I don't know if anyone preserves ALL their food for a year, but check out the Harvest forum here on GW if you have questions or want new recipes, or just to get to know some really neat people!
Kay

Thanks Kay,

I will do that. Sounds like a very useful forum.

coriander

I suppose it's possible ,especially in the warmer areas of the country, to grow ALL your food, but it will require several acres and lots of work. You'd need a few cows to provide dairy products and beef. It takes about one acre here in temperate and (Usually) moist Alabama for grazing one cow and calf then you need more to grow hay and corn to feed them in winter. Chickens too, for eggs and meat, more corn. Then you need more corn and wheat for your own meal and flour. Course you'd get free fertilizer from the cows and chickens when you muck out their stalls and pens. Another acre for veggies should provide enough for 4 to 6 people. Then you'll need to grow sorgham for molasses or beets for sugar to preserve all those fruits you're growing on another acre or two.
I believe with ten acres and 10hr, 6 per week work days you can do it. Let me know when you're going to start.
My wife and I froze venison, tomatos, green beans, turnip greens, broccoli, okra, squash and asparagus. We canned, kraut, pear preserves, blackberry jam, chow-chow, pickles (sweet, dill and relish) and muscadine jelly this year. I made blackberry wine and have muscadine wine still bubbling. That is a far cry from everything we eat. We average $ 70-80 per week in the grocery store.

Hi coriander, I know you from the PA forum. What are your goals in re food preservation? Do you really want to grow and preserve everything, or are you primarily interested in learning how in case you need to? Is your motivation financial, or having organic food, or something else?

I'm asking because I've spent a lot of time learning a lot about different methods of food preservation. I suppose at some point I've done everything, just not int he same year necessarily. Many things, like growing grain and even dried beans, I have decided are simply not cost effective FOR ME when I consider the amount of effort expended against the return. Just this year, I decided that canning a lot of diced tomatoes was not a particularly good thing FOR ME given the cost of the product in stores, but we like the taste of the homemade stuff. I capitalize the words FOR ME because there's a judgment here, and it will be different for everyone.

There are some things I grow and preserve - blueberries and raspberries come to mind - that I know are a good return in terms of quality and cost. And I like our fresh eggs so much that I don't look terribly closely at the ratio of cost of feed vs. eggs collected. Even if they're not cost-effective, I'll always keep chickens.

In other words, deciding what motivates you will help you clarify exactly what you want to do. For me, the answer was to learn as much as possible so I'd know I could do things if I needed to, but to only continue with those things that met the cost / quality / time test. Knowing I can do things doesn't always mean I'm going to - sometimes I'd rather make some extra income and buy someone else's beans, or swap fresh veg for fish because I'm not much of a fisherman.

Which kind of leads into the next point. If I grow 36 kinds of fruits and vegetables and so does my neighbor, we're each working twice as hard as if we decide I'll grow 18 and he'll grow 18 and swap halves, even disregarding the amount of space devoted to each one. Because the care requirements of tending, say, 24 broccoli plants are not half of tending 48; you're doing the exact same amount of monitoring for bugs, you're fertilizing the same number of times, hoeing around them the same number of times, albeit a shorter row. At some point when i was trying to do a little bit of everything, I came to the same realization our first agrarian ancestors did a long time ago: specialization has some good points.

And I have to say I think TedP2's time assessment is on the low side. I figured that I could raise absolutely everything for the four of us if I worked 24/7 and no equipment ever broke.

katie

I went for 2 years (back in the early 80s) without going to a town for goods or services. Grew all my own food, with exception of some hay I traded from a neighbor. He also gave me a runt pig that he was going to trash. Otherwise, I ate what I grew...had goats that browsed and, during the winter, fed them hay and some corn that I'd grown during the summer. Made yoghurt and cheese from the goat's milk, fed the pig the extra milk, acorns and dregs from the garden. Slaughtered the pig in Nov...ate him all winter. Fished and hunted.

We no longer raise animals. But we do take a deer and some grouse in the fall, fish in every season...harvest wild rice and have large gardens.
I really don't think it's that difficult to provide yourself with sustenance. The problem with most of us is we want more than sustenance.

Oh yeah...we don't live in a warm climate. We live in Northern Minnesota.

Loved the replies I received from my post. Nice variety and good information. I was just curious as to what others are doing. I guess I have a 1/3 balance, my own garden, buying food locally, and the grocery once a month. Probably spend about $20. a week at the grocery. (Mostly milk, grains, and chocolate.)

Because of a 4 day power outage due to Ivan, filling a freezer can get a little risky. I admire my ancestors more each day.

Lilacfarm, you are awesome.

We are just starting to grow more of our own food or get it reasonably from others (using money we make from selling our produce at a market). Some examples are...

We are eating only our own chickens this year and our own eggs. But the cost when I figured it is about the same as grocrey store (sale price). But we feed high quality feed (Purina), eventually we want to grow out feed.

We are buying a side of beef, the cost of that was significant, but we are paying for it with money we earned selling produce at a farmers market.

We don't have apples of our own, but we can get a bushel of seconds (really nice seconds, just not perfect) from a local orchard for $12 a bushel (if we buy 5 at a time only $10) That gives us enough apples for lots of sauce, butter, and canned slices.

We have a couple hundred tomaote plants for the market. That way early in the season we still have enough to bring to market, but when they start going good we have a TON! So those get canned in sauce, whole stewed, and salsa.

We found a farm who has pick your own peppers. We can get 1 bushel of mild-hot peppers for $14 a bushel! A couple bushels and we are set for peppers till our own come on next year.

We know a guy who will sell us his sweet corn at the end of the day (he only sells what was picked that day) for a deal. So that gets frozen.

We have a lot of stuff in the freezer, and a generator to power it if we need to.

We can grow lettuce and greens into November, and harvest our carrots all winter. We have bushels of squash in our basement.

We do most of our other shopping at a super store (Cosco)where we spend about $60 every 2 or 3 weeks. But that includes some items we really don't need like cream cheese for cheese cakes and crystal lite which we like. But we can buy a 50 pound bag of flour and a 25 bag of rice and sugar for amazingly low prices... You just have to avoid the convience foods like frozen pizza... We make a lot of bread and pasta our selves, it just tastes better.

Eventully we want to grow all our own food. But now we both work full time jobs. So we trade off, we can sell high value heirloom produce at a good farmers market. We can effecively trade 1 pound of baby greens ($12) for a bushel of apples! Or 2 pounds of leeks ($7 a pound =$14) for a bushel of peppers. Or 100 pound of loose leaf heirloom lettuce ($8 a pound = $800) for a large side of beef. Or 2 pounds of heirloom tomaotes ($4.50/lb = $9) for a bag of Purina chicken feed. That is our stragegy.

(sorry it is so long.)

Lilacfarm, how many acres do you cultivate including the wild rice, and how many in pasture for goats?
Coriander, we were without power for four days once and the stuff in our freezer didn't thaw. We only opened it once and took out several items.
hameadq, how wonderfull that you can barter that way. I don't have any intention of growing all I eat. I garden for exercise and better flavored food. I've learned that gro store potatos were as good as those I grew and didn't sprout before we ate them. Dry beans too are better than mine and don't have to protect from wevils but their green beans don't compare with my frozen ones much less fresh. What do you do with a bushel of hot peppers? I grow more that we want on 3 plants. I love a fresh pod or two with my cooked vegies and we pickle several pints of pepper sauce and dry a small sackful. How many acres do you till?

We till 3 acres maybe 1/2 is in cover at any given time and we pull a lot of greens out ofcold frames and raised beds...

The bushles are mild to hot and can be mixed, but we do a lot with them. We make pepper flakes and give them with our Christmas gifts. We take jalopenos and stuff them with cream cheese and freeze our own 'poppers.' They are great for a quick snack! We take milder ones and freeze them, and they get used in stir fry and in 'cornbread lasana' and in almost anything a green pepper can be used in.

Our first year at market we hardly had anything... We would put almost everything we had on our table at 7:30 and would be sold out by 9:30. But the money you can make goes a long way in buying what we did not have from others.

Once we had extras we also arranged trades with other people at market. Greens for a pie, or tomatoes for corn...

Hopefully someday we will be able to focus on our gardens full time. Its a dream worth working for. Right now the problem is I leave at 6 and get home at 6 and he leaves at 8 and gets home at 5, not leaving much time for the garden except on weekends, which are spent on our very small CSA and at market! Let alone time to can and preserve the bounty of the summer for the winter. Its only around now when our season is winding down can I spend time on canning.

One day.

Nice thread...and I agree with the poster who said it probably is possible to grow what you eat but agree also that it's easy to get sucked in to things at the market that you just want...When I was growing up my parents probably spent $20 or 30 a month at the grocery store and that was for flour ...corn meal ..coffee and the very few necessities that they didn't grow...otherwise we did without but we ate good...we canned or froze every thing that grew and made pickles and relishes and that sort of thing too...Any thing killed by our guns we are...whether it was rabbit, squirrel, deer, ducks whatever..it was for the table..or the freezer..

Oh RuthieG, those were the days! Real good food and lots of productive, healthy work. I'm going to keep working towards more self sufficiency, just wish I could convert my kids.

Yes you are right but it was hard work too. My parents eventually gave up their place in the country because they were getting too old to do it all...but then they bought an RV and traveled for about 10 years and then they settled in one spot and they always had a little garden. I was fussing at my Dad about working so hard and he said...Listen...if I can't be doing things that I enjoy (like gardening) then I'd rather be dead...I'm not going to spend the rest of my life sitting in a chair. I was really fussing about his tinkering and not so much his gardening. He was a mechanic in his working years and in retirement, all of his friends and relatives brought him anything that needed fixing...tractors, cars, toaster and he was the lawnmower repairperson for everyone he knew....I used to get so mad because he would put in hours and hours tinkering with someones old beat up mower and spend 10 bucks on parts and they would give him $15 for his trouble...

Ted asked:
Lilacfarm, how many acres do you cultivate including the wild rice, and how many in pasture for goats?

The wild rice grows wild on a lake across the road. We just harvest it. It grows and seeds itself.

We no longer raise goats. I take a deer or two when we need meat. We don't feed or water them. They grow wild.

We have apple orchards, many black currants, grapes...and have two large gardens with raised beds.

We belong to a buying club and buy bulk dry beans, rice, oats, etc...to supplement our growing. Takes too much land, energy and time for some things. I'll trade my work/bread labor for those things.