How much garden you would need to survive on
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
This year something ate the leaves off all my cucumber plants and they stopped producing after about 3 weeks. In 6 or 7 years of having them, that has never happened before.
One year squirrels overran the neighborhood and did the same to tomatoes. (The little f-ers take one bite of a tomato and drop it. It's so frustrating.)
One year I had to go out of town unexpectedly for 2 weeks and we happened to have a dry few weeks. Most of my plants died or were in bad shape.
Just off the cuff, if I were planning to do this, I would personally immediately almost double the size of garden I was told I needed just because I expect there would be a lot of loss.
Then you have the effort of preserving all the food. The modern house isn't a great place to store potatoes. You'll probably want to can/jar most of it. I mean you could freeze it, but in a survival situation you probably don't have reliable power. Oh, and like you said with a dry spell, where are you storing enough water for the dry season? We just got over a 60 day spell with no rain. Wouldn't want to try and survive here.
Things like: permanent wiring and netting to keep out possums and rats, a bordering method to deter as many slugs as possible, frameworks such as tubes and hooks to convert beds to polyhouses or add shade for winter and summer. I have a couple of these things now, but they're a bit of a mishmash.
It's too easy to put in a lot of effort and end up with scraps because a pest cleaned you out.
I'm also limited in poisoning because the neighbour has a dog. Rats live in our compost bin and are tough to keep out. Possums here in South Australia are protected so we can't trap them and they cause trouble as well. Lost all my garlic and chives this year to black aphids. Virtually no stone fruit lasted until picking last year. Too hot through summer or not enough bees for zucchinis to set fruit.
The things that did well are mostly herbs/chillis/etc that aren't exactly the bulk you live off!
Sometimes I wonder if the best home approach is growing herbs so you don't get stuck paying a premium at the shop, and maybe 1-2 other things for the experience and to share with family/friends.
The ease of that depends on where you live. I live in the southern US, so we don't have a frost line in the soil. Accordingly, most homes are built on post-tensioned slabs (newer) or conventional (older) foundations. There's also shrink-swell soil, so a poured concrete basement would crack (the slab floats on this, but walls would be harder to do). Just because of the topography of my lot, it would be hard to have an external cellar (and it definitely would not be as cool as those found in more northern climates).
Despite living in the city, this probably wouldn't do much. They always come back. I have chipmunks that I have not seen in over a year and yet I hear them bark a warning call when I am apparently approaching their vicinity. I bet they have been at some of my tomatoes this year.
I have regular rabbits and this year, one or more racoons have moved into the neighborhood. I have seen skunks and wild turkey in my yard in the past. We have deer but they don't jump my fence since we installed the 6 footers.
The rabbits definitely do some damage, but one of them is my bud. He hangs out about 6 feet from me and eats clover while I weed my garden.
Like, lots of buckets. Food storage, food preservation, cooking, water storage (drinking, washing, utility), and sewage. And in most cases you won't want a lot of overlap with those; your poop bucket stays a poop bucket.
Also jars, bottles, sacks, bags, wraps, blankets, etc. Unsexy stuff, but often critical.
My my area of expertise, but can you preserve most foods without a significant bulk of salt or sugar? Especially if you're talking about a significant portion of a year's worth of calories.
That means you'd also need a salt mine, a sugar crop, or tons of honey or maple syrup you make on site.
So much of "live off the grid to" me seems like fantasy. Or quietly ignoring all the ingredients you still get from the grid. Fundamentally, any western standard of life from the past few hundred years requires local and long distance trade, which means interdependence and a large community. This go it alone fantasy just isn't possible.
In southern Spain you could have fresh veg all year round. In the UK you're going to be struggling in January and would need much more land area.
According to[0], a hectare (100m x 100m) should yield 25,000kg in a year. That's a whole heck of a lot of potatoes.
Drop it by 2 orders of magnitude (10mx10m) and you are looking at 250kg /year. Which sounds like a reasonable amount both for a large garden and human consumption.
This article also reports that Niedersachsen potato fields (large state in northern Germany) produce an average of 45,000 kg/hectare, or about 18,000 kg/acre.
It's way more efficient for everybody to divide labor this way than to have each household be its own independent and self-sustaining system.
As my econ prof loved to say all models of the world dont assume there is mindlessly ambitious J P Morgan out there. And have nothing interesting to say about what to do about him.
Potatoes alone take 60 to 90 days to grow (weather and varieties) and 'only' take up two to three days of full work (at most) per bed per crop (split the above into (say) three or four rotating beds).
The work is to turn and fork grown potatoes out, and prepping | weeding soil at same time, and then (same time) working new potato cuttings with eyes back in - then cleaning and storing - as potatoes are consumed bits that have budding eyes can be cut out and set aside for planting next time.
If you've got a spare back acre you can pretty much swap gym time for garden time and stay active, healthy, and mostly eat food you grow yourself (location dependant).
His back's fine and he spent a decade on shearing teams.
Work steady, smarter not harder.
The average person needs <1m calories per year.
Do that and you end up with a big clay garden pot that'll grow anything.
But yep, that's the game with agriculture, long term steady work to improve conditions, soils, drainage, mulch pits, septic lines, fruit trees, etc.
I've got a video somewhere of me hitting the ground on our block with spade in the summer and it bouncing off like it hit solid concrete, crazy stuff.
I bet you a beer they don't grow olive trees and grains enough to feed themselves in 50 Square meters.
I don’t think the rest of the world was much different.
Anyway, I wonder how much of that was due to limits of technology/knowledge (they just didn't know how to grow more) vs. limits in social organization (they didn't grow more because it wasn't worth it for them).
I think it's really awesome for people to grow their own food but at the same time we need to have our eyes open - industrial ag is the backbone of our civilization, our way of life, and our freedom to do anything else with our time is dependent on it.
There are home gardeners out there who tout how much of their food they grow but curiously never seem to address that the bulk of their calories come from your industrial staple grains and starches.
I've had boxes of emergency rations (add hot water to get some rice meal) in our house, but they usually just advertise lasting for just a few years.
For dry / packaged goods (dried beans, lentils, pasta, rice, spices, toast, etc) you can basically ignore the best-before date. Sugar (or -syrups, honey) & salt keep indefinitely.
'Wet' stuff, as long as sealed hermetically (like canned goods, shelf-stable drinks etc): similar. Seal broken: all bets are off. Use eyes / nose / texture as indicator, or don't risk it.
Long storage of these isn't a safe-to-eat, but a quality issue. Taste, sometimes texture, and vitamin / nutritional value deteriorates over time. 'Wet' stuff generally faster. Up to a point where you're left with tasteless calories with 0 vitamin content (but still safe to eat!).
Also: say you have 5y worth of food stored. Then you'd need to replace that vast amount of food semi-regularly (like use 1y worth, give away & replace the rest), which is very costly. Or consume everything yourself (FIFO). In which case a 5y's worth store would mean eating -on average- 5y old food. Not to mention the cost/waste if that supply is somehow lost (flooding, housefire, bugs, rodents, whatever).
Imho a 1 month up to 1 or 2y supply is a better compromise. Modest space/$ investment & most stuffs can be eaten within their BB date. But enough for peace of mind or ride out a wave of economic / social mayhem. Add some vitamin pills if you're worried about fresh fruits/veggies remaining available.
I've grown my own food at times. And imho substinence farming is underrated. But as a hedge against catastrophy? No. Do it for fun, do it if you have a large garden & like your independence. Or prefer the organic-everything & knowing where your food comes from.
Otherwise just buy food in bulk & stuff it in cellar (or wherever).
I got some potatoes from the local market, from a region that traditionally is planting a lot of them. These were the best potatoes I had in a long time. They were more yellow in color, much denser and tastier.
I also got some tomatoes that were quite big, softer meat and very good taste. These kinds of tomatoes can not be sold in big retail chains because they are easily damaged by transport (soft skin).
I saw a documentary about seeds. A french lady was beeing harassed by different french institutions because she was mailing traditional plant seeds to people. In Romania there are still people that use their own seeds but we also have people buying the same seeds that comercial farmers use. In this case the produce will taste more or less the same like the ones from the big stores.
PS: I forgot to mention, my potatoes had deep "eyes" (roots) inside them. This means that they can not be peeled with a machine in a factory. They are not comercially viable.
I had been on half a litter of veg soup plus 2 eggs plus 2 sausages, some bread, some nuts. A day. For months. And I felt absolutely fantastic. Now okay its a tat too short, lack variety and all, and its to note i wasnt working much. I have since got more resources and been able to eat a more balanced diet. But this gives you an idea of what we are talking about here when we say you can eat less. You still need some amount of calories every day but its really all different on many levels and no chance you go on 4k calories for no reasons other than "youre hungry". This 16 hours fasting is marvelous. It's all about the intestines somehow. You want them clean.
Please adapt to your own situation, you may have physical conditions that could affect your ability to do that, check with a specialist.
muscle is extremely important for maintaining mobility and independence as you age. with this diet, even with training, it will be impossible to build any. past 30, without outside intervention, humans lose around 10% of muscle mass per decade. what happens when you're 70 and can barely walk after losing what little muscle you have? best have a reserve...
and the healthier ones are similarly lean but more muscular.
also, while caloric needs drop, protein needs rise as older people show blunted anabolic responses to protein and thus need more protein to maximize muscle protein synthesis
2 eggs = 12g 2 sausages = 14g 2 handfuls nuts = 14g 1 cup beans = 12g
Well yes, its a number picked and agreed upon to serve the goal of conquering the western United States. It was self-sustaining in a sense because the west was conquered, hell we don't even have native locusts anymore. But at the individual family level it was not self-sustaining in some cases, and in others it was quite more than enough which was what I was addressing for OP.
> hell we don't even have native locusts anymore
Not unique to the American West
I'll share my setup in case anyone wants a real life data point: I have about 2400 square feet of garden (in 4 plots), 19 fruit/nut trees, a small vineyard, blueberry/blackberry bushes, and various animals like chickens. I also grow indoors during the winter and have an herb garden. I think we'll accomplish this goal once the trees I've planted in the last 5 years start producing full loads, but we're probably at around 40% of needs currently. Technically, I could probably get much closer now if I hunted deer, since there's huge herds in the area and I'd qualify for a DNR crop damage permit (allowing me to take many additional deer over the limit and out of season), along with other animals. I have plenty of space for additional garden plots too, but don't really have any more bandwidth for it due to working full time as a software engineer.
Worth noting that while I have this goal, I'm not really min/maxing it either. I "waste" space/energy on flowers, gourds, luffas, and other nonedible things. Also, this is just a fun hobby, not really something too serious.
What article doesn't cover is the amont of hard work required to sustain such garden. At least we had a two-wheel tractor that tremendously helped with planting, bushing, weeding and harvesting.
Harvesting is not a final step either. You need to let it dry, clean from soil and probably sort by size to pick ones you will plant later. You need a pretty big, cold and dark storage for over a tonne of food. You need a way to transport it to your kitchen. So work spent by us only on potatoes was ~400 man hours each year.
How did you address disease being introduced when resowing? I usually buy accredited seed potatoes because if I sow the eyes from old potatoes, sometimes by the time I'm harvesting, I find that the inside is diseased.
In the country I'm from potato is the main ingredient in traditional cuisine (you could try to guess what country it is):
- potato in any form: baked, boiled, fried, mashed; often with cutlets/baked fish/beans and onions
- various soups with chicken/meatballs and vegetables
- potato pancakes[1]
- some salads where potato is a main ingredient[2]
I might've missed some, but in our family we basically ate boiled potatoes every dinner.
> Did you and any siblings find it miserable or did you cope well?
Yes, both miserable from eating it so often, and from having to help in the vegetable garden (it was forced by our parents). 8 year later, I still feel oversaturated by eating it and I consume it not very often.
> How did you address disease being introduced when resowing?
We collected potato beetles by hand... I still remember half-cut 1L bottles with them.
Some chemicals existed at that time, but we never used it, probably because parents thought that they might be harmful for humans...
> ...I find that the inside is diseased
Surprisingly, not much tubers were diseased or rotten.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_pancake
[2]: https://sweetandsavorymeals.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/p...
My background is Slovenian, and potatoes are common for us also, though not really potato pancakes that I can remember. We had some great potato salads and soups though!
Potato bread, potatoes galettes, gnocchis, inside dumplings, soup, gratins, mashed, baked, fried, boiled, &c.
People eat pasta or rice everyday with no issues, potatoes can be used in the same way, if not more
My back-of-an-envelope maths tells me your family worked for approximately £2 per hour, though I imagine if this was a few decades ago that would be worth a lot more.
I think your math is skewed to a higher end because there potato is (and probably was) significantly cheaper than in US or EU (today it is ~4 times cheaper, 0.7$/kg).
Even though, considering todays mean salary there (5$/hr), 2$/hr is not that bad for such job...
Where in the world was this?
Even if you just grew potatoes you would likely be starving.
So, one person will need 1 Acre (43560 sq feet) / (17.8 / 1.095) = 2679.6741573 sq feet of potatoes. Which will be 248.8872 sq meters (10 by 20 meters field).
It is either my math is wrong, or article is wron by order of magnitude
I could see this developed into an efficient garden with 3-4 shipping container sized portions running west-east with the most opaque at the rear to avoid blocking winter sun. Maybe something like: [1] enclosed and controlled space with vertical farming, grow lights, solar panels, heat pads, etc, [2] glasshouse with summer ventilation and hydroponic buckets and tubes/shelves, [3] open wicking beds with framework for climbing plants or shading, etc.
There are many practical concerns related to timing and food storage which are not considered in the original article which you can learn about in this series.
The followup, Victorian Farm [1], demonstrates how much of a force multiplier industrialization is, but also shows how capital intensive the machinery is, and it becomes pretty obvious why large scale industrial farms are the end state for feeding people at scale.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Green_Valley
> You’re going to need a margin of error if you’re going to live off your garden—and you will likely need a year or two to figure out what not to do and make adjustments to your plan.
You can live without any sort of oil, but concretely it's really terrible to eat without fats.
And salt, of course.
- Photosynthetic efficiency (sunlight to starch) 0.5% for typical crop plants [1]
- Average daily sunlight of 5kWh/m2 [2] or 18MJ/m2.
- Daily requirement is 8700 kJ for adults.
With 200 sqft you will only get ~1700 kJ. Even if you a had a cow stomach that could digest the entire biomass of the plant (2~3%) you would barely make it.
And then there's the issue of where you will get any nutrient other than carbohydrates.
I am in full agreement the thekevan -- I would take excepted yield and multiple by .75. Things just don't work out very well at least 25% of the time.
There is no fixed dimension since it vary from local climate to local climate + margins due to weather variations year per year but just to get enough grains, nourish enough poultry and so on in temperate climate we need MUCH, MUCH more.
Just subscribe and post the RSS feed.
In the UK, snails were brought over by the Romans explicitly as a food item.