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

From the original post, you say that you've had large gardens on 2 acres, but that your other work led to many weeds...Weeds will probably cut your harvest by 90 percent, so it is imperative that if you really intend to grow most of your food on 1/4 acre or 2 acres, that you keep it weeded, either with chemicals (ugh), hand weeding, cultivating or mulching.
It is truly amazing what can be produced on raised beds. I have 19 that are 4 X 6 and produced enough for 3 CSA members this summer, plus stuff for me for a 12 week period, plus enough for me for most of the year. I am also doing a 10 week summer CSA for 2 members. 11 of the beds are in an unheated greenhouse, so I get a longer season than normal here (NE PA), but I still have growing in the outside beds: cabbage, chard, and broccoli. Inside the greenhouse is lettuce, carrots, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts.
As a survival thing (growing most of your own food), I'd focus on potatoes, root crops, winter squashes, and corn for calories, plus onions, garlic, tomatoes to make something tasty out of the other stuff. Dried beans are no harder to grow than green beans.
Bean and grains make a complete protein and corn is a grain, not just wheat.
Most of those mentioned can be kept over the non-harvesting season without much preservation techniques, excpet maybe tomatoes that you can can.
For one person three hens would be more than enough...and they'd love to forage along with eating greens, corn, winter squash...
It IS possible...just add up my CSA membership weeks and you'll see that for veggies, it adds up to a years worth for one person, if not more.
Add a couple of fruits and you have a great variety for your menu.
You'd still need wheat, salt, sweetener, yeast, and can grow some herbs for other flavors.
Can't suggest anything for dairy as I haven't done that.

Where is it at? And how much fertilizer are they using.

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

Of couse you can't live like most western people do on a 1/4 acre. But if you were smart you surely would not need to starve!

Wheat is a want not a need too. You don't need breads and pastries, they are just easy filler in the diet. Ask the Nearing's! Total waste of space.

While 1/4 acre is tiny, if well layed out I am positive it is doable for one person.
Yes, you would need to be smart about every last thing.
You couldn't have shade trees (unless they produced protein rich nuts), a greenhouse is mandatory at least to start seedings and extend seasons.
Rabbits can eat your weeds, yes pigeons are ideal too.
A lot of planning for food storage would be required to feed you over winter, and yes it could bet dull, but no more than in the "old days".

No doubts that it is doable, might not be 'enjoyable', but you would not starve. Hard work, & not as much variety as we are used to in the US.

I'm hoping for 3-5 acres for my new home, that should be more than sufficient for all my needs.

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We will meet in the golden city, called the New Jerusalem,
All our pain and all our tears will be no more.....

I know a guy who uses SFG bisf, a chicken tractor and a rabbit hutch and a vermicompost bin under his mobile home to produce the majority of their food for a family of 3 on a 1/4 acre lot on the land he bought dirt cheap years ago because it had been stripped of all the topsoil and he has food to spare most years.

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"I didn't have time to slay the dragon. It's on my To Do list!"

I think it would be possible, although in a colder climate you'd need more land. Maybe not a lot more, though...

As to the 'limited diet' issue, one or two small raised beds will produce a LOT of food, and a great variety of food. If you put most of your space into the basics, and have a couple of small raised beds near the house for salad stuff and greens, you could have quite a bit of variety in your diet. Plant semi-dwarf fruit trees around the perimeter, and some berry bushes/grape vines, and you aren't losing tillable space. Use Jeavons methods for getting high yields out of a small space -- I thought I had a copy of his book with the yield figures, but it must have been one I got from the library. Of course his land is in southern California....

Bees take up almost no space and can feed themselves, and if you have several hives, you'll be able to trade honey for other items you can't grow (like salt).

Rabbits take up almost no space, and if not pushed too hard, can be fed mostly on weeds and thinnings from the garden.

Chickens take up very little space, and can be fed largely on stuff you can grow, including offal from butchering the rabbits (grind up the bones for the chickens, too). If you have dairy animals, feed surplus dairy products to the chickens, and raise earthworms, and possibly maggots, for more protein supplements for them.

Pigs -- especially potbellies -- need only a small pen and all the scraps and such you can feed them. They'll eat extra rabbits, chickens, offal from butchering, surplus eggs and dairy products, scraps and weeds from the kitchen and garden. Raise some potatoes for them (feed cooked) and some grain if you have space.

Dairy goats -- if you really have a small space, get minis or Nigerian Dwarfs. A single person might share goats with a neighbor, since you need to keep at least two goats. They can eat a lot of weeds and stuff from the garden, and trimmings from the fruit trees, berry bushes, and grape vines. Add a few beds of alfalfa for winter feed. In our area, some land, well-fertilized and irrigated, can grow six tons of alfalfa on an acre -- and that's with extensive farming methods. Intensive gardening methods might double that yield. A ton of hay ought to keep two Nigerian does for a year, especially with a few other things to supplement it. The goats would produce kids for meat each year as well as your dairy and fats (Nigerians have very high butterfat milk).

So it would indeed be a lot of work, but it's probably possible to come pretty close to producing all your food (at least for one person) on a quarter of an acre, and that wouldn't have to be a vegetarian diet. You wouldn't likely eat as much meat as we do now, but you would still have some meat, and with honey could say you have some luxury in your diet, too.

You would still need to buy salt and some spices even if you were able to raise just about everything else you needed.

Kathleen

oh for the $700 what they did was weight, count and measure everything they grew and then compared to what those items were selling for locally at the farmers markets or grocery stores..and added it all up and subtracted all the costs for seeds, plants, etc.

check it out in the magazine

I have to agree with those who say it CAN be done, however I think that you have to have pretty ideal climate and be willing to eat what you can produce rather than produce what you WANT to eat.

I live on an "urban" homestead. My .35 acre lot is generous for a city lot but the layout, soil and a number of completely useless, water sucking, soil wrecking and shade producing trees (cottonwood, weeping willow etc) means I have only about 1/2 of that space available to grow anything useful! I would like to get rid of the trees and replace them with nut and fruit trees but finances won't allow that at this time. I do have 5 fruit trees and a large raspberry bed. We also have strawberries ad a couple of blueberry plants. Everything else is in raised beds - every year I expand a bit more. I have experimented with growing grains and even rice. I doubt that in my climate (southwestern canada - zone 5) I could raise enough food for my family of four in the space we have but I still manage a pretty hefty supplement to our grocery needs. I compost everything and use horse manure (from the place down the road I keep my horses at) and rabbit manure from our rabbits on the compost pile. The compost goes onto the raised beds each year. We are not vegetarian so trying to add meat to our diet from our own land is hard - rabbits is all we are currently allowed to keep. Our city is ridiculously set against urban chickens so it might still be a while, though I am working on my husband to let me just get some and pay off the neighbours! We eat a lot of eggs so for us chickens would be worth the effort.

I think the key to raising enough food on a small amount of space is planning, good soil and lots of work! I have a long way to go still to provide all my families food needs but the progress I've made in the past few years has encouraged me to do even better. I will be getting a copy of that book too even if just for some ideas to squeeze a bit more production out of the land I have.

Karin

I know a bunch of Organic Farmers who are able to support their families buy producing veggies on 2 to 5 acre lots, by using greenhouses. I imagine on average they likely feed a dozen families each.

It is hard to say for sure, they sell produce in Farmers Markets and each have hundreds of customers. But I do not think that any of their customers are truly getting 100% of their food from those producers.

So you could do the math backwards to workout the minimum acreage for a single family.

It just seems to me like 1/4 acre is cutting it pretty close.

I can see where climate is an issue. I would not go way far North. I could see where you might have bigger issues if you were near the Arctic Circle.

Maine is far enough South to make it work though.

Consider the apple tree. Fruit trees are often said to be the most efficient food source. They mine their own nutrients. The amount of work is the lowest per bushel of produce. And so long as you stay away from dwarf varieties, the sq footage to bushel ratio is really good. But an apple tree requires a 30 foot circle. You can pack them in every 30 foot. But that will consume 1/4 acre very quickly.

I filled an acre with apple trees, and a second acre with nut and herb trees.

Someone already mentioned potatoes. I second that. Not only are potatoes high-calorie, and high-producing, but the labor involved is much much less than harvesting and threshing grain.

parsnips are better than potatoes. The seed is easier to save your self and the roots can be covered with hay or leaves and left in the ground for the winter.

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squashnut & bassketcher

Champagne D Argent, White New Zealand & Californian Cross Rabbits

I have this book too. It has some very useful info in it for me. I enjoyed it very much.

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Be the kind of woman that, when your feet
hit the floor each morning, the devil says
"Oh Crap, She's up!"

Tammy

The SE Asians are amazing gardeners. I live in one of the largest Hmong settlement areas in the US. The Hmong, you may remember, fought for the US in the Secret Wars in Laos, and had to be airlifted out when the Pathet Lao won. They were originally cultivators of the jungle. Anyway, here in the US they settled in the ghettos, and did what they do best-farm. Anywhere they could. I heard of a Hmong garden along a drainage ditch area in North Sacramento. Our older suburbs tend to have some open spaces, especially in the South Area where the developers built haphazardly leaving odd shaped lots that weren't good for anything. The Hmong took them over, and farmed them. They even farmed a former cemetery that was never developed due to disputes over the remains! Once they were notified of the land's history, they moved their garden elsewhere. There are abandoned shopping centers in their settlement zones, and if the dilapidated buildings could be bulldozed and the land returned to agriculture, it would knock your socks off what those people could do. Local produce brokers are trying to get these people to sell at the farmer's markets, to make a little extra money.

Yes, they are amazing. I now drive a school bus and I have several Hmongs on my route. When school started back in August, it was amazing to see some of the gardens on my route that belonged to some Hmong people.

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r.h. in oklahoma

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

I know some of you really love your goats, but on a fourth of an acre I think anything beyond a handful of chickens is not feasible. Not unless you're going to keep them penned in a very small area and bring in their food every day, at which point you're probably spending more money on keeping them than they produce.

Ernie, on paper at least, goats are the one homestead animal that will produce more than it's feed costs even if you have to buy every bit it eats. I tend to agree that a quarter of an acre would be too small, though, for goats -- but half an acre wouldn't be too small for a pair of Nigerians.

Eliot Coleman, author of Four-season Harvest and several other books, gardens in New England (Vermont or Maine? can't remember). IIRC, in one of his books, he says that he gardens five acres (by hand) and can feed approximately forty people per acre. I think that's all the vegetables (and possibly fruit other than tropical stuff), not all the food. But even if it took five acres to grow ALL the food for forty people, divide by five, that's eight people per acre. So a quarter of an acre, in theory, and even in the north, could potentially grow enough food for two people.

It would be interesting if a few people were able to experiment and see how much they could grow on a quarter of an acre and keep records of it.

Kathleen

If the orchard area is fenced and the trees are mature you can use that as a chicken yard. If the trees are tall enough and you fence the trunks to protect them you could also use that space to allow your goats a little more room. Two Nigerian Dwarf does could get by with an extra large dog house for shelter, but they and you would undoubtedly be more comfortable with a small shed so you have a place to store feed, handle kidding and do the milking out of the weather.

I run my Nigerians and chickens together with no problems. My flock "adopted" one of my smaller goats when she was a kid, and even as an adult she still can frequently be found napping with her favorite hen snuggled up next to her.

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Wags Ranch Nigerians


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

There are a number of small organic farms in Coleman's area of Maine.

This is an interesting and inspiring thread, especially reading about what so many of you are doing with whatever amount of space is available to you. My conclusion is that regardless of whether or not you could really support a family off of 1/4 of an acre one thing is for certain - you can most likely do A LOT more on whatever piece of land you have than you might expect. I have a real itch to get more land - right now we have 1.78 acres. In reality, I have not yet begun to tap the potential available to me on that 1.78 acres and that's after putting in 13 raised beds, a second "traditional" garden area that's approximately 40'x50', two rows of blueberry bushes, a row each of red raspberries and blackberries, storing the 4 or so cords of split firewood plus a couple of cords of unsplit wood, and having both a small workshop building and second 2.5 car garage on the property. I still have a ton of room left. More room than time available. I'm not sure why I want more land other than I have visions of wide open fields and more livestock than I could have in my current location - I'm probably limited to bees and chickens.

Anyway, keep up the description and opinions. Small-scale agriculture, which is a huge range for me - anything from 1/4 acre up to 100 - just not corporate scale, will be a necessity in the future. Everybody will need to engage in whatever scale agriculture that they can on the property they have available to them, so the more ideas are tossed around on forums like this the better.

Also - here is an excerpt from "The Deliberate Agrarian" website:

-What Can Be Done On One Acre Of Ground
As I’ve said in the past, we can learn from and be inspired by the old farm almanacs of the 1800’s. This particular selection is an example of that. It comes from Robert B. Thomas’s Old Farmer’s Almanac of 1851.


The editor of the Maine Cultivator published, in his useful paper, his management of one acre of ground, from which we gather the following results:—One third of an acre, in corn, usually produced thirty bushels of sound corn for grinding, besides some refuse. This quantity is sufficient for family use, and for fattening one large or two small hogs. From the same ground he produced two or three hundred pumpkins, and his family supply of dry beans. From a bed of six rods square, he usually obtained 60 bushels of onions; these he sold at $1 per bushel, and the amount purchased his flour, Thus, from one third of an acre and an onion bed, he obtained his breadstuffs. The rest of the ground was appropriated to all sorts of vegetables for summer and winter use; potatoes, beets, parsnips, cabbage, green corn, peas, beans, cucumbers, melons, squashes, etc., with fifty or sixty bushels of beets and carrots, for the winter feed of a cow. Then he had also a flower garden, raspberries, currants, and gooseberries, in great variety, and a few choice apple, pear, plum, cherry, peach, and quince trees.

Some reader may call the above a “Yankee trick;” so it is, and our object in publishing it is, to have it repeated all over Yankee land and everywhere else. If a family can be supported from one acre in Maine, the same can be done from every other state and county in the Union.

Wow, this is really interesting to read! It sure makes my land (although rental) look pretty wasteful. There's a book by John Seymour (can't remember the title) but he has some neat drawing of how to divide up 1 acre or 5 acres. I'm all about pictures, so that inspires me!