Self sufficient veg (and fruit) growing

Posts

• amancalledgeorge Posts: 2,736

  July 2020

  Yep self-sufficiency this far away from the Mediterranean is largely a fantasy. Growing so tied up to having sunshine and warmth for most crops makes the possibility of feeding oneself impossible. When you compare to the built in lack of efficiency when it comes to small plots it makes it just a pleasurable hobby and not dependable food production. 
  
  Those kind of websites frustrate me because the make people feel like they failed before they even tried to grow anything. Go and grow your tomatoes and aubergines, after all it's about what you enjoy eating, not about maximising production of brassicas that will bore you after a few weeks.

  To Plant a Garden is to Believe in Tomorrow

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• nick615 Posts: 1,487

  July 2020

  Yes, amancalledgeorge  has more or less given you the answer.  There'll be times when the only veg you'll have to eat could be, e.g., curly kale, parsnips and leeks, hardly an appetising menu.  One hears of Chinese peasants living on a bowl of rice per day but I don't think we call that living?
  

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• Suesyn Posts: 664

  July 2020

  With modern methods of preservation to is possible to expand the winter diet, we manage to eat raspberries, gooseberries rhubarb and green vegetables all year but have to buy oranges and banana when wanted. We buy very few vegetables at all as we usually have sufficient home grown in the freezer in one form or another (or preserved in some way).
  We do not buy out of season fruit or vegetables as we don't think they have the flavour that fresh locally grown food does.
  At this time of year we have so much produce we have to give it friends and neighbours. 

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• Blue Onion Posts: 2,995

  July 2020

  I think it all depends on food preservation.  Canning, freezing, and drying.  As a child growing up in rural Pennsylvania we were fairly self sufficient.  A huge garden and days and weeks of food preservation.  Canning beans, corn, grapes, carrots, pickles, etc, etc. Hunting and canning and freezing deer, turkey, rabbits, and squirrels (mainly those got eaten fresh, not much meat to make it worth preserving).  Freezer jelly and canned jams, dried apples and pears, fruit leathers, etc.  We didn't have a farm.. just veg garden, orchard, and various perennials like rhubarb, grapes, elder berries, currents, etc.  
  But with your U.K. weather and shorter season.. it will certainly be a bit more of a challenge.  Pickle your beetroots and can them, along with any other excess veg you can grow.  Kale can be blanched and frozen, along with runner beans and a variety of other things.  Grow and save what you can, and supplement with local meats and other local produce when you need.  We never grew strawberries.. instead we went to the local pick-your-own fields to gather baskets worth for months of jams for lunchbox sandwiches.  

  We still supplemented.. peanutbutter, crackers, bread, cereal, cookies, rice, etc.. plenty still from the shops.. but the bulk of most meals was from our own hands.  

  
  

  Haha.. all that effort scared me for life though.. I was a vegetarian for seven years (college to getting pregnant with our first).. and now only grow what can go from garden to plate, and rarely save much beyond some end-of-season roasted tomatoes frozen for pasta sauces in the next few weeks.  

  Utah, USA.

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• Posy Posts: 3,601

  July 2020

  I think what Blue Onion says is really fascinating. When I lived, briefly, in upstate New York almost 50 years ago, I knew an elderly lady who had a pantry the size of a small room. It was full of pickled, bottled, jammed fruit and veg. She had freezers, too, but used those for meat. In Europe, before modern agriculture and transport, winter diets must have been pretty dull, but for the lower orders, staying alive was the most important issue and hunger made even parsnips and kale tasty.

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• Butterfly66 Posts: 970

  July 2020

  Friends of mine are self sufficient vegetable and salad wise from their two allotment plots. As already said they freeze, store and preserve a lot for the winter months. I doubt it’s any more boring then eating seasonally. We try to eat seasonally and only U.K. grown to avoid air miles and it does take a change in expectations  - few aubergines and peppers for us, I now consider them a real treat and make the effort to make them the star of the meal when we do have them. Its also made me try out more new recipes when it’s the same veg for weeks on end -but wonderful when you get the first strawberries, peas etc as the season changes.
  

   If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
  East facing, top of a hill clay-loam, cultivated for centuries (7 years by me). Birmingham

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• Posy Posts: 3,601

  July 2020

  When I was young, there was no shame in tinned food. Now that we have freezers, we tend to insist on 'fresh'. The 'season' in seasonal has been greatly extended by glass houses and freezers, these days, but I would not like to give up entirely on the delights we enjoy from warmer climes.

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• Skandi Posts: 1,723

  July 2020

  We are self sufficient in some crops, we do buy anything we can't or won't grow.

  
  

  Potatoes, onions, garlic, peas, green beans, broad beans, runner beans, dried beans, beetroot, picked cucumbers, spinach/chard, strawberries, redcurrants, chilli peppers, red cabbage, winter squash, and tomatoes**
  

  We do not buy any pickled vegetables and we eat a lot of them, I do beetroot, cucumbers (both sliced and gherkins) onions, Asier (a huge type of cucumber) and red cabbage sometimes carrots and a mixed pickle.

  Jams/jellies are also all home made and vary depending on the year, but we generally have plum, strawberry, blackcurrant, raspberry, and rhubarb jam and apple, pear and redcurrant jellies.
  

  All the salsa, tomato ketchup and tinned tomatoes are also home grown, but we will buy the occasional fresh tomato out of season. same with cucumbers and we don't even try to grow peppers, we simply don't have enough heat.
  

  
  

  Due to the freezer it's not boring eating your own vegetables year round, it gets you away from cabbage/leek/potato all winter. It's not hard to produce enough for the year, but you have to accept some years you will fail at something and there will simply not be any of whatever it is that year. Last year the birds got all my redcurrants so we had no redcurrant jelly. I've just made this years batch so we have it again! It's not something I really try to do, there's things we could easily grow enough off and store enough of like carrots, parsnips and beetroot that I just never get round to sowing enough of, but that's the joy of doing it this way, there's always the supermarket to fall back on.

  
  

  I use 1500m2 with 48m2 of pollytunnel, however most of the production goes for sale not for me. We also use over 300 jars and 50 bottles to store all this in.
  

  
  

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