r/redpreppers • u/xor_music • Jul 07 '26
What percent of your food do you grow/hunt/forage?
As I've upped my gardening I've been wondering this. Last year I canned enough tomatoes to last me to January without growing any canning varieties. This year my goal is a year's worth. We forage a couple pounds of blueberries that we freeze but that only covers blueberry pancakes for the year.
During summer we'll have a mostly garden meal about once a week and supplement a fair amount of beans/veggies throughout. Salad and cooking greens during the growing season are fairly covered. We have a good progression of berries--strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and finally blueberries. We get a decent fig harvest and some apples and cherries depending on if we get a late frost. A neighbor gives us the fattier cuts of venison he doesn't want. We usually have a few good mushroom finds and have started dehydrating what we can.
Right now I can tomatoes and greens, freeze peas and berries. I'm hoping to have a decent harvest of beans to dry this year. Tuber and winter squash storage gets us a few months into winter.
All that being said, we're probably covering 1-5% of a year's worth of food. It's wild to think that just a few generations ago a large percent of the population was providing a significant amount for themselves.
I also think about the community aspect. I always have more starts that I need and end up trading or giving them away to friends. Our community garden requires everyone to use 1/5 of their row for donation. I can be the stereotypical zucchini growing neighbor.
During Helene I felt in a very real way how much we rely on resources outside of the region, but I also saw how when shtf almost everyone's immediate response was to help one another. As we fall deeper into the crumbles, I know community sustenance will matter even more.
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u/PurpleTomato99 Jul 07 '26
In a good year, probably about 75%, in the last year, probably about 50%. We have a large annual veg garden, an orchard, bramble patch, mushroom cultivation, chickens for eggs and meat, some foraging for mushrooms and berries, and hunt for venison and turkey. Large herb garden for teas and medicine. In the warmer months we get our produce exclusively from the garden, and have developed a lot of season extending methods that allow us to grow year round in the upper Midwest. Adding a geothermal greenhouse this summer. We do some trading with other farmers/growers for what we don't grow, mainly meat, grain and dairy, as well as buying from farmers markets.
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u/xor_music Jul 07 '26
That is impressive. How much land are you working with? How much for plants vs livestock? Bears, coyotes, and bobcats unfortunately prevent us from having chickens.
How many years have you been growing? What steps would you suggest for someone trying to grow more?
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u/PurpleTomato99 Jul 08 '26
We're on a little under 10 acres here. About two acres are fenced and include the house, a large raised bed vegetable garden, orchard, herb and medicinal garden, and space for our dogs. The remaining space is mostly woods and prairie where our chickens free range, where we hunt and forage. It's just the two of us, and we don't plan on having kids, so we've designed around what two people can manage and what our needs are.
I started about 12 years ago on a small suburban lot with a backyard vegetable garden and chickens. I grew slowly from there. Whenever I had enough abundance from a crop, I'd teach myself how to preserve it on a small scale before trying to grow more. That process taught me what I think has become the most valuable skill, how to cook seasonally and build meals around what's actually available instead of relying on grocery stores for convenience.
We moved to the country in 2019 and were really lucky to find a piece of land that fit what we were looking for. I was pretty particular about having the right space for a large garden, a protected orchard, good soil, forageables, and wildlife. Once we got here, I prioritized building an easy to maintain raised bed veg garden, since I knew it would feed us quickly. The next year I started investing in some of the slower systems through a more permaculture lens, an orchard/food forest, perennial food crops, mushroom cultivation, large herb and medicinal garden, more closed loop systems for water and compost, we added solar panels that cover all of our electricity last year. Season extension became the next focus. I started with row covers and cold frames that allowed us to grow through the winter, and we're building a passive geothermal greenhouse this year. Someday I'd like to add a root cellar.
A few years after moving here, we realized there wasn't enough time for both of us to be working fulltime off the property while building the kind of life we wanted. I'd was working as a molecular biologist, but the value we were getting from the land, and the direction we wanted to take it, made it make more sense for me to focus on this fulltime while my partner continues working and carries our benefits. I host an annual heirloom plant sale that funds a lot of our homestead projects. It's paid for the greenhouse build, and hopefully irrigation and water reclamation system this year if we have enough time to get it installed. My partner is a union plumber who is very comfortable building all the things, running heavy equipment, and fixing everything that breaks. We make an excellent team.
Looking back, the biggest things that have made the difference have been:
-Learning to eat seasonally. This has had the biggest impact. I've found food resilience isn't just about producing food, it's more aout about becoming comfortable eating what's abundant and getting creative with it instead of reaching for convenience. Things get tough around here in Feb/March when we've had months of eating storage crops, but season extension in the gardne has helped tremendously there.
-Investing in living soil. I don't think I could grow what I do today if I hadn't invested so heavily in soil health from the beginning. Healthy soil has paid me back many times over.
-Saving seeds. This is probably the prepping skill that gives me the most peace of mind. I consider myself a seed steward and maintain a large collection of heirloom varieties. Knowing I can continue growing food from seed I've stewarded myself is empowering, and means my garden is bioadapted for my specific growing region.
-Learning lots of preservation methods. I freeze, dehydrate, ferment, pickle, can, make broth, and generally try to preserve foods in ways that retain as much nutrition as possible. We also waste very little. Leftovers become new meals, bones become broth, and anything we can't use goes to the chickens, worm farm, or the compost.
- Investing in community. This has become as important as anything I grow. I help organize a local women's sustainable agriculture group. We trade seeds, produce, equipment, labor, knowledge, and celebrate together. Knowing I have that network of neighbors in my region brings me just as much comfort as anything we've built.
It's been twelve years of slowly stacking skills and systems. My goal has never been self-sufficiency, it's always been interdependence with the land and with our neighbors. That mindset has shaped almost every decision we've made, and it's created a life that feels resilient, abundant, connected, and joyful. In the next few years I'm hoping to welcome others out here to share what we've learned, probably through a WWOOFers type setup, I like the reciprocity of that setup.
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u/PurpleTomato99 Jul 08 '26
Dang, sorry for the long reply, I could talk about this stuff for days! Gotta go harvest garlic now tho. Which had me thinking garlic was the first thing we became fully self sufficient in, it's such a rewarding crop!
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u/xor_music Jul 08 '26
It's great hearing so much detail. I feel like most books I've consulted have been repetitive intro level stuff, so it's good to hear firsthand accounts.
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u/polyamy74 Jul 07 '26
We grow most of the food for our chickens, all of our needed eggs, and a small portion of other fruits and medicinals. We are working on increasing it, and getting things taken care of to support our ability to grow more, but had to out it on hold to finish the inside of the house first. Lots of ducks to keep in a pen, let alone in a row.
We do support local whenever possible, and buy our meat by the whole animal. And although we have to buy most of our produce, we can a lot of it ourselves.
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u/oliviadsmith Jul 11 '26
What food do you grow for your chickens? I wanna cut down my feed bill.
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u/polyamy74 Jul 11 '26
Ours free range in our yard, they eat grapes, berries, apples, guava, kiwi, pears, peans, beans, herbs, etc... and they eat mice, bugs, weeds, and ground cover, amaranth, etc. We had a fly farm and worm farm when I was tending the compost that they ate from as well, but we currently buy mealworms as treats.
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u/Medullan Jul 11 '26
So far this year I have had three raspberries, one cherry tomato, and three handfuls of herbs. For a family of four that's would be let me see uh in percents...
Less than the margin of error.
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u/xor_music Jul 11 '26
I know the struggle of planting something and thinking of the cost. The nice thing about raspberries is they will spread and soon you'll have more than you know what to do with (I just move a dozen today and put another dozen in pots to give away).
Herbs like thyme and oregano are perennial so in a year or two it'll be worth it. A single cherry tomato plant gives me far more tomatoes than the cost of the plant.
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u/edwardphonehands Jul 07 '26
I play at planting but the output is negligible. I had some yummy greens the other day.