The Reality of Growing Your Own…..Food that is.
August 24, 2010
This growing season God has blessed us with a bountiful harvest. We have had very few insect and animal problems and the weather has been very favorable. As a result, we have more stored from our garden, and more yet to process than we have had in the past few years. However, in the face of this bounty, I have made some calculations that are chilling if the need to subsist on what we alone can grow ever occurs.
Let’s just use our green bean harvest for an example. I initially planned for 4 fifty foot rows of Tenderette (bush type) green beans. So that they all wouldn’t be maturing at the same time, I planted two rows and waited a week before planting the next two rows. When the first two rows came up a little spotty, I panicked and planted another 50 ft row. So, we had a total of 250 linear feet of green beans. That’s a lot, as you well know, if you have ever squatted for hours picking beans.
The bean harvest was extraordinary, the plants were loaded with long succulent beans with very few bad spots. The plants kept bearing well and I picked most of the rows 4 times. This weekend I pulled up the plants, stripped the last of the good beans from them and tossed the plants in the compost pile. I plan to pressure can the last of those beans this evening. I don’t have an exact accounting, but my estimate is that we will have 150 quart jars of green beans put away in the pantry when all is said and done. It took a herculean effort to pick, snap, and process all of those beans. My wife and I snapped beans for hours many evenings of the past month. Our shoulders, wrists and hands ached from the repetitive movements. My knees and legs are still sore from the hours of squatting, kneeling, and any other body position I could assume to get at the beans on the plants.
One Hundred and Fifty quarts of beans. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? It looks like a lot crammed in the cupboards in our basement pantry room. But in reality, those 150 quarts will allow our family to have 3 servings of green beans each week for the next year. That’ not a lot of bulk or calories in the grand scheme of things. Of course we have other vegetables from the garden as well. Tomatoes, corn, squash, and potatoes all did well, but even with the addition of these vegetables, what we would end up with stored would amount to a starvation diet for our family.
This is from a 5,000 sq. ft. garden. Sure, we could have a bigger garden space, but right now we are at the limit of what we can take care of with our present commitments to work and school. In a societal collapse scenario where we would no longer be going to work or school, when we would most definitely need a larger garden, I doubt I would long be able to purchase fuel for the mechanized equipment that helps us till and maintain such a large garden. If you have ever tried to turn a garden over with a shovel, you soon realize what a great invention the roto-tiller actually is.
I can well imagine that somebody is about to point out this article they read where a family is producing all of the food they need, and more, on a 1 acre plot in the middle of suburbia somewhere. I have read those articles too, and believe me, that is not possible in many instances. I spent a period of time in my life where I was an avid Mother Earth News reader, and for a while I endeavored to have most of the food on my table coming from my own efforts. I raised rabbits, turkeys, chickens, pigs, you name it and I probably tried it. I had the biggest garden I could manage to take care of. Still, if I would have been forced to live on what I produced, I would have slowly starved. One bad growing season and I would have starved quickly.
So, when you hear somebody talk about how they will till up their backyard and grow all the food they need when TSHTF, be advised they don’t know what in the hell they are talking about. If you want to keep a group of people alive, that is what you need, a sizeable group and sufficient land to raise several VERY big gardens. My unofficial estimate is you need about 25 acres with a good bit of that space devoted to fruit trees, nut trees, berry bushes, and anything thing else edible that will grow in your area.
I’m not writing this to discourage people who want to grow some of their own food, I think that is a wise choice, and more people should try to do it. I’m making the point that it is the exception rather than the rule that a family can grow enough food in a small plot to meet their nutritional needs. You need ccommunity-sized gardens and lots of labor available. There is a reason that farm families had lots of children. My grandfather had seven brothers and seven sisters, and he used to tell me how hard they all had to work just to get by.
