Gardening for Self-Reliance: 8 Tips to Grow Your Food Efficiently
When we witnessed the supply chain crisis and days of empty store shelves back in 2020, growing food at home became a topic of more interest. In addition to food security, some folks want to grow their own produce for affordability, to avoid questionable pesticides and GMOs, and to address the environmental concerns of industrial farming. Regardless of your reasons, growing a big portion of your food supply is empowering and rewarding.
Gardening for self-reliance is a matter of trial and error and figuring out what works best for you, as we’ve discovered since we started depending more on our garden for food. It takes a bit of a different mindset than hobby gardening. Below are a few ways to make your food garden more efficient and adjust your strategy to fit your needs.
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1. Make Staple Crops a Priority
This was the first thing that came to mind, probably because it’s the one I’ve been the most guilty of not practicing. See, I really love growing peppers, especially unusual varieties and heirloom superhots. Peppers were what first got me interested in gardening. Once I got serious about growing our food, I’d still try to cram as many cool pepper varieties in the garden as possible.
Problem is, one pepper plant will produce a LOT of peppers. I’d plant two or three of each variety just in case one didn’t make it (which doesn’t happen often), and we’d end up with way more hot peppers than we could reasonably use. Once we made a few batches of hot sauce and hot jelly, what could we do with two more five-gallon buckets full of ghost and scorpion peppers?
At one point, we had more unused peppers going in the compost than I’d care to admit. Meanwhile, we’d finish off our storage potatoes before Thanksgiving. All that garden space occupied by fourteen different hot pepper varieties could’ve been used to plant more potatoes. The conclusion: I probably needed to scale back on the darn peppers!
You certainly don’t have to give up growing things for fun if you decide to focus on self-reliance in your garden. However, it’s important to find the right balance between hobby crops and staple food crops.
When you’re planning your garden, start with the crops that will fill your plate and pantry, particularly those that cost more at the grocery store. Think potatoes, root vegetables, beans, summer and winter squash, greens, cabbage, etc (I mean, have y’all seen the price of potatoes lately?). Plan out how much of each you’ll need to plant and where you’ll plant them. Then, use the rest of your space and resources for the fun things like superhot peppers, ornamental gourds, and heirloom beefsteak tomatoes.
2. Eat Seasonal Food as Much as Possible
When you’ve spent years grocery shopping for your produce, you’re used to getting any produce you want to cook with at pretty much any time of year. You’ve probably bought squash or zucchini in March, spinach in August, or fresh basil in December. Grocery stores have produce shipped from all over the place, when certain things aren’t in season closer to home.
Once you start relying on your garden for food, it makes more sense to plan meals based on what’s ready to harvest. Sure, there are ways to preserve some of your yields for later, but many crops are best (and most nutritious) when eaten fresh. For example, you can freeze summer squash for making bread and adding to soups, but there’s no real way to preserve its texture for roasting, grilling, and frying. In my opinion, those last three are the top ways to enjoy squash!
Here are some things that’re usually on our seasonal menu:
Spring – Early Summer: Sauteed beet greens, baby Swiss chard and beet green salad, Southern fried cabbage, slaw, roasted new potatoes, fried or grilled squash and zucchini.
Midsummer – Early Fall: More fried and grilled squash and zucchini! Blistered shishito peppers, tomato and cucumber salad, fresh salsa, roasted beets, sauteed Swiss chard, veggie stir-fry with zucchini, sweet peppers, and cherry tomatoes, fried or stewed potatoes.
Fall – Early Winter: Stuffed peppers or chile rellenos, more cabbage dishes, steamed broccoli and broccoli casserole, potato soup, stewed mustard greens, roasted beets, potatoes, and carrots.
Winter: We can’t grow much in the dead of winter in our climate, so we rely on our storage crops. We’ll eat butternut squash soup, roasted winter squash and pumpkin, hearty stews with carrots and potatoes, and green beans and other veggies we put up in the freezer or pantry.
3. Consider Storage Potential and Ways to Preserve
Even when you eat seasonally as much as you can, preserving or storing some produce is still a big part of gardening for self-reliance. That’s especially true if your winters get cold enough it’s not practical to try growing things.
When planning out what you’ll grow to stock up on food, think about which crops you’ll put up and how you’ll preserve them. Canning is a hands-on method that’s rewarding but takes a lot of time, effort, and practice. Freezing is a bit less demanding, but you’ll still need to wash, chop, blanch, and bag your veggies. Also, some veggies don’t freeze as well as others.
If you’re working a lot of hours and gardening at the same time, you may want to focus on growing storage crops to avoid burnout and frustration. Staple produce like winter squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, and some varieties of cabbage will keep for months when stored properly. Aside from brushing the dirt off and sometimes a curing period, you won’t need to do anything to preserve them.
Some Preserving Options You Might Use:
Water Bath or Steam Canning: Can be used to preserve high-acid foods like jellies and jams, pickled cucumbers or other pickled vegetables, salsa, and relish.
Pressure Canning: Low-acid foods like green beans, corn, peppers, and squash need to be pressure-canned for food safety (i.e., essentially anything that’s not loaded with vinegar or sugar!). Pressure canning has a slightly steeper learning curve than water bath canning.
Freezing: Just about any vegetable can go in the freezer, but some maintain their quality longer than others. Corn, celery, tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, and pre-cooked greens (in their liquid) will taste great for 6 or more months when frozen. Diced peppers, green beans, and broccoli will need to be used a bit sooner for best taste and texture.
Lacto-fermenting: The oldest method for preserving produce, lacto-fermenting requires non-iodized salt, a fermenting vessel, good-quality water, and some time. Fermented foods have a pleasant pickled taste, and they’re full of probiotics for gut health. Making Sauerkraut from homegrown cabbage is an easy beginner project to get into fermenting.
Refrigerator Pickling: Fresh vegetables can be pickled in a vinegar and water mixture (with optional added spices) and immediately stored in the fridge. No canning required! Refrigerator pickling works great for peppers, cucumbers, green beans, beets, and even cherry tomatoes. While a lot of sources claim fridge pickles should be used within a month or two, we eat on ours for much longer without issue (but please use your own research to make food safety decisions).
Dehydrating: Using a food dehydrator is simple and doesn’t require a ton of prep or hands on time. It’s a great way to dry your fresh herbs, make “sun-dried” tomatoes, and preserve hot peppers to use for seasoning later. I love to dry a bunch of my cayenne and habanero peppers, store them in jars, and grind them up as needed to spice up a dish.
4. Practice Succession Planting
Succession planting means staggering your planting times for a certain crop instead of planting all in one go. This helps extend your harvest window and provides more opportunities for eating fresh, seasonal veggies. It also means you won’t be overwhelmed by a massive single harvest that needs to be dealt with all at once.
If you plant twenty cabbage seeds or seedlings all on the same day, you’ll end up with twenty mature heads of cabbage on your hands within the same week. That’s a whole lotta cabbage. Unless you have a dedicated cold storage room or you’re feeding a commune, you’ve got a job on your hands in figuring out how to preserve it and prevent it from going to waste.
Instead, you could stagger your cabbage plantings so you’ve only got a few heads ready at a time. You could plant a few in mid-March, a few in early April, a few in mid-April, etc. That way, you can enjoy freshly harvested cabbage over a longer season without struggling to preserve lots of excess.
Succession planting is a good strategy for single-harvest veggies like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, root vegetables, and heading lettuce. It’s not usually necessary for crops that produce more than one harvest, like mustard, kale, and Swiss chard. For those, you can “cut and come again” many times from the same plants.
5. Experiment With Ways to Extend Your Growing Season
With a little garden ingenuity, you can keep your crops healthy and producing food even when the weather’s not perfect. This might mean trying out extra cold-hardy or heat tolerant veggie varieties, or finding ways to protect crops from frosts, freezes, or intense heat.
Depending on the variety, many cool-season veggies, such as cabbage, broccoli, mustard greens, and leaf lettuce, can survive temperatures around 25F to 30F with little to no damage. If you cover them, though, they can handle nightly temps down to the teens or, in some cases, single digits. Frost cover allows you to start cool-season crops earlier in the spring and keep your fall plantings going further into the cold months.
High heat creates another obstacle for your food garden, since a lot of your annual veggies will slow or stop production when temperatures soar. Hanging some shade cloth keeps your plants cooler and prevents stress, flower drop, and sunscald on fruit. That way, you can keep the harvests coming from summer crops like peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers during mid-summer heatwaves, when they’d otherwise stall out. Shade cloth will also delay bolting in cool-season crops if your spring afternoons heat up faster than anticipated.
Simple hoop tunnels make the best support structure for frost cover or shade cloth. They can be used for either as needed (plus insect netting!), and it’s easy to secure the material to the hoops with greenhouse clips. We make our hoops with ¾ PVC conduit and rebar stakes, which are relatively cheap.
If you don’t have time to fool with covering and uncovering plants, you can use crop and variety selection to your advantage for dealing with weather challenges. Some varieties of collards, kale, cabbage, and hardy greens can tolerate serious cold without protection. For example, January King (cabbage), Red Russian (kale), and Perma (collard) can withstand temps approaching 0 F. Mache, a salad green, is good to go down to 5 F.
For those dealing with hot summer weather, summer squash and zucchini can produce well without any fuss in high heat. Cherry and grape tomatoes are more heat-tolerant than large-fruited varieties. Here are a few summer veggie varieties we don’t have to baby when temps pass 90 F: Juliet (tomato), Homemade Pickles (cucumber), California Wonder (red bell pepper), Seminole (mini pumpkin).
6. Balance Expenses with Production
When your goal is growing your own food to reduce how much you need to buy, it’s frustrating when you have to drop more money than you’d like on the garden. There are plenty of ways to garden for cheaper, but the reality here is that producing substantial amounts of food requires some input, and those inputs often cost money.
You’ll need to invest at least some in your garden, especially when you’re first starting out. For instance, you’ll need soil amendments like compost, tools, irrigation equipment, seed-starting supplies, etc. If you’re growing in raised beds, you’ll need to start with good-quality lumber and soil. You’ll need fertilizer to keep annual vegetables healthy. If you try to cut TOO many corners when it comes to the essentials, your yields will suffer.
Instead of focusing on money and comparing your potential grocery bill with your garden expenses, consider the other benefits of growing food at home. You know where it comes from, how it’s handled, and what it is or isn’t being sprayed with. You control how its production impacts the ecosystem, such as native insect and pollinator populations.
It’s important to make calculated decisions when investing in the garden and save money when you can. However, just because your homegrown produce wasn’t free doesn’t mean you’re not doing it right.
7. Consider the Bigger Picture With Pesticide Use
When you start gardening, you’ll quickly find out pests aren’t always just a minor nuisance. Sometimes, you won’t get to harvest a darn thing if you don’t intervene.
I follow a lot of gardening advice pages and groups on social media, and I’m always seeing folks getting bashed to the third degree for recommending natural pesticides in the discussion. Apparently, if you use ANYTHING to treat for pests in your garden, you’re killing bees and butterflies and you’re a scourge to ecosystem.
So, is it true that natural pesticides like Neem oil, diatomaceous earth, and Bt can harm beneficial insects? Yes, for sure. Neem and DE are non-discriminate, meaning they can have harmful effects on anything with an exoskeleton. Bt is toxic to all moth and butterfly larva regardless of species.
Here’s that bigger picture, though:
For some determined pests, companion planting just isn’t effective enough. Maybe you don’t have an hour every other day to sit and pick potato beetle larvae off your potato plants. If pests destroy your crops and you end up with little to no harvest, you have two choices. Either you don’t eat that food, or you buy it from the store instead.
Conventionally grown produce comes from commercial farms that spray as many synthetic, broad-spectrum pesticides as they’re legally allowed to, covering many acres of land with heavy machinery. Even if you buy organic, I can promise you those farms are using organic-approved pesticides.
In a smaller garden, you can apply natural pesticides in a targeted way, only where they’re needed to protect a crop. That means the ripple effects are much smaller than those on a large commercial farm. Even when natural pesticides are necessary to ensure a harvest, growing your own food still greatly reduces the environmental footprint tied to what you’re eating.
That said, we should make sure to use natural pesticides with an understanding of their effects and the possible consequences. Then, we can take precautions and lessen the impact on the little ecosystems in our gardens. Read the post below to learn some facts on natural pesticides, along with spray-free alternatives to try:
6 Natural Pesticides for the Garden + How to Protect the Good Bugs While Controlling Pests
8. Take Good Notes!
No matter what kind of gardening you do, thorough record-keeping is a must to improve your results over time. It’s especially important if your goal is growing the bulk of your own produce, since optimizing your use of space and resources is a top priority.
As you try out different veggie varieties, take notes on what produces well in your garden (and what doesn’t), along with which ones you and your family like the most. Make notes on the different methods you use in the garden and how they work out. That’ll include things like planting times, spacing, trellising, fertilizer, succession planting, etc. Keeping a garden journal is hands down the best way to get better production and cut back on wasted time and resources.
Many aspects of growing food for self-sufficiency involve striking the right balance, and that balance will be different for every food garden. As you grow each season and assess the results, you’ll learn where to tighten the gaps so that your garden becomes more productive, efficient, and practical for your household.
