How do I grow my own food and be self-sufficient?
“How do I grow my own food and be self-sufficient?”
This was a recent question posed to me by a newsletter reader. To be honest, those are two enormous tasks. Self-sufficiency is a topic worthy of many blog posts. I’m thinking what she was really asking was, “how do I grow enough food to not have to go to the store?”
This is a much easier question to tackle. Let’s start at the beginning by asking,” Why grow your own food?”
to be connected to the food you put in your body
to have food that is nutrient dense and extremely fresh
to reduce the mileage of your food
to know exactly how and where your food was grown
to choose varieties that you like and grow vegetables or fruit that might not be available in your local grocery store
enjoying seasonal foods
desire to have a reliable food source
I’m sure there are many more reasons, these are a few of my big reasons.
How do I grow my own food?
This a one of the easiest and hardest tasks known to human kind. We’ve been agriculturalists for the last 11,000 years. Collecting wild grains from grasses and then purposefully planting them, tending them, and collecting them when they are dried down and ready to harvest.
Growing your own food is as simple as planting some seeds in the ground in a sunny place, watering consistently, and waiting for the plant to do it’s thing.
This method is great, but you want an actual crop you can eat and put the extras aside for winter. This is where the work and magic of gardening comes in. I’ve been growing my own food for over 20 years. In all those years I’ve never had a season where something didn’t go wrong for some crop. And the more you grow the more risk you take for losing something to pests, weather, and disease.
But that’s ok, because gardening is a life long learning experience and the only way to get good at it is to do it. Learn from failures and mistakes and prepare and fix them the next season.
Steps for the total beginner:
Choose crops that you really like and will eat a lot of
Choose crops that are reliably easy to grow so you feel an element of success. For example: zucchini, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, peas or green beans
Find a sunny spot, plants really do love morning sun and late afternoon shade (if you live in intermountain west)
Prepare your growing space, start small. The worst thing you can do is go big when you first start. Let your garden expand as your experience and knowledge expands
I recommend for your first ever growing season planting starts from a local nursery, starting from seed is a whole other ball game.
Water consistently. In the high desert this may mean watering everyday. Check the soil moisture an inch down to get a better sense of your plant’s water needs. For example zucchini needs a lot of water!
Check on your plants everyday. Look for signs of disease, pests and any nutrient needs. I highly recommend getting this book: What’s Wrong with My Vegetable Garden. It’s full of pictures for just about everything that can go wrong with various plant families.
Take action right away when trouble arises
When your plants start to produce, enjoy the freshest fruits and veggies you’ve ever tasted!
Keep a growing journal. Makes notes about planting times, how the plants did over the season, any issues with pests, disease or weather, note how the fruits or veggies tasted and if you would grow them again.
Growing your own food is an ever evolving task. There are many books out there which tell you how to grow it all. But growing enough food to not have to go to the store is all about figuring out your culinary priorities, having land, caring for animals and learning to grow huge amounts of crops and how to harvest and process them. Like a 1/4 acre of wheat if you want bread for the whole year for a family of 4…
“How do I be self-sufficient?”
Self-sufficiency is a never ending game of skill building and self improvement. From what I’ve discovered, self-sufficiency, in the sense that you do everything that your life requires by yourself without outside influence is almost impossible. In fact living a “self sufficient life” is much better done in tandem with someone who also strives towards that goal.
I think that self-sufficiency is really about removing as many middle men from the systems that bring resources into your life. If you think about the key factors for humans to live a relatively comfortable life and survive, you need to cover these 4 things: Food, shelter, water, heat. All the rest comes from the necessity of full filling these four needs.
If you want to cut out the middle man (ie. corporations, supply chains, government bureaucracy and so on) you’ll need to begin to learn the skills that will aid you in acquiring the resources to fill the four basic needs. You also need to build a community, even if it’s a small one like you and your spouse, to share the skill load.
For example my gardening partner is a master gardener. He can grow anything just about anywhere. But when it comes to the processing of the harvest that’s often my job. I love it and have learned to dry, can, ferment, smoke and freeze everything that we grow. He has more important jobs like pruning trees, doing small engine repair on our farm equipment, maintaining the irrigation system, the list goes on and on. I have no interest in those, though I do watch and try to make a mental note just incase I need to help or do something when he’s gone.
Of course there are also many things that we do together, because you need a helping hand or two heads are better than one at solving problems.
You can expand this example out to all four of the basic needs. The richer and more expansive you want to make the full-filling of those needs the more skills you will need. This is often why villages are formed where people have a specific skill set and they barter or trade for the things cannot or don’t have time to do themselves.
There are so many people out there who are striving towards a self-sufficient life and do an amazing job of it. However they have chosen the things they can’t do themselves and are ok with that. They are ok with asking for help or knowing there are materials they need that would be impossible to make themselves. Like power tools, solar generators, glass jars, gasoline, you get the idea. How many of us have the time to mine for ore and smelt it down into iron and make knife blades and axes and augers and nails?
The short answer to my soap box explanation is:
“Self-sufficiency is a manifestation word that will help drive your goal towards becoming a person who is well rounded, capable of dealing with adversity and has the ingenuity to make or fix anything they need to.”
I encourage you, after reading this, to pick one easy thing in your life that you could do for yourself and learn to do that thing with proficiency. My first ever self-sufficient skill was learning to ride my bike at 9 years old, then way finding, and after that came cooking from scratch, learning to read the weather, food preservation, growing food, sewing, making fire… it really snow balled because I wanted to manifest that goal. I continue work at it to this day.
I’d love to hear about the skills you are learning or want to learn.
