Keep a record of your plans and activities. At the least, you should know how much seed you used, the area you planted, and whether the amount you produced was too much, not enough or just right. When I first started gardening here in Ashland, Va. If you prefer canning, following directions closely is especially important. My attitude toward canning has changed now that I eat fresh from the garden as much as possible all year. I grow crops that store well all by themselves so that even in winter we have carrots, beets, onions and sweet potatoes learn more in Food Storage: You can learn more about solar dryers from Eben Fodor and the folks at SunWorks.
I no longer can applesauce, but I can easily make it as needed from dried apples, and the bulk of my tomatoes are dried by the sun.
- A Plan for Food Self-Sufficiency - Modern Homesteading - MOTHER EARTH NEWS.
- DAWN and The Sacred Pool.
- How to Mess Up Your Life: One Lousy Day at a Time.
- Resources for Small Scale Self-Sufficiency.
Freezing is a convenient option but requires a power source year-round, making your food vulnerable to power outages. The book So Easy to Preserve also available online at the National Center for Home Food Preservation has information on freezing and drying in addition to canning. Now, however, I buy in smaller quantities from local farmers or share a larger order with neighbors and friends.
You could also raise your own smaller animals and process them as needed for the table, thus eliminating the need for preservation altogether. If you raise livestock, you can render their fats to create cooking oils such as lard and tallow.
Learn more about making and using lard in the book Lard: If you raise dairy animals, you can turn the cream into flavorful sweet or cultured butters. Read How to Make Butter and Buttermilk. You can grow sunflowers, pumpkins, peanuts, hazelnuts and other plants to make cooking oil from their seeds. Some nuts and seeds contain more oil than others — for example, almonds, hazelnuts filberts , peanuts, sesame seeds and walnuts have an oil content of more than 50 percent.
For best results, be sure to use oilseed varieties of sunflowers and pumpkins, which have an oil content of about 45 percent.
How to Start an Organic Vegetable Garden
Find a chart detailing the yields you can expect from growing various nuts and oilseeds, including their oil content, in Growing Nuts and Seed Crops for Homegrown Cooking Oils. To obtain oil from your nut or oilseed crop, you will need to invest in an oil press. Keeping bees to produce your own honey is easy, plus having these pollinators active in your garden will help increase your yields. Bees forage over several square miles, so encouraging the enhancement of the ecosystem in your community will be to your advantage.
A single hive may produce up to 50 pounds of honey per year. Read Keep Bees, Naturally! If you live in an area with sugar maple trees, you can make your own maple syrup from the sap. One to three tapholes per tree are typical, and each taphole yields 5 to 15 gallons of sap. Ten gallons of sap boils down to about 1 quart of syrup. Check out Enjoy Real Maple Syrup for more details.
You could also grow sorghum to satisfy your sweet tooth. According to Gene Logsdon in his book Small-Scale Grain Raising , an acre of sorghum can produce about gallons of syrup. From a square-foot planting, you might expect close to 10 gallons of juice, which will boil down to a gallon of syrup. Backyard chickens are a relatively simple starter livestock.
After they begin laying, expect about eggs a year from each hen. After they have outgrown their usefulness as layers, they can become stewing hens. Goats or cows can provide your dairy products. A family cow can produce 3 or more gallons of milk per day. Its calf would yield about pounds of meat at 18 months.
Start Your Own Simple, Super-Productive Backyard Farm - Gardening - Mother Earth Living
Learn more in Keep a Family Cow. Goats and sheep need less space and feed, making them ideal for small acreages and even some urban lots. One dairy goat can provide about a gallon of milk per day and offspring for meat. Raising a kid to 6 months yields about 30 pounds of meat, including bones. For other meat options, a feeder pig raised to 7 months about pounds can yield about pounds of meat. You can use a pen, but adding pasture is ideal. If you only have a small space, rabbits may be your meat animal of choice. Litters from one pound doe can produce 80 pounds of meat per year.
Learn more in Rabbit: Self-Reliant Living in the City has a plan for a rabbit-chicken integrated housing system. Remember that the road to food self-sufficiency should be a community effort. Decide what you can do, share the surplus with others, and find like-minded people to embark on this journey with you. Gardening educator Cindy Conner is using her decades of gardening and food preservation experience to detail how to grow a complete diet in a small space and get the food to the table using the smallest amount of fossil fuels.
I would also like to mention that volunteering a few hours a week at a community food bank garden is very helpful too. I volunteer just 4 hours per week at the local organic community food bank garden. The garden produced and delivered more than pounds of fresh produce for the local food banks.
The volunteers are able to take fresh produce home year round. I am able to grow a greater variety in my mid-sized garden and bring home crops that require greater space from the community garden. For example, scarlet runner beans are fast growers with showy red flowers and edible pods. Edible flowers such as pansies and nasturtiums make pretty additions to salads, and nothing beats the sunflower for charm and height in the back of a sunny garden. Grapevines can be trained up a trellis or over a pergola, and colorful Swiss chard can be planted in hanging baskets.
Ground covers such as strawberries, oregano and creeping thyme can fill in spaces under taller plants.
Grow the produce that makes sense for you. Consider what you buy and eat most, and plan your garden accordingly. If you make smoothies for breakfast, you might want to grow strawberries or kale for a ready source of ingredients.
- Participate in Crop Rotation.
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Perhaps your kids favor broccoli and peas, or you use a lot of fresh spinach and lettuce for salads. If you love to cook, you might grow hard-to-find gourmet foods such as haricots verts or French fingerling potatoes. If you love golden raspberries, which can be expensive and scarce at the store, you might save money by cultivating a few canes. On the other hand, if local sweet corn is three ears for a dollar in your area, it might make more sense to invest your time, money and garden space to grow another crop. Re-evaluate your efforts at the end of the season, too.
Were the beets a bust? No matter what size yard you have, you can grow more food in less space by planting some crops vertically. Grow vining plants such as pole beans, peas and cucumbers straight up, supported by posts, teepees or cages. Vines can be coaxed to trail up a downspout, and trellises, wires or netting can also be attached to fences. Sprawling plants such as tomatoes, melons and squash can be trained to grow upright on heavy cages or trellises. If you install rain barrels under your downspouts, you can collect and use the water that accumulates after a storm to irrigate parts of your garden.
Commercially made rain barrels are available in many sizes and materials, and typically range in size from 50 to 80 gallons. Look for a model that has an overflow valve that kicks in and directs water away from your home when the barrel reaches capacity, a fine-mesh screen to keep insects out, and a spigot valve at the bottom to connect to a garden hose.
You can also make your own; find instructions in How to Make a Rain Barrel. As a simpler alternative, you can simply place large stockpots outside when it rains and use the water for irrigating small spaces. Not all states allow rainwater collection, so be sure to check regulations in your area. Also, enriching your soil will increase its ability to absorb and hold moisture—and reduce the amount of water that flows away from your property and down the storm drain. Raise small farm animals or bees.
Starting a Kitchen Garden
Do you have a yard with a sturdy fence and space for a hive, coop or shed? Honeybees, fowl and small animals are increasingly being permitted on residential properties in many places; check your local zoning ordinances and research licensing or permit requirements. For milk, you might consider Nigerian Dwarf goats , which grow to about 70 pounds and can produce up to three quarts of milk a day.
You can read much more about all of these possibilities. Make your own soil enhancements. A compost heap or bin will complete the circle of life in your backyard, turning garden trimmings and food scraps into rich humus.
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Best of all, everything you need to make compost is usually readily available in the yard: You can find instructions to make a compost bin out of reclaimed shipping pallets often available for free from area stores in DIY Shipping Pallet Compost Bin. Spreading a protective layer of mulch on top of soil and around plants reduces water usage and combats weeds. Organic mulch will also improve soil as it decomposes, and many yards already have materials that are perfect for the task—from grass clippings and leaves to pine needles and compost.
Dry your clothes for free. Hang damp laundry on a clothesline instead and take advantage of free sunshine and breezes to dry your clothes. A few municipalities have banned clotheslines for aesthetic reasons, but a retractable clothesline, a collapsible model or a small standing rack may work for you. For stiff clothes such as cotton towels and blue jeans, a five-minute final tumble in the dryer after drying on the line will generally soften the fabric. Of course the biggest reason of all to hang laundry outside may be the fresh, clean aroma of sheets dried in the sunshine.
Power lights and small electronics. Consider solar-powered lights for nighttime illumination around your yard. The panels absorb sun power during the day and gradually release the light in the darkness. If you invest in portable accent lights some look like candles or Mason jars , you can also bring them inside to cast a warm glow at your dinner table.
Read more in Energizer Rechargeable Solar Charger. Other easy-to-use solar gadgets include sun-powered radios, calculators and flashlights. If you live in a dry climate where the days are typically sunny and hot during harvest time, you can preserve a variety of fruits and vegetables by dehydrating them in the sun. Dry the beans you pick from your garden, preserve your tomatoes by sun-drying them, and make your own fruit leathers and dried fruits such as plums and peaches—free of the preservatives and additives sometimes found in commercially dried foods.
For even greater versatility, you can harness sunbeams to power a solar oven. On a sunny day, you can cook rice, eggs, chicken or fish in an hour or two, and if you have three to four hours you can cook vegetables such as potatoes, carrots and beans or even bread and muffins. Our yards can also be places where we can enhance our health.