A well-planned garden can provide your family with the freshest, most nutritious produce, plus a more secure, self-reliant lifestyle.
Photo By Matthew T. Stallbaumer
Providing high-quality food for your family year-round takes foresight and planning, plus healthy doses of commitment and follow-through. Whether you grow as much of your food as you can or you source it from local producers, the guidelines here will help you decide how much to produce or purchase. The charts linked to in “Plan How Much to Grow” later in this article will also help you estimate how much space you’ll need — both in your garden to grow the crops, and in your home and pantry or root cellar to store preserved foods. Here’s a step-by-step plan to help you make the best use of your garden space (or farmers markets) to move toward homestead food self-sufficiency.
1. Establish Your Goals
Make a list of the foods you and your family eat now — and note the quantities as well. The charts linked to in “Plan How Much to Grow” further along in this article assume a half-cup serving size for fruits, vegetables and legumes, and a 2-ounce serving for dry grains. If your servings differ from the charts, be sure to adjust your calculations accordingly.
Decide what you’d like to grow, noting the foods your family prefers and recognizing that not every crop will grow in every climate. Research different crop varieties: Some crops — such as melons — require long, hot days to mature, but certain varieties need fewer days to reach maturity, which allows them to be grown in areas with a shorter growing season.
Don’t be afraid to start small and build gradually toward food self-sufficiency. A good starting goal might be to produce all of a certain crop that you use. An early milestone for me was growing all of the green beans we needed for a year and all of the ingredients for the spaghetti sauce I canned. Maybe you’ll aim to eat at least one thing from your garden each day. Keep your goals in mind as you’re planning a garden.
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Image source: HomeDepot
During the summer there is nothing better than picking fruits and vegetables from your garden and then enjoying them at your dinner table that evening. The taste, freshness and convenience cannot be beat.
But how can you continue to enjoy fresh homegrown produce when they’re not in season? One way is with a root cellar.
It is with the use of root cellars that our ancestors provided nutritious food to their families all year round. Long before refrigerators were in every kitchen, most homes included some sort of root cellar that was designed to preserve nature’s bounty.
Root cellars today can take many forms, from very basic to more complicated. But all of them provide a cool, ventilated, humid and dark space to store fresh food. Foods that do well in a root cellar environment include apples, pears, oranges, potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, garlic, winter squash and nuts. 
