Many people first start gardening with the dream of self sufficient living in mind. Their early homestead starts will planning for some vegetables they like, a few chickens, and a small patch of land. While this is lovely and achievable dream it takes a lot of effort to get going and needs consistent maintenance. More than that, what you produce matters!
Getting Enough Calories from Your Homestead
Starting out your first goal is going to be figuring out how to get enough calories to live on out of your garden. This can be tough for a lot of reasons. First, you have to wait for your harvests. Second, you have to store your harvests so they don’t go bad. Lastly, you need to grow the right things to maximize your use of your space.
There are people out there who will tell you that you can do this on as little as one acre. While they’re not wrong they fail to describe just how much planning is required to do that. Let’s look closer at this by considering calories from different plants.
If you want to eat a 2000 calorie diet every day you’d need to eat a lot of garden food. Sure some things have more calories than others, but vegetables on average are low calorie foods. Let’s look at a few common examples here from the USDA FoodData Central:
- Carrot (medium size) – 25 calories
- Lettuce (a head) – 52 calories
- Onion (medium size) – 44 calories
- Potato (Yukon, Medium) – 110 calories
Even if you’re eating mostly potatoes you’re going to need to eat more than 18 potatoes a day to get your calories in! To further highlight how this a problem we also need to consider how long potatoes last and how much you can grow in an area. For simplicity sake let’s say your eating nothing but potatoes (which would be bad and unrealistic). 2000 calories a day for a year is 730,000 calories. So for the year you’d need to grow 6,636 potatoes. At best you can get about 10 potatoes per plant, so you need 664 plants. Each plant takes up about 2 square feet (on average with row space) so you’d need to dedicate 1,328 square feet to potatoes alone to get your calories.
Now when you consider that an acre of land is 43,560 square feet, it seems super easy, but of course you can’t live on potatoes alone and potatoes are the most caloric plant you can likely grow. On top of this without canning you can only keep potatoes for a maximum of 8 months, so you’ve got to figure out what to do for the rest of the time.
In reality, you need to grow a variety of calorie dense crops, leafy greens, protein rich beans, and grains to have a healthy and balanced diet come out of your garden. So how do you do that?
Grow Everything You Can
If you truly want to live off your land you need to grow as many different types of food as you can. You should grow a variety of vegetables each season that can be harvested in a staggered manner. You should grow foods that will be shelf stable over the winter. If you have the space you should grow grains which can yield flour and plants that produce high calorie edible seeds (like sunflowers) . If space allows you also want to grow sweet fruits like raspberries and strawberries and tree fruits like apples and pears.
Why do you need to grow everything though? It’s because you can’t predict how the garden will turn out. If you have a blight or a bad season you need to have backup crops that can survive or will come in. Additionally, you will run out of food your first year or two until you get good shelf stable reserves of beans, grains, and canned foods.
Grow Your Vegetables, Buy Your Butter
Can you get everything you need off of a small homestead? Yes. Should you, absolutely not. Things like sugar, butter, salt, and oil are all things you want to buy at the store. If you do things right you might only need these things when you go to the store which can save you a ton on your grocery bill, but the reason you don’t make these things at home is because the process is awful, time consuming, and far more costly than it would be to buy from the store.
If you’re in most place in the US you could make butter if you keep goats or cows. You could make sugar from beets, but trust us that’s difficult (6lbs of beets per 1lb of sugar). You can get oil from sunflowers or peanuts, but you need to grow a lot of either (~22lbs of peanuts per gallon of oil!). Unless you’re by a mine or the ocean, salt is out of the question to be produced at home.
Why does this all matter? Because you only have so much time and so much energy to spend on your farm and a majority of that time needs to be on making food that you can cook and eat. As an example here, we plan around 60-70 types of fruit and vegetables each year for our garden split between the seasons. That’s a lot of keep track of for two people, but it’s manageable.
You might think you have extra time for extra crops and processing, but you will likely be spending a good deal of time processing what you’re growing already so that it will actually keep long enough to be eaten.
You might notice I didn’t put flour on this list, that’s because if you have enough space, you should grow some wheat. I’m talking about extra acres, this isn’t for the 1 acre homestead. If you grow enough wheat you can get flour for a whole year easily, the trouble is that it takes up space and like the other items listed above has a high processing time. The upside is you get a large portion of the wheat back as flour and there is way less waste than with sugar or oil production.
Keep Animals When You Can
We recommend that everyone who can keep chickens do so. Some 1 acre homestead people rave about how chickens only need 10 sq feet to live in, but that’s super bleak and borderline unethical. We recommend that anyone with the space to keep chickens gives them 250 square feet of run per chicken in additional to growing a variety of plants for those chickens in your run. If you’re keeping chickens for eggs you only need 1-2 chickens per person to have enough eggs for the whole year. If you’re raising birds for meat, it’s best to keep a small flock and cull them as needed throughout the year. Meat birds can easily be processed and frozen for long term storage as well.
If you’re inclined to raise dairy producers like cows or goats you’ll want more space. Goats are good at eating garden waste to cut down of feed costs or grazing space and cows can produce a huge amount of milk without a lot of animals. Cows typically don’t double dip as both meat and milk sources, but goats certainly can, plus you can sell young goats each year fairly easily if you’re into that kind of work. The downside to dairy animals is that they take up a lot of space and lot of time. We don’t keep them for this reason as our homestead is very modest.
Pigs are great meat animals, but they also produce a great deal of manure that is great for some composts. They’re relatively low maintenance, but again, not required for your to meet your calorie limits and in small spaces are counter productive.
If you have the space, the time, and the energy, keeping additional animals can help you be more self sufficient. If you’re like us though and have little of either, laying chickens are going to be your best bet as eggs provide calories and open up your cooking options throughout the year.
Nutrition Matters
While we have already recommended you grow a lot of food and enough to live off of, our potato example from earlier lacks the proper nutrition to support you long term. Having a highly varied diet is not just a nice to have, it’s necessary for healthy living. You need to get some vitamin C to prevent scurvy, you need to have enough iron in your diet to keep your blood healthy, and you need to get fats and oils in your diet because your skin is literally made out of them.
While we won’t list everything you need to eat here, we can safely say the more varied your diet the less likely you are to fall prey to a nutritional deficiency.
Grow a lot, Grow Everything, Keep Chickens
It might seem anticlimactic to sum everything up so simply, but if you grow as much of whatever you can and keep a few egg laying birds you can actually cover you needs fairly easily. Ultimately you’re fighting against your space restrictions, free time, and energy, but you can find balance and you can live off your homestead. Some of your items will need to be store bought, and that’s okay, you’re not likely to buy a salt mine anyway!