Whether you’re a homesteader or are interested in off-grid living and survival preparation, one of the key factors in your life is producing your own food. Providing food like fruits, vegetables and meat for your household year-round takes a lot of work and planning, but it’s worth it to get high-quality food and to limit your carbon footprint on the environment.
Working towards self-sufficiency requires you to research, establish a plan and eventually carry out that plan. In the end, the goal is to be a producer rather than a consumer. When you grow your own food in a garden or care for animals that will eventually become protein, you’re in control and responsible for every step of the process. It makes it all the more meaningful when you sit down to have a meal where all the food was grown with your hands.
What does it take to produce all your own food? There’s a lot that goes into growing a garden and raising animals, so here’s a guide to help you as you go on your journey of self-sufficiency.
Establish a Plan and Goals for Producing All Your Own Food
First and foremost, you need to establish a plan and set goals for producing all of your food. Without a plan, it will be a bit chaotic and challenging. Create a list of what you and those living in your home eat now. Do you eat a lot of eggs in their diet? What about dairy products? What kinds of vegetables do you and your household consume the most? In addition to making this list, make a note of the quantities as well.
This will help you in deciding what to grow. You certainly don’t want to plant a bunch of peppers if no one in your household is going to eat them. The goal is to have as little waste as possible and ensure that you’re growing enough to satisfy yourself. Additionally, consider the climate in your area and choose things that will grow best. It’s okay to start small and build on your base to understand better what and how much to produce.
Consider Your Space
Next, consider your space. While outsiders may think all homesteaders have acres of land to use for food production and activities, that’s just not the case. Many urbanites have decided to go off-the-grid and may only have a 12-foot by 12-foot plot of land. The viable space you have will help determine what you can grow or raise.
You can certainly find ways to maximize your crops but to put it simply, the more land you have, the more crops and animals you can grow and raise. To sustain one person on a vegetarian diet, you would need about five acres of land. However, with the availability of greenhouses and vertical farms, it would be possible to sustain yourself with less land.
Ensure You Have Time to Devote to Your Food Production
Producing all your own food takes time. You need to ensure you have time to devote to your garden and animals. If you can’t set aside a couple of hours every day to your food sources, you won’t be successful in growing and raising your crops and animals.
If you raise livestock, you’ll need to feed and water them every day in the morning, afternoon and at night. Additionally, if you grow crops, you’ll need to spend time weeding them, finding ways to get rid of pests, watering them, adding fertilizer or mulch and eventually harvesting and preparing the soil for the next season. Food production will become part of your daily routine, so set aside time to produce your own food for the most success.
Choose Gardening Methods and Principles
You’ll also need to choose a gardening method when you decide to produce all of your own food. There are so many gardening methods available that have proven to be effective. Here are a few techniques you might consider when you go to plant your crops:
- Composting
- Mulching
- Companion planting
- Deep soil penetration
- Regenerative agriculture
- Square-foot gardening
- Growing crops for sufficient calories
Other gardening methods are available too. Research and ask other homesteaders in your region for best practices to have the most successful crops to ensure you can be self-sufficient.
Prepare Your Soils
Without good soil, you’ll have a challenging time producing enough food for survival. Starting a garden begins with a good foundation. You have to build good soil so the vegetables you plant get the proper amounts of nutrients and water without adding fertilizers or other chemicals.
Soil stores everything that plants need to grow, like nutrients, air, water and organic matter. It also gives the plants’ roots support. Organic matter in mulch and compost are some of the best additives to soils, making the soil more workable. As long as you care for your soil, you shouldn’t have a problem with weeds, and your plants will thrive.
Decide If You Want to Get Animals
Another important consideration when you want to produce all your own food is deciding if you’re going to get livestock. Many homesteaders choose to get animals to feed their families and make extra income by selling animal and dairy products. Some great starter animals for producing your own food are chickens, goats and cows. A cow can produce a few gallons of milk every day, and individual hens can lay up to 250 eggs every year.
Animals often cause pollution if not properly handled. If you get cows or other livestock that need a lot of space, practice things like regenerative farming and rotational grazing to reduce your carbon footprint as you work towards self-sufficiency.
Plan How Much to Grow and Raise to Sustain Your Household
Depending on how many people you’re planning on feeding, you’ll need to plan how much to grow and raise to sustain your household. It should be easier if it’s just you because you know what you like to eat and how much you eat. If you’re planning for a growing family, it can be a bit more challenging.
You can plant by the number of servings various crops will provide you. Figure out how many servings you and those in your household need for a year by monitoring what they eat in a given week and then multiplying those numbers to add up to one year.
Use Different Varieties of Crops
Growing food to sustain yourself for the whole year means that you’ll likely have to plant different varieties of your crops throughout the growing season. If possible, plant early, mid and late versions of your crops.
This means that you’ll have crops growing throughout the year instead of just one time of the year, providing you with fresher vegetables. Doing this also helps reduce food waste and loss due to pests and diseases because the vegetables are designed to be planted at a specific time of the year instead of using one variety and counting on it to produce throughout the year.
Succession Plant to Maximize Space
In addition to planting a variety of crops, you can also succession plant. This maximizes the space you already have, and it’s a way to produce more food quickly. For example, if you plant an early crop of potatoes, you could plant a quick-growing crop immediately after before you would plant another crop of potatoes for the fall.
By planting quick-growing crops between your longer crops, you maximize the space you have and produce more of your own food. This will allow you to have more fresh produce, and you won’t be wasting your time or garden space.
Consider Adding Greenhouses
Some climates are better suited for gardening and raising animals than others. If you live in a warmer region, you can grow crops nearly year-round. However, if you live in a colder climate, you might want to consider adding a greenhouse to produce all of your own food.
Greenhouses create stable temperatures for the perfect environment to grow fruits and vegetables. Additionally, you could add an indoor vertical farm to continue to produce your food even when it’s snowing and cold. Greenhouses are great for the summertime, too, especially when it’s wetter or there are drought conditions.
Plant Fruit Trees
Planting fruit trees is a great way to produce your own food. Once they mature, they offer you so much fresh fruit that you can later preserve for the colder months. Fruit trees, like apples, cherries and pears, are perfect for those who want to produce their own food.
They take some time to grow, and you will need to prune them to continue to mature properly. Additionally, they’re great for pollination and will attract beneficial insects to your garden so your vegetables can grow as well.
Decide How You’ll Preserve Your Food
All of the time, money and effort you put into planting crops and raising animals should not go to waste. Preserving your food is one of the most important factors when you want to be self-sufficient and live off your land.
There are some great ways to preserve food, like pickling, freeze-drying, fermenting and freezing. Many farmers and homesteaders will can their food. This process preserves fruits, vegetables and meats in brine in an enclosed jar. Another popular way to keep food is by freezing it. If you have a large family, you might want to invest in a chest freezer to store all of your food items. You can also dry or dehydrate foods.
Keep Records of Your Food Production
As you navigate through feeding yourself and anyone else in your home, keep records. You can do this in a notebook or on a computer. That way, when you plant your crops and raise your livestock for the following year, you can go back and read what worked and what didn’t work. Here are some questions to guide you as you journal about your crops and livestock:
- What vegetables did you plant?
- What were your crop yields?
- How many eggs did your chickens produce?
- How often did you tend to the garden for watering?
- What was your schedule for taking care of animals?
- Which varieties of plants grew best?
- How did you prepare your soil?
- Did you have any garden pests? How did you get rid of them?
There are many other items you can address in your gardening and livestock journal. The more you write, the better off you will be for the following years.
Care for Your Animals
Besides providing any livestock with food and water, you’ll also need to keep them healthy. Throughout the year, you may have to take animals to a vet for a checkup or have a veterinarian come to your property. If you’re raising your animals for food or dairy products, you want to keep them in the best condition.
Additionally, you’ll need space for them to graze. Animals will require a few acres of land to move around. Plus, you will need to make plans for shelters. Whether you build a large barn or have separate smaller barns and huts for animals, they are necessary to keep your livestock safe.
Go the Extra Mile with Oils and Sweeteners
Finally, if you want to be purely self-sufficient and produce all of your own food, you can go the extra mile and make your own oils and sweeteners. If you raise livestock, you can render the fat to create cooking oils. Additionally, you can grow sunflowers and other seeds or nuts to make vegan oils.
For sweeteners, you can get a beehive for honey. Keeping bees is a reasonably easy task and is something many homesteaders rely on for their sweeteners. Having the bees around your garden will be beneficial for pollination, too. If you would rather not get bees, you can tap sap from sugar maple trees to make your own maple syrup.
Growing Your Own Food in the Journey to Self-Sufficiency
As you prepare to grow your own food, think about how much it will benefit the environment! You’ll be reducing your carbon footprint and living off of the land. Growing your food will take time as you learn how much you need to grow, but it’s worth it in the end to have fresh food that you prepared with your own two hands.
Author Bio:
Jane is the editor-in-chief of Environment.co. She is passionate about sustainability, gardening and homesteading.
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