In shopping around a self-sufficiency garden food system, it’s perhaps not surprising that I’ve come across doubts that such a drastically different approach would work. That is, provide a feasible alternative to the industrial food system, even though I’ve consistently said gardens don’t need to completely replace it. Rather, just go around it. So this and the next post will address concerns around whether it can do that.
The Inside Story
Are you kidding? Gardens take too much time.
This is by far the most common reaction I get when I suggest starting up a garden. The overwhelming impression “out there” is that a vegetable garden calls for way more time than most anyone has, in no small part because it entails a lot of hard, costly work. As The New Yorker cartoon below so cleverly claims. To test that impression, in 2023 I kept a log of the number of minutes I spent in the garden every day and what I was doing, starting March 14 and ending October 21. As you can see from sample entries, it averaged out to 62 minutes a day, about an hour. Full disclosure, that varied from around two hours a day for some days in the Spring to as little as 15-20 minutes/day in the Fall. However, that year happened to be when I was starting up a new garden on a site that had been in brome grass pasture for years, which meant getting tough root masses broken up, re-installing fences, spading new beds, etc. Those are initial chores that don’t have to be repeated each year. Also of note: I was 74 at the time, used only hand tools, and prepped ten 1.5’x40’x1’deep beds. If I could do it in that amount of time per day, on average, under those conditions, how hard and excessively time-sucking could it be? Especially considering that the average American spends four hours a day watching TV.
Eating only from your garden for 30 days doesn’t prove that you can do it for a whole year.
Technically, that is correct; unexpected things can go wrong when you multiply any initially successful endeavor by a factor of twelve. However, my (2020) 30-day experiment does provide enough baseline data to indicate that properly managed, the soil of a 35’x40’ plot has the intrinsic capacity to produce 365 days worth of food for one. Based on that trial run, my 2021 garden of that area produced over 1,000 pounds of vegetables, or 107% of a year’s needs. Nor are my results unusual: yields of the primary vegetables I’ve grown matched the average of home garden yields predicted by five USDA field experiment stations around the country. Exceeding those outcomes, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported home garden yields at 170% of what I achieved1, and a permaculture garden produced 230% as much.2
Besides, even if a self-sufficiency garden system met only half of U.S. food needs for a year, it would be a huge nutritional improvement over the standard American diet (SAD) of 75% UPFs (ultra-processed foods). In addition, as I’ve mentioned before, it would be a powerful hedge against the onslaught of climate change disasters now arriving ever more frequently and intensely.
You can’t get enough calories from a garden.
My best garden yields can produce a total of about 1,650 calories worth of food per day (on an annual basis, 35’x40’), although I could increase that to at least 1,800 or more if I planted (in the same area) more staples like beans, corn, and sweet potatoes and less of “juicy” options such as tomatoes, squash, kale, and okra. The recommended U.S. intake of calories—regardless of the source—varies from 1,600 to 3,200 a day per person, depending on five metrics: age, sex, body mass, activity, and health issues. However, it’s absurd to portray (as the food media does) calories delivered by UPFs as equivalent to those in whole, healthy foods. Especially given that 75% of us are overweight, 40% are obese, and well over a third are diabetic or pre-diabetic. How could universal benchmark calorie recommendations have any realistic value when they’re derived from—and thus set goals for—a bloated population consuming a high proportion of low-nutrition, high-calorie junk food?
A more sensible context would include a sixth carb-related measure of diet: healthy quality calories (e.g., favoring garden-fresh vegetables) rather than UPF-dominant quantity.3 This is why, incidentally, I portray ULFs (ultra-local foods) as the extreme opposite of UPFs. Even then, rather than trying to weight all six metrics into some pre-conceived formula (more numbers games), you could more feasibly and beneficially pursue a diet according to how it makes you feel—and feel about—yourself through intelligent trial and error.
To do that, it would be helpful to follow some simple guidelines. First, have a firm and enduring intention of getting the amounts of vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, and calories that you find are right for you, even if you don’t know at first just what they would be. A starting point for a balanced diet from a garden could be about one-third dry shell beans (for protein); one-third dry corn, sweet potatoes, and regular potatoes (mainly for carbs); and one-third dark leafy greens, squash, tomatoes, etc. (for a variety of additional nutrients). Rest assured that this mix could provide a surprisingly wide variety of menu options. Second, don’t make any drastic changes suddenly. If you’re just beginning a self-sufficiency garden, don’t think you have to produce a year’s supply of a balanced diet right off the bat. Rather, start small and enjoyably build up, step by step, according to what your body tells you is working. Third, gradually reduce UPFs to at most an occasional item.
In my 30-day experiment of eating only from my “Super Size Me” garden, my beginning compared to my ending physical exams revealed that my weight had remained normal and my moderately high cholesterol had dropped by 15 points—nice results. But then, my weight and cholesterol were not that much of an issue. This experiment is just one outcome, but it could serve as an example of how to take a cautious, try-it-out-and-see-what-you-get approach. Then adjust accordingly, rather than being ruled by a set caloric “need” according to the UPF-dependent metrics of the food media.
You can’t get enough protein from a garden.
Protein is even more contentious than calories when it comes to figuring out what constitutes a healthy level of intake. The most often recommended figure is 0.36 g per pound of body weight per day, but I’ve yet to see how objectively—or not, as I suspect—that figure was determined. I’ve seen reports of thriving, healthy cultures that consume a third as much while some dieticians in this country advise multiplying it by a factor of three or even much more. In fact, high-protein diets have become somewhat of an obsession over the last few years.4 Meanwhile, we Americans consume twice as much meat per capita as Europeans (who tend to be healthier), and three times as much as the world average.
Should we thus add yet another measure—protein—to our list of diet metrics? To be sure, it’s an essential nutrient, but just as with calories, it would be nonsense to cast the protein in UPFs as physiologically equivalent to that in whole foods. Yet that’s precisely what the universal benchmark does. As with calories, it would be more rational to think in terms of consuming healthy foods—preferably from your garden—and adjusting according to what you hear from your body. In other words, it’s high time to shift the context: make diet decisions based not on UPF-framed standard numbers but rather, on self-empowered bodily results. For a balanced diet self-sufficiency garden, planting guidelines for protein would be roughly the same as above: a third for carbs, another third for protein, and the final third for anything else that delights your palate.
A 35’x40’ garden for one would mean a 70’x80’ garden for two, and 140’x160’ for four.
Not necessarily. First, consider that a family of two to four would likely achieve some economy of scale, although I haven’t yet tested that out. There are intriguing unknowns here. For instance, how would teenagers versus young children play out? Teenagers would certainly eat a good bit more, but they could also produce much more in that one hour a day than young children. Second, would an average healthy family accustomed to mostly garden fare crave the excessive volume of food that the average 75% UPF-dominant diet dishes up? And third, to be realistic, no one, not even homesteaders, suggests that as a country we should switch to 100% garden food overnight. Which is why I consistently push a goal of “only” 50%—by perhaps 2050. That’s in part because it’s already been achieved by Russia5, with far fewer advantages—especially now—than we have.
The average family of four doesn’t have enough storage space for a year’s supply of home-grown groceries.
That may be true in some cases. However, if two-thirds of that supply consisted of staples like dry shell beans and dry corn, which need relatively little space, the rest could likely be accommodated without adding an extra room to the average house. Of course, it would depend on what non-staples are grown and how they’re stored: frozen, canned, pickled, whole dry, or dehydrated. To be best prepared for a disaster like the Helene-generated event that flooded western North Carolina, it would be wise for every household to use the storage space they have to maintain at least a month’s supply of garden-produced food at all times.
Without planning to, I had that amount of home-grown garden food on hand when I decided to conduct my 30-day experiment prompted by the Covid pandemic. Then again, the Helene disaster was more extreme than most in that it wiped out all services in the Asheville area for weeks: power, internet, cell phone, city water, and grocery-store food. Absent (as that event thankfully was) the coldest part of winter or the hottest period of the summer, a well-stocked garden-supplied pantry—not too dependent on freezer space, plus perhaps a rooftop-collected tank of filtered rainwater—would have gotten most people through the worst of it.
This is another reason why it would serve us well to shift the context of how we think about food. Don’t just assume that the “just-in-time” three-day supply in grocery stores will always be there. Rather, create your own stash with a self-sufficiency garden. Prior to Helene, western N.C. had been thought of as a “climate haven,” immune to just about any kind of geology- or weather-related disaster. But look what happened: $60 billion in damages at last count, of which only about $10 billion in help from the government is on the way. When and if it arrives.
This is our new, alarming world: “natural” disasters that will drastically shake up our food system. But don’t get discouraged. Instead, be part of the new answer: start a garden or upgrade your current one to balanced-diet self-sufficiency. And stay tuned.
1McDougall, R., Kristiansen, P., and Rader, R. 2018. Small-scale urban agriculture results in high yields but requires judicious management of inputs to achieve sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116: 129-134. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1809707115
22019. Permaculture garden grows 7,000 pounds of healthy organic food per year using only a tenth of an acre. PreparednessMama. https://preparednessmama.com/permaculture-garden-grows-7000-pounds-of-healthy-organic-food-per-year-using-only-a-tenth-of-an-acre/#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20family%20that,per%20year%20selling%20excess%20produce!
3Maldarelli, C. 2025. “To Me, It’s Junk Food”. Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/health/marion-nestle-interview-ultraprocessed-food-health
4Spivak, E. 2024. The inside scoop on how America became obsessed with protein. Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/health/how-america-became-obsessed-with-protein
5Sharashkin, L. 2008. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri. https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/5568