Topic: How much to grow to keep a family fed?

[moonbells]

1. Too far, Moonbells - see my profile!
2. Too late, Truffle - too impatient! But daughter has rescued some for her painting classes to wash brushes in!
3. Should this thread not be edited & put into a sticky or other reference place??

oh - was off on Friday and have Friend with birthday in Bristol so I was thinking I could do a recycling run en route!

pity - I've been trying to get a few proper Kilner jars for ages (you can't get them any more, just inferior replicas)

 :)

moonbells  (now to find the book with the quantities in)

[tim]

SEE MY PM!

[flowerlady]

An allotment like mine of 20m x 10m has 1,800 sq ft.

 

This year will be my first full season, having started very late last year.

If I had any aspirations I would try very hard to emulate EJ,  ;D , I stand in awe of your achievements.

Sadly I am still working and feel sure that this will effect my self sufficiency.

Would be very interested to know approx how many kg of spuds you put in and the number of onions, shallots and garlic?

John Jeavons list from supersprout I find fascinating, it seems be be highly subjective and I am sure we would all adapt the list, I shall try !!

[jennym]

I am glad this has generated some interest, lots of lovely replies here. Very impressed!
Flowerlady, for the potatoes, this may be not the best way to judge it - but I reckon one seed potato generates 2 or 3 meals for our family, so I work it out that way. The same with shallots, because they split, I reckon one seed shallot gives me enough for a meal. Other onions, well, how many do we use use a week? the sets just provide one, so that's straightforward to work out.
I suppose the veg I most appreciate and seem to get best results from are the french beans - they always seem to do well, and they are so dear to buy in the shops, and freeze so well - either as green beans whole, or cut into little pieces, or frozen as green haricots vert.

[Trixiebelle]

What an interesting thread!

I'm just looking @ chest freezers at the moment ready for the 'harvest'.

After 2 years on the allotment we've decided that we didn't grow enough of everything to last all year round (although it seemed a lot at the time) and like some of you, I DETEST AND BEGRUDGE buying vegetables!

If you've got the growing room and the time, in my opinion it's well worth growing twice as much as you THINK you NEED ... after all, the price of 2 beetroot seeds isn't much more than the price of 1! That's the main reason we've taken on an extra veg allotment this year and although it'll be twice the work, it'll save me having 'shop-vegetable buying rage'  ;D

This is a very good book for ideas on storing:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1903998255/qid=1141908242/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/026-0012524-1530843

And a hint on freezing veg: Instead of just freezing the individual veg (like I did for the last 2 years!) make up the actual meals that they will be used in i.e. pies, soups, stews etc. and do 'veg mixes' in bags instead of just one type.

And always label it well! HOW many times have I taken a bag of green mush out of the freezer andf thought "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?" :D

[Curryandchips]

Excellent suggestion on the 'mixed veg' idea in the freezer. It becomes a bit of a chore to wade around in the bottom of the chest freezer to search for beans, carrots and peas, and often we end up just having what we grab hold of. This coming year I must remember to keep some of the veg in boxes so they can be mixed and bagged.

[supersprout]

If I had less room for my root cellar I would store 'mixed veg' in one bin - carrots, parsnips, beet - and take pot luck like that.

[Trixiebelle]

Forgot to add ... ALSO pre-prepare and freeze veg. side dishes. e.g. carrots in orange juice, garlic, cider; red cabbage with apple and red wine etc. . They keep really well!

[tim]

Curry - a little old friend of ours fell into hers!

[cate]

What an interesting thread. :)

The reason for my allotment is just to have some really good, fresh veg.  I hadn't considered being completely self sufficient.

However, yesterday, in Sainsbury's, I bought 6 carrots, a tray of brocolli and cauliflower mix, and a bag of 'new' potatoes - cost £4.15!!  So I am begining to think about not just the fresh stuff but also the keeping of it for use later in the year. :o

Interesting, that the veg cost £4.15 but the four pork chops cost under £2.50 when you take into account that they were bogoff.

[Curryandchips]

My chest freezer is 9 cu ft Tim, big enough for ME to fall into, and the bottom seems a very long reach away. I hope your friend was not alarmed by the episode !

[supersprout]

hi cate :) unlike some hardy folk on this thread, I don't try to be self sufficient in spuds, onions or carrots - but enjoy some home-grown ones for the freshness and taste. But I do live in the East of England where you can get bags of spuds and onions for a pound or two, and 'dirty' carrots, from farm shops or smallholders who sell from the roadside. If you can get these staples in bulk from places like these, you can save a fortune. Mine are stored in a cold room or in the cold cellar. With the staples taken care of, you can have fun with veggies where freshness is all, or which are just fun to grow.

[moonbells]

I recommend the HMSO book Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables, which I found out about on a thread here somewhere!  Needless to say, it was Tim who mentioned it - haven't thanked you properly for this, Tim!  Great book! Thankyou!
 
Here is the thread:
http://www.allotments4all.co.uk/joomla/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,28/topic,12824.0

I bought the book - photocopied though it was! And found something that covers basics up to jam problems (and how to fix them), times of boiling, freezing, microwave jams and has all sorts of recipes (including four for marmalade!)

It was first published aeons ago before there were domestic freezers, and has been updated over the years to take new tech into account.

My copy has all the middle pages back to front cos someone mucked up the photocopying!!!  ::) ::)

moonbells

[Robert_Brenchley]

To keep my lot fed I'd need several greenhouses, since they're all addicted to warm-climate veg. I can manage sweetcorn, and tomatoes to some extent; this year I'll try aubergines as well (which go by the African name of 'jublocks' with us).

[MikeB]

An extract from ‘ Your kitchen garden ‘ by George Seddon

Quote

An area of 100 sq. yds. Should provide a family of four with adequate lettuces, runner beans, peas, carrots and turnips in summer, and with leeks, cabbages and sprouts in winter.  To be self supporting in most vegetables, given a family with hearty appetites, four times as much ground, 400 sq.yds. would be needed.  The average English allotment measures 300 sq. yds..  Further land would be required for potatoes, 100 sq. yds. Or more depending on the family’s fondness for them

Unquote

The method of gardening described in the book is what I would call traditional, i.e. vegetables planted in rows and thinned out as per the seed packet.

I intend to use a variation of the square foot gardening method.  In the sfg method you plant a different type of vegetable in each sq. foot of ground in a raised bed, me I use raised beds and will use the spacing recommended in sfg, but I have the same veg in the whole bed e.g. my carrot bed is 4’ by 10’ and is totally planted with carrots.  This method of gardening (it is claimed) produces five times the crop that you would get with traditional methods.
So you should only need 1/5th of the land.  Using the above figures where you need 400 for veg, 100 for potatoes, a total of 500 sq. yds, with sfg you now only need 100 sq. yds to achieve the same results.  If you have a normal size lottie of 300 sq. yds., you can feed 12 people for one year.

OK these aren’t my figures and the last 10 years I’ve been using raised beds, but planting traditionally within those beds.  This is the first year of using the spacing recommend in sfg.

http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

[jennym]

Well, am going to grow slightly less potatoes this year, as supersprout says, they can be bought fairly cheaply and stored - but can't NOT grow my Anya, so love the taste.
Would love a polytunnel too Robert - no room unfortunately - do envy EJ and her bananas etc!
The HMSO book is not one I have so will look out for that, see if I can pick it up secondhand Moonbells - was it a photocopy you bought from Amazon? sounds odd?
Another book to put on my list then, Your Kitchen Garden sounds good Mike. I find the projected output from the sfg method a little daunting though! Maybe I'll have a go at a trial area, the spring onions I grow in a square after all, but they are ok sown thickly. Will be interested to know how you have got on at the end of the year.

[moonbells]

Jennym - the book seems to have some weird copyright - you can also order it from the HMSO or whatever it's called now, and again it's a copy. But Amazon's postage was cheaper (esp when I added a couple of others I wanted!) so I got it from there!

Not that it matters - it's pretty much solid text and therefore in some ways better value for money than something with 1/3 information and 2/3 fluff or pictures.

moonbells

[Curryandchips]

Mike, reading through your approach to sfg ... I am intrigued as to how it can achieve up to 5 times the yield as by conventional methods ... then a realisation struck me. With traditional 'linear' gardening, a lot of the space is not turned over to crops, but left 'fallow' ie as access around the plants, and not productive. This traditional method allows the land to sustain growth year upon year with some added nutrients in the form of manure, compost, chemicals etc. To increase yields dramatically as claimed, means the soil is also being robbed of the nutrients at an accordingly similar rate, which must deplete later crops, unless the nutrients can be restored by heavy replenishment. Therefore I can only see intensive cropping using sfg approaches working in the short term, ie not sustainable for most gardeners. In simple terms, the soil is not an infinite resource and the time and energy to replace the nutrients is not feasible.

Please be aware here, I am not being critical of sfg, I am just being cautious of 'claims' for fantastic gains over conventional methods. I also accept that conventional methods are not necessarily 'efficient' but have evolved over centuries to suit local demands.

[grawrc]

This is a really interesting thread.

We have a family of 6 and 2 allotments but I work full-time and I am the allotment holder. I have had lots of successes but also failures. Sometimes I can't go to the allotment for a week or more because of pressure of work ( or at the moment because of the weather) and things wilt and don't really recover.

I still have potatoes, parsnips, savoy cabbage, some pigeon blasted broccoli and jam - raspberry, strawberry and blackcurrant + some frozen fruit - mainly rhubarb and raspberries - + some broad beans and runner beans. We're on our last root of  garlic.

I don't really aspire to be self sufficient but I'm happier feeding my family stuff from the lottie.

[Svea]

moonbells, the dig for victory booklets are online - use google to find them.
not only was there a generel booklet but something like a monthly 'diary' publication, too