. My wife has a specific brand she likes. Yellow can, but not sure which.

They are also tomatoes bred for taste rather than shelf life, which makes a significant difference. Unless they’re in season, I’d personally never use “fresh” tomatoes from the produce section. Canned tomatoes from a good vineyard will taste better and even be cheaper sometimes.

For whatever reason, my generation (20s) tends to have a some repulsive initial reaction to canned goods. But as long as they’re packed sans preservatives, many fruits and vegetables are probably better for you than the “fresh” ones at the grocery store.

And don't overlook frozen. Not sure about tomatoes, but many vegetables are excellent in this format.

I recommend chard (a.k.a. Swiss chard, beets bred to produce a lot of greens instead of large roots). Chard is expensive and hard to find in shops because it has short shelf-life once harvested, and because you need to harvest individual leaves as it grows instead of cutting the whole plant at once. But it's easy to grow, and the drawbacks are no problem to a home gardener.

It's also nutritionally dense, if I recall correctly. Iceberg lettuce, not so much.

Store bought carrots are almost tasteless. We grew carrots for the first time last year and I was amazed by how much flavor they packed.

Same thing happened to me. I used to think carrots were useless - just filler for dishes that need some color and volume.

I grow shallots and garlic as well. Very easy to grow and both kind of pricey in the store.

Is there a way to mechanize berry harvesting? The time involved in picking them is pretty substantial, at least for this amateur. We picked buckets and buckets of blackberries last year, and had a great time doing it, but it was many hours with the family outside. If I charged my hourly rate for that it would've made for some pricey berries.

Are you _sure_ you (and your kids) aren't getting more value out of hours with the family outside than any mechanized thing could provide?

If those quality hours could be spent playing volleyball or something, why not mechanize?

If those quality hours could be spent tinkering with a robot and debugging control software, why not mechanize

Not at all! We enjoy it greatly. I was speculating on why they cost so much in store. I may have expressed this clumsily though.

What am I missing here? I plant blueberries and blackberries and getting a pint at a time takes 5-10 minutes

> Like, there's no use in planting cucumbers when they are $0.50 at the grocery. But fresh herbs are like $3 a bunch and berries can be $3-5 a lb,

Correct, but think also that there are other factors. Your herb is $3 in value, but how many rosmary can you eat?. Maybe less than 100 grams could fill your needs for the entire year.

Now think that you use the same space for a cucumber. Now you can make it climb and take advantage of vertical space. Cucumbers are $0.5 a piece, but you can pick them when they have like 200g and eat it as many as you want without dying poisoned. You could harvest some Kg from this plant to eat it fresh two days a week, or make your own pickles and store it for the winter.

Therefore if your goal is to produce food and there is space only for one, cucumber is a better investment than rosmary or basil because you would buy much more of it in any case. Herbs are a luxury, they play in a different league than potato or onions. Similar case with berries. A single tomato can weight more than the entire raspberry harvest that you could obtain in the same space.

How about each person grows one herb or vegetable and they trade? For convenience, they can all bring their harvest to a meeting point to exchange

Could be a possibility...

I do usually grow cucumbers, but I grow a thin-skinned variety that isn't available in the stores. Taste is great and you can leave the skins on.

It's also just a fun activity to do with children to keep them occupied since schools are closed.

I'm planting one because its the most relaxing and rewarding thing for me. Something about watching things slowly grow after tending to them for months is very rewarding. Also they don't sell all the kinds of produce you can grow. Heirloom varietals taste so much better then the mass market kinds.

It’s not quite planting season yet here (frost risk until the end of May), but my wife is laid off and wants to do a garden this year to save a little bit of money and have something to do with her time until the entertainment industry is allowed to do stuff again.

You can plant onions now and probably lettuce in a couple of weeks.

Don't forget potatoes. We're still using some of last year's crop from our garden (and they're so much better fresh from the ground than anything we get from the store).

We're not planting because we fear shortages now, but independent of our current predicament there's a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that there _could_ be shortages in our lifetime (most likely climate induced, directly or indirectly) and the time to learn is now, not when the shelves are empty.

Also, it's fun and gets us away from screens for a day.

I have a garden and consider the same issues as you, but where I live in Australia, the summers are becoming hot enough that many things are difficult to grow. The changing climate could well hurt the amateur as much as the full-time professionals who have time/means to adapt.

In the space of 2-3 years, I went from being able to grow countless giant zucchini effortlessly, to now struggling to get almost anything: pollen/stamen are too dry. Tomatoes don't set if over a certain temperature which is now often the case. Even if you cover everything with shadecloth, a heatwave of 40+C can fry plants. Corn this year all failed. I've had one modest zucchini. Most of my 40ish tomato plants went crispy. Five fruit trees failed to develop any fruit. Two that did developed mold patches quickly all the way up the tree. Only a couple of trees did well.

Maybe you could try Okra or Eggplants

Tried Japanese eggplants but didn't enjoy them. Don't love eggplants in general either. I might try okra though. We have kids so anything that gets past them is favoured; they eat a lot of spinach and spring onions at least. Potatoes are obviously trivial, but they're so cheap to buy I figure it's barely worth tying up a garden bed for them.

Currently growing beans, tomatoes, zucchini, lettuce, spinach, coriander, garlic, carrots, spring onions, rocket/arugula, chilli, chives, strawberries, basil, oregano, snow peas, sugar snaps, etc.

This is scary. I'm just starting gardening and I've heard similar stories from other amateurs.

Have you found any mitigative actions you can take to continue growing (shadecloth was new for me)?

I don't bother growing things that will get smashed by bugs (broccoli, etc) - just too frustrating. Spinach and lettuce grows easily enough that the bugs can't beat it down. Garlic is easy and rewarding, though cloves might be puny. Zucchini worth trying though they quickly cop disease on the leaves in my experience. Carrots easy, though also cheap as hell to buy. Herbs are a no-brainer as bugs ignore them and they're expensive/annoying to buy each time you need a small amount. Tomatoes are a warzone with grubs or heat gunning for them but hard to resist trying to master them!

Get a reliable watering timer. I've had them fail or kill batteries due to unreliable motors and by the time I've noticed, plants have been dead. That at least is a predictable and solvable problem.

For shade, I have brackets down the side of my garden beds into which I can slot broom-handle style posts. Onto that, I slide a half-hoop of inch-thick irrigation pipe. Then I can clip shadecloth or bug/bird netting onto that as needed.

These are really good tips. Where could someone go to learn about these intricacies? Or is experiential-only knowledge?

I think it depends so much on where you are and how you work that you mostly have to learn it as you go. Some people have loads more time to weed and water and check on things. Others might not have time to even look at the garden for a few days. I used to marvel at my late grandfather's garden and had to remind myself that he had decades of experience honing what he grew and how he grew it, plus in retirement had all day to do it!

People have grown all those vegetables in summers with several 40+ degree heat waves since the 1930s at least. Most of the issues people are having are due to decreased moisture, which is because of soil destruction. Living soil holds massive amounts of water, dirt holds almost none.

We also changed countries and moved several degrees north, for similar concerns (among other reasons).

Ever heard of groceries delivery?

F-ing A. I haven't left the house in three weeks and have a year of basic food (3 months of most things). To me, people who continue at this time the European-style habits of shopping at markets every 1-2 days or even every 1-2 weeks like most Americans are dangerously stupid.

Also, after waiting on Instacart customer support for 6 hours today without anyone answering or resolution to missing, damaged goods, and wrong quantities in a single order, even though they're YC alum, I can't honestly use them again (sorry folks). I'd rather make a trip to the markets every 6 months in indirect vent/non-vented goggles and a solid N95 NIOSH mask than pay someone else $60 to buy terrible produce and throw bags onto the ground without any care.

PS: We're "autoclaving" the mail at 170 F for 30 minutes to denature any enveloped virus "guests" and letting packages rest in the garage for 4 days before handling them.

We've started making bread every night for the next day, and I've heard many of my friends are doing this. It's better than what we get in the local bakeries (we don't live in France) and have already discussed continuing to bake now that we figured out some easy tricks. We started here : https://andyljones.com/posts/bread.html

Good Christ, how much bread do you eat? We make like one loaf a week.

probably just small loaves. so they always have nice fresh bread...

Do you eat an entire loaf a day? I like making bread sometimes but my family can't eat it quickly enough before it goes stale.

Freeze it, then toast it.

> before it goes stale

Not a problem! Time for bread pudding or a strata.

There's a limit on how much carbohydrates we can reasonably consume.

This is why I'm a transhumanist.

That's quitter talk.

More seriously, a loaf every day does seem a bit much unless you have a large family, are making small loaves, or have a strange diet. I was just speaking to the bit I quoted. If you're making a loaf a week and can keep it dry, you can do use the stale leftovers whenever you've accumulated enough of them.

Before that even, you can make toast and / or french toast with it. And with the leftovers, dry it out in the oven and cube it to make croutons for in soup and salads. My girlfriend puts a collection of herbs and spices on them too, dunno what though. She does put the bag in the freezer then, but since it's dry it doesn't really need to be defrosted.

I’ll also break it into pieces, let it dry and dip in soups or make French onion soup out of it.

I've baked bread for my family (2+3) for years, but our consumption is very bursty. Particularly if we haven't had bread for a few days, we can eat a loaf in a day, but then we'll be sick of it and there will be a lull.

I invested in a nice set of aluminum Nordic Ware pans a while back, so I do five loaves at once, and probably bake ~1.5–2 times per month. Toast for breakfast can easily knock out half a loaf, and it's way more economical for everyone to have a slice or two of homemade bread than to eat dried cereal and polish off a box a day.

With working from home, I've been keeping my sourdough alive on the counter (rather than storing it in the fridge), and although I haven't baked any _loaves_, I've done a lot of other bready things with it over the last few weeks— pizza crusts twice, cinnamon rolls once, lunch buns twice, a focaccia one day. It's been great!

> ...my family can't eat it quickly enough before it goes stale.

You're obviously not making enough french toast.

We used to (family of five) go through a loaf a day; we'd buy it in bulk in the weekend and freeze it.

Mind you my dad would take like six or eight sandwiches to work every day (metalworker). And we're a sandwich-heavy culture.

Slice it before it gets too hard, then fry in olive oil or make French toast.

Conversely, just saw this twitter post by @gloomfather: "Oh dude yeah you gotta try baking your own bread in quarantine. It takes 14 hours to do right and it’s boring as shit, but the results are often quite disappointing." :)

A very on-brand comment from that fellow. But if you not doing it to pass the time, I'd suggest using a bread machine!

Making bread with extremely limited time commitment involves 6 steps that each are very quick, but have to be spaced out correctly.

1. Use a mixer to mix flour (measured by weight), salt, yeast, water for 10 minutes.

2. Let sit for 4 hours

3. Kneed for 5 minutes

4. Rest for 30 minutes in a cold Dutch oven while you preheat to 425

5. Put it in the oven for 30 minutes

6. Remove lid and Lower temp to 375 and weight about 20 more minutes until bread gets to 200 degrees.

You do that. It’s 15 minutes worth of work, but you have to be home which makes it optimal for wfh days. You will get awesome results every time

I use a similar technique, but I throw it on a pizza stone for 45 minutes in total with a cup of water evaporating from a heated oven tray underneath the stone to provide steam.

Making bread yourself is incredibly delicious, easy to do, and takes no time at all.

Edit: I also set my oven to 510 Fahrenheit to get a consistent bake, but that may be a quirk of my particular oven.

By using a Dutch oven you get a more consistent temp since it holds the heat like a stone, and doesn’t let moisture evaporate until you take the lid off.

So yeah, the variations make sense

If you do it the no-knead way, making bread in the oven is less work than a bread machine and less noisy. Less clean up, and better bread.

No-knead bread needs high-hydration dough, which is fashionable nowadays but not to everybody's preference. If you prefer something like normal sandwich bread then a bread machine will make it for you.

I just had a similar experience. But I just had to remember that like ~literally almost everything I have ever attempted~, the important thing was that I reviewed what I did wrong (misread the amount of yeast and let it alone too long for the second rise), correct it, and try again. Now I am making delicious bread!

There is very little work just a lot of waiting. I also bake the Ken Forkish recipe. It is a no-kneed bread recipe.

The trick I figured out is to invest in a danish dough whisk - then I whisk it in the bowl instead of pinching. I also let the dough rise over night in the same bowl. Also - don't ignore the instructions to heat the dutch oven before baking. This is what prevents the bread from sticking.

I've baked seven loaves of sourdough since quarantine started. I made my starter by mixing flour and water. The first two were utter rubbish, the next two were edible, and the most recent one has been rather good - much better than what my parents' bread machine would put out.

I've never baked so much as a cookie, in my life before. Like any skill, baking bread simply requires practice... And a scientific approach, where you vary one parameter at a time, until you figure out something that works.

I own exactly two things that have made this process easier. A kitchen scale, for exact weighing (Because all bread recipes measure in grams, not cups...) - and an oven thermometer, because my oven is a lying, slanderous ne'er-do-well, and is never accurate about its temperature.

It does not take 14 hours to do. It takes about 30 minutes of up-front work in the morning, and then about 30 minutes of attention interspersed throughout the day.

And it's not like I have better things I could be doing.

The bread I make takes about 20 minutes of work total, including measuring out the ingredients and cleaning up afterwards.

You do have to wait overnight for the dough to rise, but you don't have to do any kneading.

The results taste about 10x better than any other bread I've ever had in my life.

Would you share this no-knead recipe?

https://www.markbittman.com/recipes-1/no-knead-bread

Here you go, Lean Bread from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day, a fantastic book I heartily recommend:

http://dpaste.com/1JH41V3

Recipe modifications and tips:

- I use a cast iron bread pan -- it really makes a difference

- I prefer to use a good quality bread flour, like King Arthur. Haven't had luck with all-purpose flour.

- I do everything in a single bowl, up to the point that the dough is transferred to the bread pan

- I keep the oven at 450 degrees F throughout, and only start it 15 minutes before baking.. works well enough for me

- I use the "3/4 of original" ingredients in the recipe to make one single loaf of bread, which fits perfectly in my bread pan

- I tend to apply coconut oil to the top of the bread half-way through baking, rather than before baking. It's a lot easier to apply coconut oil when it's melted, which it'll readily do atop hot bread, so this is the easiest way to do it for me. But I still oil the inside of the bread pan beforehand as usual.

- I like to use instant yeast, so I can mix it directly in to the flour without needing the extra step of activation. It's worked great for me.

- Before adding the yeast, I mix the salt thoroughly in to the flour. Yeast should not be dumped directly on a pile of salt as that could kill it. Also, don't let the water you add get too hot, as that can also kill the yeast. I make the water luke-warm to slightly warm and that's resulted in a big rise in the dough for me.

This is a great bread, btw.

I use a simpler version, but very similar.

I like to roll it (or just coat the bottom) in seeds or cornmeal to prevent sticking, rather than dealing with parchment, oil, etc.

Would it be possible to get an updated recipe link? I was hoping to try this, but it looks like the paste has expired. Thanks!

I follow this one every few weeks. I put a bit more salt than he recommends. This is the most no-fuss recipe I've encountered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX_6l2bmvQI

Yup. This is the one I followed and the results are perfect. He also has a baguette recipe which is quite similar which comes out just right too.

Also, if you are running out of yeast (like I did) you can just save some of the dough and learn how to feed the culture with flour and water daily.

Also if the crust comes out too crunchy, I just bake it at a lower temp and longer.

This is an older post of mine, which has a video and images to show you what things look like at various steps

https://blog.steve.fi/this_is_mostly_how_i_make_bread.html

That really made the rounds but anyone who has done it knows it's nonsense.

Fresh bread can take as little as 20 minutes of work and tastes amazing.

The only valid complaint is it doesn't last long.

Go sourdough. Avoid the need to purchase yeast. It's really no more difficult, just a slower rise. Also you don't need to knead, just stretch and fold six or seven times as it bulk ferments.

In times like these I'd highly recommend getting starter from someone who already has some. Starting your own won't always yield a high-powered reliable one. I've started many over the years, but never realized that all of them were weak until I got some starter from a cafe in town. I cannot recommend enough using an established proven starter.

You also don't need to stretch and fold, you can just knead (or not even do that if you have enough gluten development from the autolyse).

I point this out because I'm pretty sure that different techniques will suit some people better than others. Personally I'm happy to do 10 minutes of kneading at the start, but find it burdeonsome to go back and do stretch-and-fold every half an hour (or whatever schedule you're following). Similarly I've seen people claim that the only correct way to keep a sourdough starter is to feed it small amounts of flour and water multiple times a day. If I had to do that I'd never remember and so never bake bread again; the results from keeping the starter in the fridge and refreshing it 12-24 hours before baking are good enough for me, and it's a schedule I can stick to.

Sourdough seems to be one of those activities where there are a lot of people who have a way that works for them and generalise out to that being the one correct way to do things. Whilst there are definitely things that work better and things that don't work so well, the important thing is to find a method that you're able to reliably follow and that gives results you're happy with.

>from someone who already has some

Not really possible right now =)

Where are you finding flour? The stores around here have been sold out for weeks now.

Same here. I tried one of the mills, but they had closed their online store due to increased demand.

We ended up getting some from a baking school that had been forced to close.

I just got some from Walmart, which took exactly a week to arrive. Not bad under the circumstances. If what you're looking for is out of stock, just keep checking it, they seem to be restocking quickly enough.

The great thing about making your own bread is that as long as you have salt, yeast, flour, water, and an oven, you can fit your bread recipe to the equipment that you have. Getting a great loaf at home takes some practice (my first loaf came out like a biscuit, it was horrible). But after a few repetitions you can get pretty consistently good results.

I'm not as much of a sourdough person, and I don't have a dough machine or stand mixer, but I have a hand-kneaded recipe that I like. I don't have a dutch oven, so I use a stockpot instead. And so on. There's tons of info online, and it gets easy and more consistent with practice.

I've been doing a no knead recipe that takes ~3 hours, and it comes out great. If you're making bread every day, it might save you some time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0t8ZAhb8lQ

I've been baking bread every weekend, or two, for over a year now. Currently in Helsinki my local shops have run out of flour, and dried yeast, but I'm still good for now, as I have a surplus of flour and I started making my own sourdough starter.

Sourdough starters are pretty easy to create, but I usually make one then go back to dried yeast after a few months. I suspect the batch I'm using at the moment will last longer than most:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-R-kkphHPP/

We had 10 pots on the patio last summer, growing cilantro, parsley, green beans, stevia, potatoes, basil, swiss chard, etc.

Drip irrigation tubes attached to a timer faucet watered it every morning automatically. At some point I'm going to try to hook in a Pi or Arduino so I can remotely control the irrigation, e.g. if it's raining I won't have to go outside & manually shut it off.

We'll be doing that again, and this spring we're also planning to plant a couple of rows of potatoes, carrots, and lettuce. Growing food is not difficult, but it does require some knowledge and understanding of soil pH, pest control, etc. Fortunately there are plenty of how-to videos these days.

The food you grow in an organic, chemical free environment tastes fresh and pure, is good for you, educational for the children, and very satisfying. It may not pay for itself in the first couple of years, but over time you'll find that it's well worth it. Freshly grown potatoes taste incredible.

We are thinking of getting chickens, but it may or may not happen this spring. Self-sufficiency takes a lot of work, but partial sufficiency is quite attainable for many people. Even if you're in an urban apartment, there are hydroponic devices and grow lamps to help you grow considerable veggies. I suppose we can thank the pot industry for that.

>Growing food is not difficult, but it does require some knowledge

I'd push back on the first part of this lightly. Growing some food is not difficult. Growing food effectively however, in quantity and for a long period of time, does require a fair bit of experience and local knowledge that you just can't get in one season. My family gardened heavily growing up, and I've been gardening extensively since my mid 20's (late 30's now), and I would say I only now truly feel like I 'get it' with regards to many aspects of planting, harvesting, timing, and preservation.

Prior to the pandemic, my goal this summer was to have my house be 'food-independent' for 3 months of this year. I've revised that goal to try and get to food independence by end of spring and maintain that through the end of fall and into winter.

My argument would be that gardening has a very low barrier to entry: literally any one can (and should) have a garden. However, the top skill cap on gardening is very high and does take time to achieve. Its also not something that can be entirely short-cutted through self learning/ study. How you grow depends on where you are and the details of your particular garden. Nothing else but experience will get you there.

>My argument would be that gardening has a very low barrier to entry: literally any one can (and should) have a garden. However, the top skill cap on gardening is very high and does take time to achieve

It really isn't. Gardening is very easy, and the skill cap is very low. The problem is that there is a TREMENDOUS amount of misinformation being promoted as knowledge, and beginners have no way to tell fact from fiction. Almost all of my learning curve was spent trying things that are based on incorrect assumptions or just plain memes. As soon as I learned "build soil instead of killing soil" everything became trivial.

> At some point I'm going to try to hook in a Pi or Arduino so I can remotely control the irrigation, e.g. if it's raining I won't have to go outside & manually shut it off.

I mean do it if it's fun, but you can just buy something that does this at home depot.

Don’t think it has as much to do with fearing food shortages as it does with being bored at home. At least that’s how it was for me.

yah, it's therapeutic, and it is a great supplement of fresh food to compliment shelf stable foods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

I wonder if the people planting vegetables are aware of just how much they would need to plant in order to supply even a small fraction of someone's required calories. I mean, there's a good reason we've centralized food production into massively efficient enormous farms with heavily mechanised harvesting.

For my family and me it's not about calories, it's about nutrition. Vegetables are an excellent source of all kinds of vitamins and minerals, especially ones grown in quality soil with quality seeds. It's also about fiber. We get our calories from fats and protein.

In general most people planting these gardens "ad-hoc" and not doing it more or less "as a job" probably don't have that much dedicated surface for this, nor can put in that much effort/time into it in order to obtain more than a nice and tasty complement for their meals. If you can consistently offset a shortage for your family then you're pretty much a farmer.

And I say this as someone who actually cultivated such a garden for years, with help from the family. I allocated a lot of time each day to tending that garden, more than most people would be able to do these days and have a stable job, even with WFH.

It was just a pretty hard but pleasant activity, relaxing, I got fresh air and exercise, and I could get some really tasty vegetables but nothing that could "feed the family". And my livelihood didn't depend on the success. Like a dessert at the end of the meal: great but not quite main course.

Yeah!! And they taste better!

And it incentivizes good composting and soil practices everywhere, which help all of us choose better choices in what we support for businesses and governments.

100% this is correct. We have 10 raised beds that are 4'x16', and we supply probably 1/2 of what we need for the year for a family of 3. We're super efficient and good at this, too.

wait wait... that can't be correct math. You must be getting far far more of your calories than 50%.

The normal estimate is that it takes 1 acre of land to feed a person for the full year. One acre is 43560 square feet. Your 10 beds are 640 square feet.

Somewhere the math is very very wrong.

It's the difference in growing techniques and your estimates translating into the real world.

Your estimates are based on what, grain production? That grain production equals meat and other things, not just produce. That estimate is also based on traditional row-cropping, is my guess.

Also, at the heart of it, your impression is incorrect. I didn't say the raised beds provided 50% of the family's calories, but 50% of our vegetable and other fresh produce needs. This does not include meat, most proteins in general, or fruits.

Finally, it is an assumption comparing traditional row cropping to square foot gardening in the raised beds. You get much more produce in a smaller space in square foot versus row crops, but it is much more labor intensive. You cannot use machinery in square foot gardens, compared to row crops. So there is a trade off.

In other words, the math doesn't work with your assumptions, because they're two different things. My estimate is that, while the garden produces 50% of our vegetable and produce needs, it's probably 10-20% of our overall caloric consumption. But that's a madey upey number, really. I have no idea.

> Your estimates are based on what, grain production?

1 acre/person is roughly what a pre-mechanization, pre-chemical-fertilizer, pre-pesticide subsistence peasant needs to keep himself alive.

Just on a quick Google, figures from the 1970s suggest you only need 4000 sqft/person.

https://www.growveg.com/guides/growing-enough-food-to-feed-a...

You omitted the next line...

> with about another 4000 square feet (370 square meters) for access paths and storage

Not intentionally. Just trying to give a more up to date figure and a source for it.

That's still less than 1/5th of an acre even if you waste all that space for no reason. Keep in mind, Jeavons is trying to sell books and speaking engagements for his gimmick, not trying to be efficient. I grow much more than 4000 square feet of crops and I use zero square feet for storage and less than 1/10th of the growing space in paths.

>The normal estimate is that it takes 1 acre of land to feed a person for the full year

That is not an estimate, it is a meme.

Well, it appears that your math is wrong.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=arable+land+usa+in+acr...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=arable+land+europe+in+...

Basically with that rule of thumb USA is on the verge of starvation and EU has been starving for a few decades already.

And this doesn't even consider the fact that eating animals is less efficient than eating plants. Where is the food for the 8 billion chicken and 70 million pigs in the USA coming from?

From my own calculations roughly 3588 sqft of wheat are necessary to feed a single person. Of course people are different, farms are different and plants are different. So a rule of thumb of 4000 sqft sounds about right and matches DoreenMichele's number.

Not so much as you think. You can have lots of potatoes in a relatively reduced space.

Potatoes are indeed the game changer if you need to survive off of your garden.

Exactly. The only people who think "farming" sounds like fun are people who never farmed for a living. It is fine if you enjoy fresh tomatoes or whatever but it isn't a replacement for your grocery store trips. Even if you go big enough to grow enough, you are going to spend a lot of time canning too.

Enormous farms do not optimize yield per hectare, they optimize total amount of land being utilized. Maximizing yields over land is very labor intensive and you would be surprised how productive you can get a garden to be.

Ya but massively efficient enormous farms with heavily mechanised harvesting don't remind me I'm human, while my garden does.

...which is why you would say it's for your mental health - not your physical health.

A home garden provides a trivial amount of food.

A garden provides as much food as you want it to. 500 square feet of potatoes provides 25% of a person's caloric needs for a year. That is a trivial amount of land and work, and a substantial amount of food.

I look at growing a garden like washing your hands for this current situation. It won't prevent starvation if the world turns into Fury Road but it can meaningfully move the needle in aggregate and reduce pressure on strained supply chains.

There is no strained supply chain of food. If anything, coronavirus will cause a massive overproduction of food, because people are not splurging on giant feasts. The issue is that the supply chain typically leans towards restaurants and businesses, and that's been almost completely suspended. It will take time for the supply chain to adjust and food to start appearing in stores or direct to consumer, but it will.

> The issue is that the supply chain typically leans towards restaurants and businesses, and that's been almost completely suspended. It will take time for the supply chain to adjust

That sounds like a strained supply chain to me. =)

I'm looking at the current situation as just the beginning of the start of this situation. There may well be localized flareups for the next year or two. Ill-timed flareups may cause further disruption (think the central valley during a harvest). I don't think there's going to be widespread starvation or anything, but adding more resilience to the system can't hurt and gives me something to do outside for the next several months.

But it's not. The suppliers that supply restaurants and stuff will have extra on hand. It's just a matter of their orders going down and grocery orders going up.

I have seen the empty shelves, but grocery stores are still well stocked with enough food to eat.

Around here at least, the shelves are pretty much back to normal.

...except for toilet paper!

Um ...

> The empty grocery shelves are unnerving. While we're probably not going to starve in the long run, the farm system is going to be seriously stressed. Most of our fruits and vegetables are picked by hand. 73% of farmworkers in the U.S. are foreign born; half are undocumented. What happens when those workers get sick? How do we keep the food supply chain going when borders are closed over coronavirus concerns?

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/821593542/episode-984-food-an...

> the food supply chain going when borders are closed over coronavirus concerns?

After the last two decades, believing the United States has any ability to police its borders (especially its southern one) is willful delusion.

I encourage you to give the podcast a listen. Hygiene and sanitation conditions for farm workers are horrific. The not-yet-realized future where undocumented farm workers successfully cross the border, then fall ill, is even worse. Now you have little or no crop, or contaminated crops, and a bunch of very sick people.

It is highly unlikely the virus lives very long on many crops. In most cases, a few days of storage will denature the viral particles enough. Something surely for food regulators to think about, but nothing insurmountable.

Not only that, but a lot of food in US grocery stores comes from other countries. Many of these other countries are likely to get hit very hard by the pandemic, and most probably won't be responding as effectively as South Korea, so expect to see long-term shortages of foreign food.

>What happens when those workers get sick?

The vast majority will have a mild cold and continue working. Covid isn't dangerous enough to the working age population to significantly impact the workforce

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is just empirically true. A 1% death attrition rate is really nothing in terms of farm output. The human cost may be a lot, but it won't affect much in terms of production.

Yeah, be prepared for some disappointment. I've been growing vegetables in my backyard now for about five years. I usually get a lot of jalapenos, some spices, and maybe a handful of tomatos, cucumbers and zucchinis. Plus it takes months before anything edible appears at all.

Farm.bot have some calculations on their website [1]. They claim that a 2000 calories/day of vegetables only can be grown using 110-205 m^2. But even vegetarians eat grains etc , so assuming 3 cups of veggies per day, one person needs 7 m^2.

[1] https://farm.bot/pages/yield

Before potatoes getting enough food from crops was very difficult. Wheat was common in Europe but the amount of work to get calories from wheat is intense. After potatoes it's much much easier to get a lot of calories from a small amount of land. Thank you South America!

Food isn't just about calories. Fresh fruits and veggies are desirable for good health. Even a small garden producing a small amount of tasty, fresh produce forms a good complement to shelf-stable rice, dried beans, etc.

We only did that for staples, because we have ways to easily mechanically harvest huge quantities of them. We went from a man with a scythe harvesting an acre of wheat per day, to a man with a combine with a 45 foot header harvesting 600 acres of wheat per day. Vegetables are still harvested by hand. With vegetables we have gone from 4 workers harvesting an acre per day to 4 workers harvesting an acre per day.

A whole family doesn't even need one acre to grow all their grains, fruits and vegetables, so the labor really isn't a big deal.

This family of 3 produces 6000 pounds of food a year on 1/10 of an acre that is organic, non-GMO and vegetarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCmTJkZy0rM

They have enough surplus to sell to local restaurants to the tune of about 20,000$/year to supplement their income.

They use a lot of techniques handed down from antiquity, apparently.

Shh, don't tell the eugenicists masquerading as environmentalists and conservationists!

Tangential topic, but does anyone have a good no-nonsense evidence based source for how to make bread and/or sourdough?

I've been trying sourdough and it's crazy how many contradictory pieces of advice and explanations you read e.g. if the yeast comes from the initial flour or air, what ratio of flour + water to feed it with, how many times a day you feed the starter, how many times you let the dough prove. It generally indicates to me that the process is very forgiving though (as so many variations work).

I would have thought most myths would have been put to bed by now as it should be relatively easy to run cooking experiments if you want to debunk something.

This was posted in a HN comment not long ago: https://github.com/hendricius/the-bread-code/blob/master/bas...

Here's a google slides deck I put together for how to make good-quality sourdough for a fraction of the effort that the "bread hipsters" go through:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UoH_BhRWUi0nnGj3uGp4...

Harold McGee's book "On Food and Cooking" has a chapter on bread making.

My favorite bread recipe is the No Knead Bread recipe that I saw in The NY Times many years back: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread

I've never had much success getting a sourdough starter up and running.

I highly recommend books by Peter Reinhart. I prefer to bake with whole grains, so I have his "While Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor," but anything by him should be great. His work is definitely based in experience and the science of yeast and flour.

The bread I make most often, the simplest and most delicious one I've had in my life, comes from Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. So I can definitely second the recommendation of his books.

Quasi-serious home baker here: think of those pieces of advice as possible inputs, instead of contradictory! How often you feed your starter, and how much water is included, are both factors you can use to control the final properties of the bread. For example, wetter starters tend to lean more lactic (milky) in flavor while drier ones tend more acetic (vinegary). Temperature, time, ingredients, kneading, etc. are all part of a big interconnected system that will have different results in your brand :)

I recommend checking out recipes and the forums on www.thefreshloaf.com. I also really recommend keeping some simple notes when you bake sourdough - what you did, how everything seemed, and how the bread came out. Over time, you’ll adjust and manipulate your own processes to get closer and closer to the bread you want.

I paid $10 for this pre-Corona and have made several loaves so far. https://www.udemy.com/join/login-popup/?next=/course/sourdou...

Ken Forkish's book 'Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast' has led me to making some great breads, and every step is explained and has photos.

There's as many ways to make bread as there are bakers, and they are probably all good.

Being in lockdown has enabled me to really focus on our vegetable garden this year. Am even getting into weeding which is not normally something I enjoy.

This. I used to grow veg before commuting and children got in the way. Last time I tried I didn't have the time to keep on top of the weeds. I hope that now we are all at home all the time, I'll be able to do a bit of hoeing any day I like.

I run tech at a small farming and gardening supply company in Maine. We’ve seen order volume jump 2-300% in the past few weeks. We’ve done several VPS upgrades to handle the increased traffic, and our order number allocation system has broken down several times recently. Our digital infrastructure is keeping up now, but we’re all still scrambling to keep the staff healthy and safe as we all work to get the orders out the door safely and responsibly.

Puts a new twist on "Elastic Beanstalk"

I hope this convinces people to become more self-sufficient overall and grow a little of their own food. Living farther out from dense urban cores on more land will help, and conveniently, it will also make one less likely to fall ill. Telecommuting will hopefully enable people to live much less densely and avoid something like this recurring at its present scale.

Sprawl is starting to look pretty good right about now.

The climate impact of individuals living in the city vs those living in the suburbs is considerable. More people living away from the city increases deforestation and is a net negative as far as lifestyle is concerned. Telecommuting is a nice option but most businesses don't work that way. I work in the commercial arts world. A lot of it is sensory stimuli and requires paying butts in seats. I can't dropship an experience through Amazon working from bungalow in Chiang Mai.

>The climate impact of individuals living in the city vs those living in the suburbs is considerable.

Yes, but in the opposite direction of what you imply.

>More people living away from the city increases deforestation

Why would that be the case? Almost all deforestation is for land for farming, not for houses. How much oil is burned growing food and shipping it and storing it and lighting and cooling stores to sell it?

>is a net negative as far as lifestyle is concerned.

Not everyone values the same materialistic things you do.

>I work in the commercial arts world

That's a make-work industry that doesn't need to exist. Consider the massive environmental impact of your industry, and how it adds absolutely no value to society at all. Yet you want to stop people from living further away from massive disease spreading urban centers and growing their own food at a cost of zero burned oil?

> Consider the massive environmental impact of your industry, and how it adds absolutely no value to society at all.

What massive environmental impact? Commercial art sounds like one of the least energy intensive occupations. You just sit in front of a laptop with low energy consumption. You are sharing a building with hundreds of other people. You probably take public transport instead of commuting by car, live in a small apartment and share heating with other people. Really the biggest pollution source is the food that you are eating as an artist and that's not your fault. It's the fault of the farmer that is using diesel tractors, fertilizing his plants with artificial fertilizer, shipping his food with diesel trucks. All of these pollution sources will have to switch to renewable energy one day. What about that laptop? It's probably running on Renewables today!

>What massive environmental impact?

The one you describe in the rest of your post. Billions of tons of CO2 emissions and the outcome is a negative burden on society rather than a benefit.

>It's the fault of the farmer that is using diesel tractors, fertilizing his plants with artificial fertilizer, shipping his food with diesel trucks.

None of those things are the farmer's fault. They are the inevitable and mandatory cost of urbanization. Were you planning to just starve while making ads?

>All of these pollution sources will have to switch to renewable energy one day

That is physically impossible. What will have to happen is techno-industrial society will collapse as we exit the tiny blip in history of abundant energy.

I'm glad people are doing this. Us long-term gardeners, farmers, farm lifestylers and preppers are happy to answer any questions.

> answer any questions

well, since you offered... ;) I've heard differing advice on using coffee grounds in gardens: some say you should and some say you shouldn't. Am I doing my garden a disservice dumping each day's pot of coffee grounds into the dirt? I'm trying to grow tomatos, peppers (jalapeno, bell and poblano), cilantro, beans, squash and zucchini.

You should add it to the compost, spreading it to ground will probably don't do much as it will oxidize away.

Coffee grounds are good. Either compost or dig in directly.

Many people get confused about pH. Coffee grounds are acidic. But it will have negligable effect on soil pH. Something about buffering capacity (I'm sure I'll be corrected by someone). Same thing with pine needles. They are acidic but will not change soil pH.

They won't make much difference right away, but adding organic matter improves the soil over time.

Let me explain the pH thing better, now that I've had a think. Soil has a cation exchange capacity (CEC). Some soils have higher capacity then others. Think if it like a numeric count of all the molecular points where a cation could ionically bond. On each of those points, either you have a hydrogen (which makes it acidic) or another cation (which generally makes it alkaline). Those are calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, but also a few others in minute quantities even lead (Pb+2). Ammonium is a cation too.

When adding something, it adds more CEC attachment points, but also more cations and more hydrogen.

Within just the coffee grounds, many of the CEC points are occupied by hydrogen, so it is acidic. But when you compare the number of CEC points to that in the soil, the amount in your soil overwhelms. The good cations in your soil wont be affected much until you have enormous levels of coffee grounds (like >10% or something, I'd have to calculate it and I haven't).

And of course you can always just measure the pH and add cations which will displace the hydrogen (it will bond with the anion). Calcium is cheapest which is why people use agricultural lime. Dolomite will give you some magnesium which will probably produce healthier veggies. Potassium is important but too much will just bulk up the veggies rather than letting them develop more healthfully. Sodium is almost never useful.

Out of curiousity regarding the beans, are they doing well? Have you grown them before? One thing I learned that nobody seems to mention is that legumes don't necessarily fix their own nitrogen. In my soil, for instance, beans do poorly and leaves get chlorosis because there aren't any appropriate rhizobium for them to utilize (I've checked the roots - no nodules at all). If you can innoculate the beans before planting they do much better. Adding nitrogen fertilizer hasn't actually helped as much as I would have expected, but does help somewhat -- unfortunately that also inhibits any use of any existing rhizobium. Even so, pole beans give me a 15-fold return on my seed planting (that's actually pretty poor compared to what is expected, but I still think it's a great return).

Zucchini is easy and you'll be amazed how fast they grow. So is squash (same family).

Tomatoes, peppers and cilantro don't grow well where I live. They like the heat.

This mean that your soil is just rich enough in Nitrogen yet

Therefore Zucchini grows as kelp, as usual, but beans just so-so. They will still yield but will not develop nodules.

You could find useful to rotate parcels and put the beans in the old soil, not in the freshly enriched this year.

In cold areas you can try rhubarb and horseradish (a wasabi substitute)

Thanks. Next summer (southern hemisphere) I'm putting beans after a cover crop of mustard/lupin/oat over winter, and I'm also checking with the local seed store for rhizobium innoculant designed for beans (after this lockdown).

Horseradish grows like a weed here, rhubarb also does great, you are spot on with that advice.

It's great if you can efficiently do it and actually use the results. If you have free time, or kids to help out, I think gardening can be a great hobby and help supplement your nutrition. I think it takes some practice to get right. Fertilization, bug control, selecting varieties, site selection and preparation... My past attempts at gardening have reminded me of the comparative advantage of outsourcing my food supply. Even when my garden has done well, I struggled to eat the results(weeks of non-stop zucchini gets old), and didn't have the time for preservation.

I love gardening. Have a lot of really fond memories of playing in my mom's garden (despite terrible allergies) while she was working on it. Tomatoes, rhubarb, raspberries, all sorts of other spices and nectar plants for things like bees and hummingbirds. One summer memory in particular sticks with me, because it was probably my first lesson in the scientific method. Mom's hollyhock plants came down with what ended up being a bad case of rust[1]. We changed the watering routine, fertilizer...nothing worked. This was before google and all that, so we first went to the library and got some gardening books. Went out and compared pictures, but none were exactly the same. Next I clipped some leaves from the plants and we went down to the garden shop a few blocks away and, sure enough, the guy behind the counter (kicking myself I can't remember his name, probably 85 or so with crystal white hair) gave the diagnosis and recommended cutting off all the affected leaves and burning them. Saved the whole lot!

Unfortunately, because of work, I live in a city now and that means ... no yard with a garden. The wife also loves gardening. Anyone have any tips for setting something up in an apartment with a balcony? Irrigation is my primary concern.

[1] https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/flowers/hollyhoc...

You can make self watering pots with 5 gallons buckets, their lid, a pipe, and an old T-shirt. But if you’re not going away, you can simply water every day.

Planting your own garden ensures you know what crap is sprayed onto the plants.

There is not a shortage issue, there is a logistics issue.

The logistics issue is that we have commercial and retail supply chains that are Apples & Oranges level different in terms of getting end consumers what they need.

For instance:

1) Commercial Offices - why is toilet paper disappearing especially in big cities? It's not the production side that's failing. It's that a huge amount of toilet paper is bought and distributed by commercial contract stockers. The supply chain has NOT adjusted to get commercially stocked toilet paper to retail centers. And making it worse commercial distributors are FORBIDDEN to sell to retail in many cases! So now you're dealing with a supply chain + beurocratic issue. There are Mt. Everest sized stocks of commercial TP sitting in warehouses all over America.

2) Commercial Restaurants - These establishments fed the MAJORITY of office workers in major cities up until 3 weeks ago. Commercial restaurant supply chains are reeling - they have stock sitting on shelves and are trying to figure out how to get it into the retail supply chain with similar beurocratic and logistics issues.

There is not a food / grocery shortage and there is unlikely to be a food / grocery shortage in the USA.

But it is going to take some time to sort out how to adjust to this new normal.

And inevitably as soon as we figure it out the pendulum will swing the other way :)

Agreed 100%. But while you can repackage toilet paper, it’s harder for most people to deal with 10# cans of beans when they would otherwise buy and use 1#.

But I guess that bucket of pickles can be rejarred, if they’re available.

You make a good point about the supply chains.

There is not a food shortage yet. However, I would not be surprised if there is a shortage of labor intensive food products in a month or so, depending on storage limits. I would not expect shortages of less labor intensive staples like cereal crops and maybe milk. It seems to me that meat packing is fairly labor intensive, so I would not be surprised if meat becomes more scarce at some point.

Fresh vegetables seem fairly labor intensive. Fruits can be warehoused for a year or so(AFAIK, at least in the case of apples). Some vegetables are probably more automated(potatoes, corn). I wonder about salad greens though.

FWIW, if you're just now considering getting a chest freezer to stockpile frozen goods, good luck. Everyone is sold out.

It's important to remember that many of these labor-intensive crops are harvested by migrant workers who are facing much harsher treatment by our Federal Government than in previous years. This, plus the trade war with China have significantly reduced the output of the USA's agricultural sector.

I suspect we will see shortages of lots of key foodstuffs in the coming months, or higher prices as these goods are imported.

With 30% of the US economy out of work and the gov't prioritizing business vs. consumer handouts I would argue the inverse.

80% of people that get COVID have a mild case.(1)

Mild / average cases of COVID run ~2 weeks beginning to end.

Farming, food production, and grocery is NOT going to close down.

The available labor pool has massively expanded and without paycheck or stimulus coming lots of Americans playing 1-rung above farm labor are going to fill any void in the migrant labor pool.

(1) https://www.webmd.com/lung/covid-recovery-overview#1

That doesn't take into account fear and the need to care for family. If, for instance, Mexico gets hit hard by COVID, you might see an effect on US agricultural labor supply as people return home to care for family or attend funerals. There is a fear factor as well. In China, I remember reading people were simply refusing to show up for work.

> Americans playing 1-rung above farm labor are going to fill any void in the migrant labor pool.

Has this ever happened in modern times? I can see Americans filling voids in the construction and service industries, but farm labor is pretty hard work and doesn't pay well. Will Americans take a farm job when they can sit idle and collect enhanced unemployment benefits?

Keep in mind that farm workers generally don't have quality health care, and will likely fare worse as a population than an averaged sample of cases.

"In China, I remember reading people were simply refusing to show up for work."

This might be what happens with people who can afford to live off their savings or state support while out of work, but many won't be so fortunate.

Here's a more likely scenario for many of the seasonal workers who supply our food:

I soon spotted a group of men huddled in a corner...

I stopped and asked them, from a safe distance, if they were following the lockdown.

Ramesh Kumar, who comes from Banda district in Uttar Pradesh state, said that he knew "there won't be anybody to hire us, but we still took our chances".

"I earn 600 rupees ($8; £6.50) every day and I have five people to feed. We will run out of food in a few days. I know the risk of coronavirus, but I can't see my children hungry," he said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52002734

The short term outlook for produce is fine. However, the medium term outlook doesn't look good. It is unclear where the supply for farm labor will come from for the rest of the year. The border with Mexico is locked down.

Given that because of quarantine measures a lot of people have little or no work to do at the moment, that might be a potential source of farm labor (which is mostly unskilled labor anyways)?

Canada is not enforcing border closures against temporary foreign farm workers.

The US may be about to discover what a combination of its immigration enforcement policies, combined with its unwillingness to pay farmhands wages that Americans can live on, will result in.

In the Netherlands, soon after the first measures were put in place, they decided to open up the wholesale stores to private persons (normally, by law, only businesses are allowed to use these). I have no idea how many people actually go there, but in the light of this situation it may well have been a smart move.

I received my Permaculture Design Certificate from Bill Mollison, my Permaculture for Aid Workers from Geoff Lawton, designed two properties, both included food forests, and I also like long walks on the beach and sushi. WHO’S HIRING APRIL 2020. Joke aside, gardens not only provide food, I’ve found they act as an anti-depressant and are quite fun to build.

One principle of Permaculture is to optimize space to provide for human needs. I feel like the HN community could come up with some cool shit in this space.

Made a good penny selling my tomato starts this year. More than covered my seed purchases for our garden (not due to coronavirus, I just like gardening and splurged on them this year).

I’m curious if the Feds will start to crack down on this kind of behavior. Think of the impact on veggie prices once a good portion of Americans are growing their own food. The New Deal already showed the US could come in a demand you pay fines for not buying crops you don’t need. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

I'm encouraged to see this. I don't really have anything profound or witty to say, but this makes me feel like we're probably going to be okay.

Related to this the sales of my gardening app in March were about 100% higher than usual. That's coming off a low base (people don't like paying for apps) but it's a big change. Most of that was in Australia where it's coming into winter so it's not the usual vegetable gardening time. You can't buy vegetable seedlings anywhere at present as they're sold out immediately.

Aspirationally, I’d like to put in the “Three Sisters” (corn, beans, and squash) https://redandhoney.com/milpa-plant-one/.

What pests should I worry about in Northern California?

Plant them and find out - it's an interesting learning exercise! You'll get slugs and aphids whatever - plant lots of pollinator friendly native flowering plants to attract hoverflies and parasitic wasps - they'll help you out.

Some garden plants are sure to attract lots of pests. But corn, beans, and squash are not among the most heavily attacked in my experience. You probably won't have too much of a pest problem.

The crops with the most pests (in my experience) are brassicas (white butterfly), tomatoes (everything seems to attack tomatoes!), and beets (slugs).

Nasturtiums as a trap crop supposedly can draw away aphids. But remember that nasturtiums attract aphids. So it's a gamble. I guess just don't plant them too close. I've never tried.

I live in a place where it’s not good weather most of the year. So I tried some indoor garden with grow light somehow it didn’t work the plants seemed to be sick just gave up. Instead I am stocking up some frozen veggies if they really goes short.

It takes minimum 1 acre of land to feed an adult. Small gardens make sense for things that are needlessly expensive, like mint, basil, etc...

If you have a backyard, the least effort - highest output thing you can plant is a fruit tree.

If you're hungry, you plant dense staple crops - an acre can yield something like 10 tons of potatoes (or carrots or pumpkins) - if you're not selling produce, then even planting 0.1-0.2 acres of potatoes means you'd have more potatoes than your family needs (because you eat lots of other things). It also takes a lot of labor if you don't have specialized machinery and will take a lot of space in the basement, but it will keep you from starving even from quite small plots of land.

A fruit tree is great, but the proper time to plant one is ten years ago.

>It takes minimum 1 acre of land to feed an adult

No it doesn't. Potatoes are 15 million calories an acre at the low end of yields. That's enough to feed 20 people. At the high end you get twice that. How much land it takes to feed a person is entirely dependant on what that person wants to eat. I grow a balanced diet of meat, dairy, eggs, grains, potatoes, fruits and vegetables for five people on two acres, and I'm not using all that space and I choose to grow low efficiency things like berries because we like them.

Here's the list for this year, first growing season after recovering from the Nov 2018 fire:

- Red, green & yellow bell peppers

- Jalapeños

- Okra

- Heirloom tomatos

- Cherry tomatos

- Yellow squash

- Zucchini

- Watermelon

- Sweet corn

- Sunflowers

Critters we have to deal with:

- Black bears

- Deer

- Crows

- Blue jays

- Turkeys

- Squirrels

- Snails

- Drug addicts who can't see me or the Glock I'm racking

Hydroponics are really easy to produce :)

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