Garden joy planning
While I was sick this
past summer and fall, I doubted everything about the homestead (well,
everything except Mark and Artemesia). Now that I'm bouncing back, it's
easy to settle into old patterns. But I've decided to be smart instead
and make the necessary changes so I don't go down the same dark road
again.
To that end, my garden
ambitions this year are extreme --- I hope to cut back my work by 50%
while still feeding us most or all of fresh produce we eat.
Spreadsheets to the rescue!
I've
attached my garden-planning file in case anyone wants to use
it as a jumping-off point for your own work-to-joy analysis. For those
terrified by the mere idea of Excel, here's the upshoot:
- We're cutting everything back a small amount so I won't end up giving so much away
- I'm not going to preserve any soup for winter, so I dramatically reduced quantities of soup components
- I generally deleted crops that aren't streamlined to the point
where they produce in proportion to the amount of work I put into the
project
I suspect we'll end up
having to buy a few more goat carrots, onions, and possibly winter
vegetables. But otherwise we should still be eating primarily off the
farm for the entirety of 2017.
Final estimates: garden
square footage will reduce by 43%, yields will reduce by 38%, and
work will reduce by 50%. I hope this means joy will also increase by
100%. Stay tuned for more details as the project progresses.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Hi Anna and Mark,
Anna, I am impressed. I started off last year with lots of intentions. And I did get a lot to grow thanks to your last year's spreadsheet.
I have been looking harder at Aquaponics and enlarging my current setup. I especially like the idea of putting the Aquaponic over spill into the garden and the claim that things grow twice as fast??!!
That claim makes sense to me with what I have read about using the paddy system with cattle.
Gotta try some of that water on my real-time conductivity sites. I should be able to see results quickly once the ground thaws and the biology gets up and running.
FWIW - I ran the snow plow over two sensors, so I gotta wait until the ground is non frozen to get the sensors back into the ground taking real time data.
warm regards to you both, John
Hi Anna,
I forgot how big a block was? 2x3 feet?
I expect to be growing quite a bit more this year and with a lot less work.
I am still eating last year's apples. Stored in paper shopping bag, in a loose plastic bad in the refrig. Kale didn't do very well just being frozen. Tasted off.
Gotta try drying stuff like you do.