Why?

            Today we are going to start delving into gardening. This is the first post in a series focusing on very important things which will make or break a good growing season. I’ve consistently grown food plants for over ten years now. There are many, many blogs, articles, and books about the subject. However, as is often the case, people with an expertise in something often jump straight to the details without focusing on the underlying concepts or they don’t provide the proper amount of emphasis to the base principles. I’ve found myself surprised on numerous occasions because there are basic concepts I either did not find information about or I didn’t understand just how important they were. The goal of this post isn’t to provide a bunch of details. It is to emphasize the concepts that make the details matter and hopefully save you the time it took me to realize them.

            Before you start doing anything associated with growing food plants, you need to settle on your goal. Are you growing for subsistence? Are you growing as a hobby to learn? Do you want to grow as a business? The answer to each of these questions has very different requirements in terms of time, space, and finances.

If you are growing for subsistence, you need about 400 SF with producing plants per person. Most of what you read says just 400 SF. I add the producing plants because there is no guarantee all your plants will do well in any given year and you need that 400 SF to provide enough food for the year. If half your plants don’t do well then that means you have only enough food for half the year unless you increase the size of the gardening plot you allot per person. To give some perspective, 400 SF is about the size of a two-car garage. The average size family is three people. That means, at a minimum, you need space for three, two car garages to feed a family of three all year. Most backyards these days aren’t even that big. The next factor to this question is time. Gardening takes a fair amount of time. The larger the garden, the more time it takes. For a relatively small 8’ x 12’ garden I’d estimate it takes about six hours a week to plant, water, prune, handle any bugs/infestations, and pick. If your growing season is six months, that comes to 144 hours of labor. Another way of looking at it is that comes to 3.6 40-hour work weeks over a six-month period. If you can grow cold hardy food plants during the fall, winter, or both then the number of hours increases with it.  An 8’ x 12’ garden is 96 SF. Therefore, over six months, a 400 SF garden is going to take approximately 576 hours or 14.4 40-hour work weeks. I’ll discuss this more later but another factor you must consider, especially with subsistence farming, is food preservation. This is a new skill that adds significant time and cost.

            If you want to make this into a business, start with the information for subsistence and scale it from there depending on how much you want to make and if you want to eat any of the produce yourself. If you are healthy and don’t have to work a normal 40 hour plus job then this is a good way to supplement your family’s food or finances. If you do have to work a normal 40- hour plus job, this is going to take up most of your free time. Only you can decide if it’s worth it to you.

            I recommend everyone start with hobby gardening. A hobby garden can be any size, although I recommend at least 4’ x 4’ to get an understanding of how different food plants grow in proximity to each other. I’m going to go over it in this series but nothing takes the place of experience. If you don’t have that much space, learning to grow is the most important thing. Hobby gardening allows you to grow most food plants in as little space as 1’ x 1’ or a large planter pot. Hobby gardening allows you to decide how much time and money you are going to invest. The fewer the plants, the less time and cost. Hobby gardening also still provides the pleasures of growing food plants – watching something grow that you planted, learning more about nature, enjoying the fruit of your efforts, and experiencing the taste of food without chemicals. The more you do something, the better you are going to get at it. The more ability to match added effort to your time, space, and finances the more you will enjoy the experience.

                        Whatever you choose, please get out there and start growing food plants. If you love watching things grow and enjoying tangible reward from your work then you will love this activity. If you don’t love the process then do it for the knowledge. You can read all the books that exist on the subject but until you get experience doing it, the usefulness of that knowledge is limited. Regardless, learning to grow your own food is important as is learning the time, resources, and methods required to do it successfully. It’s ok to get the bulk of your food from grocery stores but it is tremendously important to have a knowledge base that does not make you dependent on those stores.

The Old Man