If you want a lot of food from your garden to supply your family through the year, you need to grow a lot. It’s quite simple. So you create a large, productive garden by whatever you think the best.
Say, you successfully grew a lot of crops. You have pails of tomatoes and cukes in summer and potatoes, carrots and squashes in fall that should be enough until the next season. Does it mean you have secured enough food? Unfortunately things are not that simple. After you get the crops, you need to store them without spoiling.
You need to process the fast-going ones like summer vegetables and berries to preserve. You dehydrate, can, freeze, pickle and so on. And they have to be processed between the harvest and the time to be spoiled. It is quite intensive work in a short time period.
Can you imagine how many jars of tomato sauce your family will consume in a year, and how many tomatoes you will need to make a jar of sauce? Say you use 3lb/10 tomatoes per a jar for 1 meal of family of 4. You use 2 jars per month. This requires 72lb/240 tomatoes. If you get 6lb of fruits per plant on average, you need to grow 12 tomato plants. You know this is just the calculation in a perfect world – in reality you may lose some of your plants before fruiting, your fruits won’t ripe all at once, you may consume some fresh before you process, etc. And 2 jars of tomato sauce per month is a quite moderate volume for a family with growing children. And think about you process 72lb/240 tomatoes/24 jars in your kitchen… And this is just one of all sorts of foods we consume every day. After this kind of mental exercise, I have appreciated a jar of sauce and jam someone else made much, much more.
The other day I tried to process my winter squash and carrots as much as possible. Using the oven fully, this is my one-day work.
And I clean up the squash, pack and stick it into the freezer next day. A 2-day job for 9-10 bags of mushed squash.
Storage crops – potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, cabbages, winter squash, etc – last long, but you need to store them properly. The space has to be fairly dry. In this cold climate it requires proper insulation to avoid freezing. It can’t be too warm either. You want to protect them from pests.
And some requires cleaning and/or curing prior to storing. You need the space to spread or hang your crops to dry. The more you have the more space you need.
Many serious homesteaders have a large storage container, room or even a building to handle the great volume of crops.
Just like any other thing in our life, once you start growing more foods, it expands. You realize more time, space, tools and labor required to manage it. How much is enough for you vary person to person and time to time.
I am pleased to see the small but significant improvement of my gardening, food storing and processing skills this fall. I find myself getting more conditioned with the annual cycle through the food growing.
After somehow I store my foods, hopefully I can catch my breath. Then start dreaming about seeding in the garden again!