Can We Feed Ourselves Just out of Our Vegetable Gardens?

Anything helps and what you learn will be valuable

A spread for my CSA customers in Portland, Oregon, in 2007

[Here’s this year’s version of my annual “Can Our Veggie Gardens Feed us in a Real Crisis?” post, which I originally wrote in 2019, and have been updating every year.]

As someone who grew up with a big veggie garden, and who has been involved with small-scale organic farming over the last 20 years, I’ve been delighted to see all the gardening posts on Substack lately. So many enthusiastic folks sharing their knowledge and advice is truly inspirational. Practically speaking, what with the increasing economic and social instability going on in the US, the future is more uncertain than ever, and it’s probably never been more important to grow some of your own food.

If you already are, I would urge you to expand your own efforts and also to encourage your neighbors, friends and family to start. Share seeds. Help them take out part of their lawn. Commit to visiting regularly to give guidance. Lend them a book or share a video. Anything, really.

My own biggest recommendation to new gardeners is this: GET LOCAL / REGIONAL ADVICE.

I put that in all caps because it’s that important. The US is a big nation, with many different climates, and there are very significant contrasts from place to place. Good advice for New England is not likely to be good advice for Southern California. What works in Appalachia won’t necessarily work in the Pacific Northwest. Seek out regionally-relevant information from books, neighbors, local farmers, the county Extension Service, regionally-focused websites, etc.

A brief list of things that will vary from region to region:

• which veggies will grow well

• timing for seeding and transplanting

• frost dates

• which soil amendments and fertilizers to use

• when and how to water

• overnight temps

• relative humidity

• what pests and diseases are common and how to handle them

• timing of harvest

• how to process and store harvests

Whether you succeed or fail will depend on factors like these, so please look into them for your area!

Don’t do something in your area just because it works for someone somewhere else. Example: In the late 2000’s I was living in Portland, Oregon, getting into farming there, and I was on the local Permaculture listserve. (This was before social media, when listserves were still common.) Every single spring, a bunch of people would be complaining about slugs devouring their starts as soon as they put them out. Slugs are a perennial issue in the Pacific Northwest, it’s true, but there are things you can do to make them worse, and one of those is to mulch heavily. Mulching was very popular among the Permaculture folks because it was considered to be a Permaculture technique. Ruth Stout’s “no work” method was often mentioned. But Ruth lived in Kansas, where the winters are much colder than in Oregon, so slugs were not a problem there because they simply can’t survive those conditions. But in the mild PNW, mulch creates perfect slug habitat. They love it. So when people plunked their tender starts down in the middle of this mulch, they would immediately get eaten, because of course. So if people wanted to mulch their gardens over the winter to protect the soil from the pounding rain (which both compacts it and leeches away minerals), fine, but then they need to rake it back before transplanting or seeding.

Or better yet, as me and my friends found out, plant an overwintering cover crop which you turn over before planting. Slugs don’t thrive in a cover crop in the same way at all. We had literal side-by-side beds where one was cover-cropped and the other wasn’t, and the difference in slug populations was stark. Very few compared to many. Cover-crops serve the same function of protecting the soil from the rain, but additionally add nutrients if you include nitrogen-fixing legumes in the mix like Fava beans or field peas.

But it will be different place to place what cover crop to plant, or even if you can. So don’t take my advice on that one unless you’re in the PNW, and even then, see what other sources say first.

Can we feed ourselves out of our veggie gardens?

This is a great question. Speaking as someone who has tried, I must say that totally feeding yourself from your own efforts is very, very challenging. Though some friends and I tried over multiple seasons, we never succeeded, or even came anywhere close.

First of all, consider what you eat. Yes, you. What do you eat at home? At work? When you go out? Okay, what percentage of that can be raised in the bioregion where you live? If you have trouble answering this question, don’t feel bad. I would guess that the proportion of the US population with practical agricultural knowledge is lower than in any other society in history.

Looking at the subset of your current diet that can be grown in your area, is it enough to live off of? Is it well-balanced and does it provide enough calories? If not, what will you add to fill it out? This is purely an exercise of course, but there’s the rough draft of the menu you’re going to survive on. How will that work? I mean logistically?

Let’s take carrots. They’re popular, they’re nutritious, and they can be grown all over the US without too much trouble. What’s a year’s worth of carrots look like? How many ten-foot rows would it take to produce that many? When are they best seeded? How much space, water and amendments do they require? What tools do you need? Are there diseases or insects to worry about and what’s the best way of dealing with them? When do you pick them? How long will the harvest keep? How can you preserve them?

Now go through all those questions for everything else on your list.

Then add it up: all the space, hours, and equipment.

Does it look daunting? If it doesn’t, you left something out.

Without going through all of the above, here’s what you’re probably not thinking of right now: The typical US American diet is only 10-20% fruits and veggies―like you might grow in your backyard―and the vast majority is made up of grains and proteins in one form or another.

What vegetable does nearly everyone grow in their home garden? Tomatoes. How do they eat them? Often enough, on a sandwich or in pasta. That’s wheat or rice or some other grains. How many people have ever planted rice or wheat in their back yards?

Meat is also grains because that’s what’s fed to animals. This includes the majority of grass-fed cows, who are “finished” (fattened up) on grains on a feedlot prior to slaughter. So if you want meat in your home-grown diet, you’ll need to plant for those mouths too. You might end up concluding that you don’t need as much as you thought you did. (BTW, though many historic paleolithic diets were supplemented by hunting meat, they were dependent on gathering roots, seeds, berries, etc.)

When my friends and I tried the grow-all-your-own-food challenge, we quickly got educated about the difficulties of grains and other staple crops. I’m not just talking about planting and raising, which are hard enough, but harvesting and processing. Wheat, for example, is easy to grow, but there’s a number of steps from mature spikelets in the field to flour in the kitchen, including threshing and winnowing. In 2008, we attempted to harvest and process a third of an acre of wheat entirely by hand. Over two dozen people participated during a two week period. I kept careful notes and after all was said and done, each hour of labor produced 2.6 lbs of wheat berries, cleaned and ready to grind. To put that into perspective in the context of our current Capitalist mode, if you were paying people $15/hour, the labor cost of each pound would be $5.77.

We also experimented with quinoa, dry beans, flour corn, millet, buckwheat, flax, and other crops. Each one required its own set of techniques. Overall, our yields were much lower than we expected and the work much harder than we wanted. (For an accounting of our efforts, including tables of data, see this report.) Not to say I didn’t enjoy it; I did. But I also wasn’t actually depending on it.

When I think about the possibility of some kind of food supply crisis in the US, all I can do is shake my head. We do not have a safety net to catch us if we fall. If we want one, we needed to start working on it yesterday. Just putting in another raised bed in your backyard ain’t gonna do it. You can’t live off of spinach, cucumbers and green beans. (You can survive just on potatoes if you have to, but guaranteeing year round availability is tricky.)

I’m totally not discouraging anyone from putting in a veggie garden. We should put in as many as we can and fight to keep them when they’re threatened. But let’s not kid ourselves that a few heads of broccoli (or even a wheel barrow of zucchinis) will get us through an actual breakdown of the agricultural system. It won’t. If we want a shot at doing that, we need to put in some meaningful time and effort, and it will necessarily be outside the system.

In the meantime though, yes please plant!!