this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
67 points (95.9% liked)
Gardening
583 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This really underplays the food storage and preparation required to live off your own garden. No talk about pickling and storing vegetables to last. Great rule of thumb about space but nothing about the effort
Preserving is absolutely the worst part of bumper crops.
It takes multiple full days of work throughout the growing season to preserve everything for winter. It’s a ton of effort.
That’s like 90% of the reason I advocate for growing 3-5 plants inside (only one tomato, omg only one tomato), space permitting. They will produce year round for years off a single plant if well tended.
Year round fresh abundant tomatoes beat the pants off growing 12 plants in summer and needing to spend literal days preserving the haul (plus the investment in glass). Same with bell peppers. Squash needs to be hand pollinated, but if you grow that inside you do get to choose how much the plant produces, and it’s less likely to come down with powdery mildew and stuff, so that’s super nice, too.
Exactly. We grew like 3 tomatoes our first year and it was so much we ended up throwing some of them away. This year we did 1 pickling cucumbers and it's more than enough.
We are doing herbs inside all year before doing one other crop maybe.
Herbs are good, and you should consider growing lettuce or spinach. You can mix it into stuff if you don’t salad, it’s good fiber and easy to grow in the same conditions as herbs indoors.
If you ever feel like growing something in a closet with a few standard 60 watt-equivalent leds (or a cheap grow light), bell peppers are expensive enough to warrant home growing, are self-pollinating, very easy to grow in a soilless or hydroponic medium, and tend to grow very dense flesh so even if the pepper is smaller it’s more meaty and flavorful.
Cucumbers also do really well with a soilless medium, but are not self-pollinating. If you want to limit your harvest, just don’t pollinate some of the female flowers, and the plant will spend more energy on those remaining.
There are a lot of plants that will continually produce for x time, if kept in good growing conditions. Tomatoes and peppers are “many years, possibly indefinitely”, and there are other plants which are the same, but maybe require more work. Totally worth looking into.
(This is a special interest of mine, I’m working on creating a root crop system to give away freely, especially for low income households)