Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre.

Read this book and others like it in years past. We as a family do this at families home. We have a very large raised garden, lots - 35 fruit trees, berries etc. We are putting in chickens this year and maybe a few goats. We have all the fruilts and veggies we need for the year for 5 families. Bought and shared a beef and a pig this year to. Takes planning and hard work. Worth it.

I wouldn't doubt it could be done, I would doubt what it would provide and how you can do it and still afford to live. It would have to be somewhat intensive. You still would have expenses which means working off of the land. I'm sure the book would streamline what you have now or make it more productive.

I think I figured out the best way to homestead and be self sufficient on your land. Write a book.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

I think that it is possible to survive in this way, but the diet probably wouldn't be very diverse. The DerVaes family in Pasadena CA lives in a small home on a very small lot (1/5 of an acre). They do grow something like 75 or 80% of what they consume and then they tend to trade and barter for the rest. They are vegetarians and they do have goats for milk, chickens and ducks for eggs and an extremely long growing season because they are in California.

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~TheMartianChick~

My latest novels:
Bystander: A Tale of the End of the World as SHE Knew It!

Christmas in Bystander & Other Village Tales

Coming Soon: A Slice of Heaven

I couldn't do it. No way no how, not even for just me. I like my cheese and popcorn too much. My little 1/4 acre would never produce enough forage to feed one little dairy goat for a year. Even having a totally vegetarian diet I don't see how you could raise all your own food on just 1/4 acre.

Keep in mind that my yard is 1/4 acre. I do raise livestock on it, ducks, rabbits and pigeons. I doubt I could feed 52 rabbits (the amount you would need to produce to fix one a week for the entire year) if all I had was rabbit forage, or even feeding the rabbits leftovers from the garden. Even with just 3 chickens in a tractor and all of the yard in gardens I don't think I could do it. It might be possible if you lived someplace where the grass grew all year but I don't have that luxury here.

this months mother earth news has a person growing $700 worth of food on a 5 x 20' plot..and planning on getting more out of it the rest of the year and following seasons upping it..you might find it interesting.

i agree, they aren't growing grains for bread though..which take a lot more room..

also if you are smart you wouldn't just put in the vegetables..but you would also put in fruit trees, berries and perennial plants which don't have to be put in every year..

on our property right now i have more of my property to perennials than i have to annual vegetable gardens..

On my first homestead my garden was exactly 1/4 acre. From that I fed a family of 6 plus a flock of chickens and 3 pigs. I also canned quite a lot. In retrospect I could have managed it a LOT better. A ton of food was wasted and I bought commercial feed. That was just dumb. With a little more forethought and experience I believe I could have fed them completely from the garden.

I think it could be done if you had to. You don't have to produce everything you consume. You'll have extra of some things that you can barter with a neighbor for things you need. My neighbor makes sorghum syrup every year. I could trade him some of my surplus corn or wheat and have all the sweetener I'd need for a year.

Instead of planting it all to wheat or whatever, I'd want to make it as diverse as possible. That way if you lose all the wheat, oh well, you've still got corn and potatoes.

I'd sure want to buy a couple or three piglets in spring, let them eat all the extras from the garden all summer, then eat them all winter or trade them for what I couldn't produce. I think if you try you can produce some animals over the summer practically for free. (I'll find out soon if that's true or not )

It's an interesting thought exercise and I'd like to read the book. If nothing else it makes me grateful I've got more than 1/4 acre.

I have that book and really enjoy it.

But I do agree that it would take a lot of planning & hard work. Might just give it a try this coming year.

Going to get my book down again.

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Debi
wife to Richard-currently deployed
mama to: Thomas 12, Aric 11, Noah 10, Matthew 7, Jadon 6, early MC, 4.4.05, Caleb 3, Rachel 2, early MC 5.9.09.

I have that book too and found it very interesting. The only thing I disagree with is they said for one of the layouts there wasn't enough room for goats, only pigs. But a couple of Nigerian Dwarf goats would have had more than enough room in the space they set aside for two pigs. Plus you could join their pen with the chickens giving more elbow room for both and the chickens will help keep the fly population down.

Another very good book is the All New Square Foot Gardening. It involves 6" deep raised beds with a special growing mix. So it doesn't really matter what your soil is like, you won't be using it. It also means very little weeding, and no tilling. It makes use of "growing up" - all vines including melons are grown on a trellis. They maintain that one 4x12 box per adult will meet your vegetable needs. Of course that doesn't include grains, but they do mention growing them and there are lots of suggestions for extending the growing season as well.

Even if you figured twice that amount per adult, you could still get a lot of 4x12 boxes into a small amount of space.

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Wags Ranch Nigerians


"The Constitution says to promote the general welfare, not to provide welfare!" ~ Lt. Col Allen West

Who determines the AMOUNT of food that equals $700? You can make the dollars fit any amount!

It always goes back to what land you have and the climate. I have seen some that can grow anything you need on 1/4 acres but it is rare. In the area that I am now you could grow most everything on 5 acres with a lot of work. What they did on the book was to get the average from a large farm and reduced it down to 1/4 acre. If you planted 10foot by 50 feet of corn you might get a bushel but you will have to work at it pollination the outside rows and not having any worms at all and fertilize it with some nitrogen. The same thing with wheat and oats.

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God must have loved stupid people because he made so many of them.

Historically people have done it, but under different circumstances.

The first problem you're going to encounter is soil fertility. Plants will need to be very close together in that space and thus yield is going to be compromised. Where is your source of fertility going to come from? It will need to be heavily renewed every year.

A more reasonable approach for one quarter acre would be to simply produce the three vegetables which comprise the majority of your diet. I would hazard a guess that for most people it's going to be potatoes, carrots, and onions. Maybe some bean plants climbing poles around the perimeter of that space or on the fenceline.

One thing that prevents most people from growing any food at all is the difficulty in providing ALL of their food. That's a poor excuse, in my opinion. If you could provide only 50% of your dietary requirements, isn't it still worth doing? Isn't 25% still worth doing?

If I told you a way you could cut your grocery bill in half, eliminate your need for a gym membership, lose weight by getting more fresh air and exercise, eat healthier vegetables than you could ever buy in a store, AND learn a relaxing hobby ... would you take me up on it then?

This Basic Food storage list put out by the LDS suggests 400lbs of wheat per adult per year, or if storing other grains reducing the wheat amount so that the total is still 400lbs. I think it would take more than a 1/4 to produce that amount. Of course if you aren't big on eating wheat products you might not need that amount and could increase other areas of production.

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Wags Ranch Nigerians


"The Constitution says to promote the general welfare, not to provide welfare!" ~ Lt. Col Allen West

On a 1/4 acre you'd most likely experience some input from neighbors, mostly negative. I don't think most would have a 1/4 acre to work with that didn't have neighbors.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

So true. That $700 might be a couple of bushels of exotic yuppie food. My GF had a neighbor that carried 'weeds' to city folks in the Philly area and made out like a bandit. None of the stuff you'd ever see on a working man's table.

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

You could probably have bees, rabbits and a few chickens, without complaints from the neighbors, and what complaint could they really have about a garden.

Some large cities like Seattle now allow up to two miniature goats (no bucks) along with a handful of hens (no roosters) if your lot meets size requirements, so you would think you could have that on a more rural plot.

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Wags Ranch Nigerians


"The Constitution says to promote the general welfare, not to provide welfare!" ~ Lt. Col Allen West

If you pick the right 1/4 acre, you can have pineapples and cocoa. Pineapples are a two year crop, though, and cocoa is a tree which doesn't produce a whole lot per year. Same with coffee.

Even if folks aren't able to provide all their food from their backyard - no matter the size, even a little bit helps.

At one point, I had about .27 acres on which I had 15 fruit trees, kiwi vines, blueberries, strawberries, rasberries, 13 raised beds, a small green house, a small barn and paddock, and still had room for flowers. And a not very productive water trough for water chestnuts- I really experimented in those days. Also grew in enclosed front porch. The weather was zone 9 -maritime temperate. Had all the water needed.
To do well, I did bring in manure from a horse stable. The vegetable beds were very close together which mad it difficult to work in them- mistake but...... The trees were all semi-dwarf with a couple of dwarf peaches. I grew Meyer lemons - too cold for other citrus. The weather would rarely get into the 20's and as a result, I had 4 yr old tomatoes growing in the green house. And still would be growing if I hadn't moved.
Pretty much all my fruit, vegetable and beans needs were met. But I still bought oil, wheat, butter, salt, cocoa, vanilla (gave thought to trying vanilla orchids but never did) and a couple of types of spices.
It was great til I ran into a couple of years where my Mom was ill and I spend a lot of my time traveling and helping her. The first year, blackberry vines and some of my other plants grew thickly in & under the fruit trees- by the end of the next year, you needed a machetti to get to most of the garden- grass and weeds got between the raised beds and under various fences walkways and I couldn't get them out- Several ornamentals turned out to be very aggressive too. Once they seeded- they were virtually mats each year.
My point is that it was actually pretty easy while I was doing a small bit of work pretty much every day but let go, it became a real fight to keep it up at all. I depended on clever, intensive space used constantly almost all year. Once some wild and domestic plants got out of hand, I spent so much time battling them that it wasn't worth it. I came to hate oxalis. And baby tears.
For what it's worth.................

Funny you should mention that. When I worked in town as a Journeyman Electrician we wired up several new houses in a new residential area. About 2 years later I had to go back to one of them cause a GFI receptacle had quit working. When I knocked on the door a Vietnamese woman answered the door and showed me which receptacle had quit working. It was located in the Kitchen. When I looked out the back kitchen window, I could not believe the most amazing garden I had ever seen in such a small area. I bet that lady was raising more vegetable food in her backyard then I was on my whole 2 acre lot.

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r.h. in oklahoma

Raised a country boy, and will die a country boy.

Okay I haven't gotten very far in the book yet. Everytime I open it up I get interupted. But I've studied the layouts of the sketch drawings which consist of 1/10 acre, 1/4 acre, and 1/2 acre.

1/10 acre consist of beds of vegetables, Fruit and nut tree's, Herbs, 1/2 dozen chickens, rabbits (doesn't say how many) and 2 behives.

1/4 acre consist of even more vegetable beds, more fruit tree's, more herbs, 12 chickens, 2 pigs, rabbits, and 2 behives.

1/2 acre consist of everything mentioned on the 1/4 acre plus enough area to raise wheat and either 2 to 3 milking goats or one beef steer.

So far I haven't read anywhere of how big the family living on this amount of land is or how they feed the animals yet. I guess I might find all that out later as I read on.

They do give a estimated harvest on the 1/2 acre and do mention it all depends on the weather, or what type of veggies you grow.

Estimated Harvest: 50 pounds of wheat, 280 pounds of pork, 120 cartons of eggs, 100 pounds of honey, 25 to 75 pounds of nuts, 600 pounds of fruit, 2000 plus pounds of veggies.

I must read on, if I can do just half that much on my acreage I would be very satisfied. Very interested to see if they buy feed for the animals or feed them off the 1/4 acreage.

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r.h. in oklahoma

Raised a country boy, and will die a country boy.

I have the same book as well as others of the same nature. It's a good book with a lot of useful ideas. I wouldn't be inclined to try to produce all my food. Some things, like wheat and corn are easier to get from a local farmer. Corn takes up quite a bit of space and wheat takes up a bit of time. On the other hand that guy who built the Earthships claims to produce all his food inside the house so a 1/4 acre is worlds of space. I suppose it can be done you really need to ask yourself do I want to. I plan to stick with basic veggies,(potatoes, carrots, onions, and tomatoes) chickens (meat and layers) and maple syrup and buy the rest. Of course I have lots of space, a maple grove, and family that raises beef cattle so I get free beef for labor. Also I usually get venison from someone who likes to hunt.