How much food can you grow...

Living on 0.25 ac in SW Ohio, I can say that she will be able to grow all her fresh vegetables during the growing season IF she has enough sun and uses some kind of intensive planting system. We do raised beds with almost pure compost inside, succession planting, and season extending, but square foot gardening works for many others apparently. We currently grow on 220 sqft (bed surface only and not counting the paths), and in the growing season we do not buy vegetables.

Due to time constraints, we are not able to put up a whole lot. So in winter, we buy vegetables. We also do not have much fruit yet other than strawberries, but I do think that she should be able to make quite a dent with dwarf or espaliered fruit trees and berry bushes (I hear blueberries make nice "ornamental hedges"). On the downside, fruit trees/bushes are expensive, and if she is not going to stick around for a while they may not be cost effective when compared to buying in bulk at peak season and preserving.

As far as animals are concerned, our community does not allow fowl, but does allow bees. Rabbits are not mentioned in our zoning. I myself love rabbit meat, but if I were to raise them for food, I would keep that kinda quiet, as they are considered pets by most people around where I live.

The limiting factor will really be if she has enough surface that gets sun for a long enough time of the day.

BTW, the Dervaes family is not a fair comparison! They live in southern California and succession plant year round, whereas here, there is no green 5 months out of the year unless you use season extenders. Having lived in both CA and SWOH, you will be able to harvest 2-4 crops in any given year in CA in the same space that you can do 1-2 here in SW Ohio.

A more encouraging example of what can be done in a four season climate would be Eliot Coleman. He is a four season gardener up in Maine and has written extensively on four season gardening. I like about him that he is someone who has made a living market gardening for decades. He has a very practical approach to things, and is not so heavy on the ideology as some others out there. Food forests and edible landscaping are beautiful things, but might not be the most practical approach to feeding a family for most of us...

My best 2 cents for her would be to just go for it and plant whatever she can. If she is looking to cut cost, in my experience the most cost effective things to start with would be greens (for salads and braising), tomatoes (she'll never go back to store bought) and other things that are fresh and expensive, depending on what she eats (for us, snow peas and an ever expanding strawberry bed are huge). Chard and kale, if she likes them, are gifts that keep on giving and hardly need any space at all. 3 ft of chard, and two or three kale plants, produce more than we can eat. Green beans, and summer squash do not take a lot of space and just keep on producing if you plant them in succession, with plenty of surplus that she can put in the freezer.

We also do a lot of root veggies, which are not very cost effective, as they are cheap to buy. But certain family members think rainbow carrots are just too cool, especially if you can pull them right out of the earth. Space hogs like cauliflower, watermelons, winter squash, or pumpkins are probably out. It all depends on how she wants to plan her garden. While garlic is not cost effective, I still plant it in the fall because all I have to do is tuck it in a bed that would otherwise be fallow, and after harvesting it, I can still do a succession warm season crop in the next summer. Same for carrots, which overwinter under fleece and are harvested in spring.

Whatever she decides to do, she will have the benefit and satisfaction of at least some homegrown food. The important thing is to start now, with whatever she has available, and just have at it. From what it sounds like, time will be her main constraint anyways! So why not start with a few raised beds next spring with some low input- high reward type of plant, see how the season goes, and take it from there.

I agree about Eliot Coleman over the Dervaes for climate comparison - his books are incredible and he is very practical. But he has a lot more room, so perhaps they can blend the best of both. Because the Dervaes also work with 1/10th of an acre I thought the size/structures/set up might be useful for particularly space issue utilization.

~ST

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It's funny you mention this because I just watched a video on Bottle Tower gardening which addresses the issue of small spaces.

You might be surprized on how much food can be raised on a small city plot. I saw on t.v. of this old man who lived in the city and raised all the food he needs on his little lot. His front yard was still a lawn. But to get around city regulations he only grew small blueberry bushes as a lawn border and had two dwarf apple trees. City regulation is you can grow a shrub as a border fence so long as it's not over 3 ft. high and kept trimmed. Therefore the blueberry bushes fit right in.

But his back yard was the garden of Eden! Every available space had some kind of vegetable, berry bush, or herb growing on it. Around the backyard fence he was growing different kinds of rasberry plants. A small 10 ft. long vineyard, garden vegetables, containers full of herbs. If you can imagine it, he probably had it growing somewhere back there. He used every available space he could find. He would take his extras to sell at a roadside somewhere and use the money to buy what he couldn't grow such as flour, rice, salt, etc.

He also kept a small hen house in the backyard with no rooster to wake the neighbor and raised a few rabbits in his garage.

As I get older, I do wonder if I should move to town and be like this old man I saw on t.v. One of these days It's going to be too much work trying to keep up this place I have now. I will need to downsize!

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r.h. in oklahoma

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

r.h., hush your mouth about movin to town, way too many rules, regs, nosey neighbors, kids runnin loose,,, yes some places the kids do go outside... too little light, people using herbicides and pesticides without regard for anything or anyone. NO SIR, stay in the country, town will come to you soon enough.

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"Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness."
Thomas Jefferson to George Washington 1787

I agree with this! When space is ltd. think growing UP. Lots of stuff that average people let sprawl can also be trellised (the larger squashes, watermelons, etc.) Someone posted on the Gardening forum last year a great trellis system that can be expanded up as the vines grow. I don't normally grow pole beans, but the last time I did, I had so many I had to give most of them away.
Look into duel-purpose plants. Amaranth produces a lot for the size plant in seeds, plus leaves can be used as greens. Some root plants like beets have leaves that are great in salads!

I'd also under plant newly planted dwarf trees, as well. I have cranberries under dwarf apples and plums. Patio-sized Blueberries like to be near pine trees.

kimberlyg, loved the Bottle Tower video!
~RM

We do pretty well with a smaller in town garden. Our landscape is a garden. i.e. we got rid of "plants" and replace them with edible plants like blueberry bushes and a black berry bush. We have some nice arbor trellis's, we plant beans on, its food, plus a nice blind for the other homes close by. we have a small garden (10x20) and just grow things we use a lot of, like tomatoes etc.

Hard to grow most of your diet as the OP asked anywhere unless you are really committed and have very good weather. Luckily I do. Small animals will give food and improve and/or make soil. Meat would be only small animals, rabbit, chicken (minimal in town) quail, pigeons? Then make growing areas around them. It will take most all of the area not taken up by house/garage, storage shed/shop. I have goats too but I don't live in town. I also raise chickens to butcher. I hunt, fish and glean from 1000s of acres of timberland. I grow hay but not the oats that I feed. The whole 1 acre is used here. We have all the free spring water we need to irrigate. If she can grow most of her fresh vegetables and some to preserve, some fruit and a small part of the meat needed she will be doing well. It will be a half time job, 3 seasons of the year. We grow 98% of our food on our 1 acre. Just the 2 of us, small retired couple....James

Hi, I'm the OP's daughter, and I will be looking at the replies in more depth, but for more information… my only south-facing is the strip in front of the house, which makes the backyard more suited for crops that want a cool summer, like my greens. It's shaded by mature trees and an unruly hedgerow of useless tartarian honeysuckle. I plan to replace them slowly with berries. I doubt I'll be trying to grow ALL our food, I just don't have the time. I do have a background in sustainable agriculture, Mom and Dad were Permies before it was cool, and I grew up reading Eliot Coleman, Victory Gardening, and more.

I plan to put in more of a garden this coming spring. Last summer I grew tomatoes, herbs, cucumbers, and beans in a 2x12 strip along the front of the house. The cukes didn't do well, I had more tomatoes than you could shake a stick at (after 20 years in NH, gardening with no rocks is sheer bliss!) and the beans did fine. I need to get pole beans, though. I won't try growing corn, no room. But I do can, and have introduced my partner to the joys of homemade jams and jellies, and we do have a freezer. If I have time… and that's the variable. I'm working on a dual major, BS in Microbiology and Forensic Science, plus being self-employed, so there's that. My partner works, and has been supportive, but he grew up on a large farm, so is rather skeptical about how much I can produce on this tiny lot. I mean to surprise him :-D

Yay! Should be a pleasant surprise! Do things the 'easy' way as much as you can, though -- spending a few dollars on materials and potting soil for square-foot-gardening beds will save you hours of weeding.

Kathleen (Cedar's Mom)

Love, love love the bottle tower gardening video!!!! I just wish they would have gone into detail on the set-up of the whole thing. It looks like it would work with buckets with lids too. I'll have to start saving my pop bottles so I can try it out.

We put a pair of raised bed gardens in the front of the house and they have been producing an amazing amount of food. Currently there's asparagus, tomatoes, beets, carrots, lettuce, kale, onions, peppers, stevia, rosemary, basil and celery out there. Of course, we cheat a bit with the weather and have succession plantings.

These are the raised bed gardens, although the picture was from last year:



The size hasn't changed much although I do vary the locations of the different vegetables. The only fertilizer is "bunny berries" from the angora rabbits that we keep for their fiber.

We've also been replacing all the landscaping with either edible or useful plants. Peach trees make just as good a shade as any other tree.

The person who built the house back in the 70's put in fruit trees instead of shade trees so we started with mature fruit trees and have been adding more in the several years we've been here.

It's a quarter acre lot which is half the size of where we were before, but we are producing about ten times as much food as we were before. Some of the extra goes to the local farmer's market where we swap it for types we don't have growing.

...ooohhh Hotzcatz! I have Hawaii envy now... It'll be six weeks at least before I can start with mache...

I found this on the bottle garden.

Awesome!

http://containergardening.wordpress....m-van-cotthem/

The book I started reading today (and have almost finished) is by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates- Paradise Lot; 2 Plant Geeks, 1/10 of an acre, and The Making Of An Edible Garden Oasis In The City.

Eric and Jonathan were partners in a permaculture venture, seed company, and writing a book on edible forest gardens when they decided they were tired of planting gardens in rentals- so they bought a duplex and went to work creating a permaculture gardenthat wrapped around their house(s) Both have since married, and their wives are also into permaculture and working alongside them. It's a really fantastic book.

If there are only two of them, six 4 by 4 foot square foot gardening plots can provide them with most of their vegetable needs and require very reasonable manpower hours.

Info on the square foot gardening BISF technique can be found at www.squarefootgardening.com

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

What about aquaponics? I am going to try it out this year. We have a pool that our one child poked holes in - but has patches. (She has autism, so holes are inevitable!) I saw some really good designs that can be used inside a basement or even a closet. Single barrel and using a fishtank pump!

How is it? I saw the book on Amazon, but the reviews said it was more anecdote than how-to.

A couple of people have mentioned aquaponics, but I don't plan to attempt it. I've watched my Dad try it over the years and it's a lot more work than square foot gardening, which is what I plan to do this spring, altough I may also experiment with pallet gardens a bit. We have plastic(?) siding, so hanging things on the house is out. I may trellis stuff up, though, and I am reminded I need to order pole bean seeds, since I couldn't find any here in Ohio last May (when I moved, and put in my garden a month late!LOL, so much warmer than NH).

I've attached pictures, one of my 2013 garden, early on, and another of tomatoes. The big yellow is the heirloom Mr. Stripey, and it bore impressively, to say the least.

Attached Thumbnails

   

Love the link on vertical bottle gardens. We have quite a few water bottles and the gardens would be great for the kids to work with until spring.

The aquaponics, I'm going into it with blind optimism. There's an area in our backyard that run off water from the mountain, plus from the sump-pump has turned into a mini-creek/wetland. Going to try putting in a small fish pond (very tiny) that ends up feeding a huge herb garden. Worked pretty well for the chamomile, might as well try it on a larger scale and then report back.