Self-Sufficiency Gardening - What Exactly Is It?

I noted in my introductory post that food self-sufficiency means different things to different people. Here, I’ll describe what it means to me, based on my research over the last several years, and how I arrived at that version. Along the way, I’ll weave in various aspects of what others think it is. You can then decide whether it makes sense to you.

My take in a nutshell: Per person, a self-sufficiency garden provides a balanced diet for up to a year in an hour a day of enjoyable tending. Feasible on a 35’x40’ plot, managed with hand tools only. Scalable to a garden food system serving up to many millions.

How the criteria of self-sufficiency began to emerge

I had been raising vegetables off and on ever since I was about ten. When Covid hit and the industrial food system was nuking huge masses of produce, eggs, milk, and animals they couldn’t get to market, an intriguing thought occurred to me: Really, everyone should start up a World War II-type victory garden. Then at some point I recalled Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, Super Size Me. In a famous experiment, he had eaten only at McDonald’s for 30 days straight, humorously recording the damage to his body and mind. That, in turn, triggered a third thought: What if I copied him but instead ate only from my garden for 30 days?

So I did just that back in 2020, Covid still rolling. Like Spurlock, I even scheduled a physical exam first (though not as extensive as his) and then again following the 30-day period of eating only from my garden. Just to have before and after health data. Always the scientist, I kept meticulous records of how much I ate, down to the tenth of an ounce, and the amount of area it took to grow it. I allotted myself three hearty servings per meal—breakfast, lunch, and supper—which sometimes meant getting a little creative. For instance, as I was used to having a couple links of sausage at breakfast, I concocted some bean “sausages” by boiling some of my dried butter beans until they were soft, mashing them up re-fried beans style, and making them into little patties seasoned with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Then I sauteed them to a crispy brown.

And it worked! That is, I was able to stick with it despite withdrawal symptoms from meat cravings, as I was not (nor am I now) a vegetarian. The only physiological change revealed by my post-30-day exam was a 15-point drop in my cholesterol. The doctor was impressed.

I then thought, Well, if I can live for 30 days off that amount of area in my garden, I should be able to grow a year’s worth in a garden 12 times that size. So in 2021 I enlarged my garden and grew out enough vegetables—calibrated to match the rate of consumption and area I’d recorded in my experiment—to give me 12 times as much food. As the table below shows, the garden exceeded that goal by about seven percent in number of servings, yielding over 1,000 pounds of veggies. Not too bad.

So fine, this would theoretically feed one person for a year, assuming that I’m average. But it does so to a degree unmatched by any other self-sufficiency garden plans I’ve seen. In following my criteria, you’ll see that they work together, each one interacting with and supporting the others.

Features of a self-sufficiency garden

Balanced nutrition

First and foremost, genuine self-sufficiency provides a nutritionally balanced diet, which means not only adequate minerals and vitamins but also protein, energy, and fiber. I never cease to be amazed at the number of gardening books, articles, videos, podcasts, and documentaries that extoll the nutritious wonders of home gardens with little or no mention of the need for calories and protein. Maybe they simply reflect the top ten favorites of American gardeners, which start with tomatoes and continue through cucumbers, lettuce, squash, peppers, green beans, carrots, zucchinis, and sweet peas—all watery. Nutritious as they are, you couldn’t live off them for very long without adding robust amounts of dry shell beans and veggies such as dry corn—for the likes of cornmeal and grits, sweet potatoes, and regular potatoes. That is, if you want to count on your garden for your sustenance. (I’ll cover various perceptions of how much protein and calories the average person needs—a whole other, fascinating, discussion—in a later post.)

For people who require vitamin B12, which is most of the population, a couple eggs per day may also be necessary. Some longer-term vegans have evidently conditioned their bodies to no longer need it, but no one is suggesting that you can count on reaching that point quickly.

Duration of self-sufficiency and plot size

To reiterate, I never say you need to get all your sustenance from your garden for a year to achieve a modicum of self-sufficiency. Rather, doing so for any continuous period of time counts as self-sufficiency—for that duration. Even if it’s just, say, one day. You don’t have to tackle the max end of this endeavor all at once. Yet even the minimal end would be a novel experience for many—I’m guessing most—gardeners, who ironically have never eaten even one nutritionally balanced meal sourced entirely from their garden. That’s probably because it means gearing the size of their plot to a desired duration of self-sufficiency, which seems rarely to occur to them as a goal worth pursuing. It also means supplying enough sources of protein, calories, vitamins, and minerals to achieve balanced meals. That can understandably seem like a lot, even though it can be simple. Picture a well-prepared garden bed just 2 feet wide by 12 feet long, sowed at appropriate intervals with the right amounts of corn, tomatoes, potatoes, dark leafy greens, and dry-shell pole beans. That mini-garden, with proper tending, should yield a least one entire day’s worth of a balanced diet, and probably more.

Of the 20 or so books and chapters on self-sufficiency gardens in my home library, none describe a plan for producing a balanced diet for a given amount of time, supplied from a prescribed amount of garden space, for an average person.* They talk a lot around those parameters, but don’t specify an effective route to self-sufficiency. One provided a table denoting the amount of space per vegetable needed to satisfy an average person’s consumption of that item for a year, but didn’t say how to group vegetables in quantities needed to balance a diet for that amount of time. Others, despite serving up large portions of juicy, enticing information, were nevertheless even more vague. A few briefly noted the importance of protein and calories, but again, without suggesting proportions needed to balance a diet. Another admirably focused on the nutritional importance of potatoes, squash, beans, and corn, but only hinted at general rates of consumption, no real plan. Some ignored calories or protein altogether. How would you reach self-sufficiency with a nutritionally deficient diet? In short, you wouldn’t.

Plenty of time

Oh, boy. Nothing sums up this grossly mistaken narrative better than the following cartoon:

To counter it, I say, “Well, I spend about an hour a day at it. And since the average American spends four hours a day watching TV, maybe most people could spare an hour away from the mesmerizing big flat screen. People say, “Really? You can do that even with a 35’x40’ garden that produces over 1,000 pounds of vegetables?”

Yes, you can. And to put that claim to the test, in 2023 I kept a garden log of the number of minutes I spent each day in my garden during the growing season, and what I was doing. Above are a few entries at the beginning and end of the log, the total number of days (223), hours (221), and average minutes I spent per day: 62. One. Hour. Per. Day. At age 73, so most anyone can do it. Especially if they aspire to only a few days’, weeks’, or months’ worth of self-sufficiency. Of course, that’s if you have the knowledge and skills, and approach it with the right attitude, which is not rocket science.

Not even one of Amazon’s self-sufficiency garden books estimated how much time, per person and per day, it would take to reach a designated degree of self-sufficiency. Don’t get me wrong, almost all of them are filled with wonderful, useful information; I can and do learn from nearly all of them. It’s just that they don’t come even close to describing how to achieve a feasible level of self-sufficiency for a year’s supply of balanced diet, in an hour a day.

True, my version applies only to one person. But it does provide baseline data on the intrinsic capacity of sunlight, air, soil, water, and an average human’s activity for the purpose of achieving a self-sufficiency garden. It’s beyond the scope of this thread to take it to the next level of a couple or family of say, four. To that eventual end, this version is intended as a much-needed starting point. I will say that a significant economy of scale would probably accrue with more gardeners per household, so that four people are not likely to need four 35’x40’ plots.

Enjoyment

This is THE most important principle of attaining food self-sufficiency. The cartoon above implies that gardening not only takes too much time just to save a few dubious dollars, it requires all of your energy and savings. Not exactly the picture of enjoyment. Yes, it’s just a cartoon, but it reflects the way people tend to think. And make no mistake, done wrong, gardening can certainly be sheer drudgery. Spend too much time and energy laboriously hoeing or pulling weeds, or putting too much strain on your back or knees, and that’s what you’ll get.

Note that I said laboriously. Time and again I hear people ominously warn that you have to account for your labor, above all. But that’s judging gardening in terms of industrial production, in which farm workers or laborers all along the 1,500-mile long industrial food chain do indeed engage in hard work, often under abusive, unfair, or underpaid conditions. Which means, or so the warners insist, that you, too must “labor” so you can “pay” for the “cost” of gardening, no way out of it.

If that’s your approach to gardening, you might as well head on back to the couch and TV. The hardest thing for many people to understand about gardening is that properly done, the activity you engage in delivers an even greater benefit than the food, fabulous as that bounty is. And the benefits of both the food and the activity arise like the early morning sun through genuine enjoyment, which happens only if you approach gardening with the right goals, knowledge, and attitude. That in turn gets back to continuous repetition of those circles of connection—planting, nurturing, harvesting, prepping, and eating, which enhance the cosmic wheel of connection to the earth, yourself, and others. So gardening activity done well really is an enjoyable benefit, not a cost. Put it on the solid profit, not the irksome expense, side of your ledger.

At least in this way most general and self-sufficiency garden books do recognize the importance of enjoying the activity, even if they never portray it as a benefit rather than a cost, or see its value as equal to or exceeding that of the food produced. Or fully advocate the underpinning circles of connection when experienced continuously. After all, it’s one thing to have a couple home-grown vegetables for the table; it’s quite another to enjoy the empowerment and satisfaction that comes from having an entire balanced meal picked from your garden. And it’s even more empowering when you enjoy it continuously, meal after meal, for days, weeks, or longer. That’s what I learned from my 30-day experiment; it takes the enjoyment of self-sufficiency to a whole new level.

A 35’x40’ Plot

Missing most often in the self-sufficiency gardening books and chapters is a description of a garden plot small enough for the average person to enjoyably produce a year’s supply of food. The books that came closest to doing are those in which gardens are part of a homestead. Full-out homesteads are great, and the best of them really do achieve self-sufficiency; that’s their goal. But they’re off the grid for not only food (which usually includes animals) but also housing, energy, heating, cooling, water, and waste disposal. That’s just too complex for more than a very small fraction of 1 percent of the population. Too ambitious, too expensive for the average person.

By contrast, a 35’x40’ garden, done properly, can fill the bill. It’s not that large—just a little over half of the floor space of the average American house. Self-sufficiency garden books either don’t mention how much space is required to feed one for a year, or else prescribe an area considerably greater than 35’x40’. A truly large garden—up to a tenth of an acre or more—runs into limitations on average available space, in addition to the extra time it would take one person to manage it. Remember, an important component of self-sufficiency gardening is that it should require an average of only an enjoyable hour of your time per day. At least IMO.

Hand Tools Only

Although I’ve found that it’s possible to put in and raise a year’s worth of vegetables for one with only a spade, a hoe, a rake, and a small wheelbarrow, and maybe a t-post driver if you consider that to be a garden tool, I have nothing against using a roto-tiller or the like. Although I don’t find a tiller to work well for me, I do use a weed whacker to “mow” the grass in the aisles between my rows of vegetables if I don’t get around to covering them with enough mulch to make that unnecessary. I might also use a power post-hole digger if I want to install super-sturdy support posts to keep my pole bean trellises from getting blown over by blustery storms (as happened three times in 2024). For those who choose to go to the trouble and expense, I also see no problem with using power tools like a drill to build wooden confinement borders for raised beds. All of which—including only hand tools—is still basically gardening, not farming.

Scalable to millions

Achieving a significant degree of food self-sufficiency is not just an individual concern; it’s an imperative for the whole country and the world, given both our current and rapidly approaching challenges.[hyperlink to intro] In practice, only by making gardens fully self-sufficient at the individual level can they be replicated widely enough to provide some, much, or even most of a country’s food, conferring enormous side benefits in the process.

As I noted, full-out homesteads are just not feasible for more than a tiny sliver of the population. That means they’re never going to ramp up to the scale of many millions, even though the best of them do include individual self-sufficiency gardens. And since the other books have yet to demonstrate full garden self-sufficiency at the individual level (at least by my multiple-point reckoning), they are not positioned to scale up to a national, let alone a global, self-sufficiency food system. Which brings up a compelling question: How would all this accomplished on the ground, down at the level of the garden itself?

That is precisely why I’m putting together a course that covers the basics of creating a genuine self-sufficiency garden, starting with that 2-foot by 12-foot mini-plot. None of this writing would be worth much if I didn’t do that. Full disclosure, Sharashkin’s¹ study on household gardens supplying 50% of Russia’s food does show how a garden-based food system can function at the scale of scores of millions, but it doesn’t lay out a specific garden plan.

Back in the US, the remainder of this Substack thread will explore various facets of what it will look like at a system level, which will provide a foundation for adaptative export to other countries. As perhaps the best (if you can think of the best as simultaneously the worst) nationwide example of how the industrial food system is struggling, it only makes sense to start with the good old US of A. Stay tuned.

*I don’t name titles here because I admire any book that promotes gardening, and don’t want authors to feel slighted in print.

¹Sharashkin, L. 2008. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir region of Russia. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri.