The first week, I introduced my definition of "almost" food self-sufficiency and talked a bit about my circumstances, assets and opportunities.
The second week, I spoke of the necessary (to me, they seem so, though in an emergency situation, I could forgo them) grocery store purchases, mostly dairy, which costs me another $30 or so per month.
I also talked about how this year, out of pocket garden costs will run me about $16/month, while last year was much more expensive and next year will be a tiny bit more so. And I admitted there are time "costs" to having 3000 square feet in fruit and veg growing.
How much time? that's this week's topic. I'm going to guess here. Some of it will apply to you, and some won't.
I'm including fishing in this time--this is really my "food self-sufficiency" time commitment, though that's only two hours a week half the year. Also, I'm still in a situation where I'm trying to improve hard clay soil, so that includes a weekly run for free mulch at a city park in spring and autumn, spreading that, and the time spent driving to and fro. Next year, there'll be less of that task, and the year after (2022), even less. By then, I'll have the veg and fruit gardens all built and the soil should be at least slightly improved.
And next year, I plan to buy a small chest freezer, so more tomatoes can be frozen than canned, which will help tremendously. Next year, I suspect I can get by for fewer hours than this year. In 2022, maybe even fewer. But it'll never be "15 minutes per day), as I see some youtubers claim about their large garden. They're lying to people. It takes time to develop beds in the first place, and it takes more time if you preserve your harvest. If you have a smallish garden, and the beds are all in place already, and you only grow for summer eating, 15 minutes per day is, yes, plenty. But if you're doing what I'm doing--feeding yourself most of your year's food, and still converting lawn to productive garden space, that's not nearly enough.
Time spent in garden or otherwise getting food that falls under "food self-sufficiency" category:
Winter: The easy season, but still, there is some time here. seed starting indoors. (it's either that or pay a hundred times as much for started plants as for seeds) Drawing plans of the beds and counting up what I don't yet have seeds for. Sending off for mail-order seeds. Shopping for a few final soil amendments and dollar-store seeds. Not bad, though--up until March 15 or so, it's an average of an hour per week. And it's fun work.
Spring: ho boy. Now it begins. Because my beds are not yet in perfect shape, I drive off to get mulch for free from a park that happens to also have a lake stocked with yummy fish. So one morning, I'll fish for a couple of hours. I bag up mulch for 45 minutes, I take a ton of mulch home, and I drag it out to a section of the garden and spread it. I clean the fish, freeze some, and dig holes deep enough to bury heads and guts in the garden below the level cats or raccoons might smell and dig up. Six hours on that, every week of spring.
Hardening off plants begun indoors takes 10 minutes per day, shuffling them in and out of the house. Planting potatoes and onions/leeks/scallions in March (which can go in early though are not harvested until June or July) takes time. Planting the spring garden (broccoli, cabbage, peas, snow peas, lettuce, spinach, mache, radishes, turnips, beets, and so on) from late March to mid-April takes time. Some of those plantings are plants begun indoors under grow lights. Some are seeds, pressed one by one into the ground.
Oops, it's the end of April already? Now there's more stuff to plant, and by May 5, the summer garden is planted. I'm starting 68 tomato plants and 40 pepper plants indoors, and that's a lot of holes to dig!
You have to pinch off excess plants from where you overseeded, called "thinning" your plantings. And you have to pull weeds, which are at their most enthusiastic in spring. This is when you discover how well or badly your winter weed-suppression strategy worked. I've put plenty of four-hour weeding days in during this past year, and while I'd like to think I "have a handle on weeds," I'm not such an optimist I can fully believe that!
There's also putting up all the trellising that you hauled indoors to keep it out of winter weather. Turning the compost for the first time of the year. Putting in all those berry bushes I've ordered--there are a couple of four-hour days just in that chore. In my fenced/anti-rabbit bed, there's moving some fencing and restructuring the walking paths this year. Mulching those plants with leaves once they're big enough.
And I'm not counting the hours I spend on purely flower gardens (which attract pollinators and so are not unrelated to the veg gardening) or mowing the lawn (which I need to do to keep from being fined by the city). I'm outdoors a lot!
OMG, it's late spring already? There are peas to shell. And if you're getting lettuce and spinach every day, you're having to make a nice salad for lunch. This is the reward for good gardening, of course, but it's also a cost of it, cooking daily. Greens need washing twice, and spinning, before I can eat them.
There are other crops that need preserving by June 1. Spinach to freeze. Peas dehydrated, canned, or blanched and frozen. Broccoli beyond what is eaten for dinner to blanch and freeze. If the cabbage isn't ready, you'd better net it well before the darned cabbage loopers come!
Twenty hours per week, easily. Probably closer to 25. Some of them are fun. Some are just work.
Summer:
Mid-June. Rip out all those peas! And the lettuce and the spinach, which may be bolting anyway. Harvest the spring beets and set them aside to roast or pickle. And plant things in their places.
Cut off the bottom tomato leaves and pinch out suckers once a week. Tie up tomatoes. Tie peppers to stakes. Tie eggplants to stakes so a bad storm doesn't flatten them all. Pluck off and squish hornworms. Still, walking through a garden first thing, cup of coffee or tea in hand, and admiring the lush growth while keeping an eye out for pests and diseases isn't such a bad way to start a day.
Okay, the summer garden is planted. Tomatoes won't appear until July 4 (and only the earliest ones) here, and peppers won't appear until September. There is actually a breather here. And that's good because you mow the lawn more in June and July and it's hot and there are mosquitoes, so being out there isn't much fun.
Potatoes need harvesting in June and July. Then something goes in where they were. This year, probably I'll put in a cover drop to improve the soil.
You eat all of July's tomato harvest fresh. And most of August's! They taste great and you aren't tired of them yet. You will be, and that's when you'll start your preservation efforts. But for now, with sufficient freezer space (the venison is almost gone by now), you can park them in the freezer in gallon zipper freezer bags until you get a day for canning.
July and August will see cabbage loopers on the kale, so you either net it well, or give up on it until fall. A harvest for kale chips isn't a bad idea. Okra chips are also fun. And all sorts of crops are coming in and need cooking/preserving. Cucumbers for fresh salads and for pickles. Green beans to blanch and freeze in small batches when you've eaten your fill. It's a steady sort of work, not overwhelming. It's mostly fun, except for the heat and mosquitoes.
Summer squash come in and you work to preserve those. (I find dehydrating them for soups the best method of preservation), and you eat a lot, and you beg strangers to take them off your hands. You still weed some, though one hour per month per 400 square feet seems to be plenty of time for that. (still, with 3000 square feet of veg garden and 600 of flower garden, that's a half hour per day.) You spread your grass clippings as mulch or toss them into the compost.
Here, July and August can bring drought. They have not the past two years, but if they do, you water once a week. You can set up a sprinkler, or you hand-water, or you install a pricey drip irrigation system. I hand-water, sprinkle, and will have two soaker hoses through the tomatoes, which are pickiest about not having water splashed on their leaves if you can avoid it.
Ooops, the tomatoes are getting blight anyway? You spend some hours cutting off infected leaves and bagging them to burn later on or to put in trash.
You succession plant certain plants, making sure that you have not 500 cucumbers all at once, but a steadier dose of them. This doesn't take long--just pushing a few seeds into the soil every week.
Storms bring down branches. You get out your little branch grinder once a month and turn them into chips for the the pathways. Efficient! You save the big branches to weigh down tarps, or you burn in autumn, and you add that ash to your compost.
Composting is ongoing. Turn the pile once a month, use it at the end of summer, start a new pile, and routinely bring your veg trimmings out to the working pile. At this time of year, a daily trip out there is necessary.
Summer means ground cherries, and that means ground cherry jam, and maybe a pie or two to give away. In the future, June will mean strawberries and currants for me as well.
Sometimes, you have to spray for a disease (milk and baking soda sprays are safe and organic) or pernicious insects (I use neem oil at the hearts of my squash plants at sundown, to kill vine borers without hurting any bees.)
Still, summer isn't the hardest season. 12 hours per week, let's say, and I do it first thing, so I'm often back inside the house by 9 a.m.
Autumn
For the purpose of veg gardening, this starts with more seed-starting outdoors on the table in cells in late August. Your garden is full so you can't plant seeds directly. So you grow your seedlings in cells to be transferred to the garden when space empties out. In September you plant out. Carrot seeds get a second planting, beets, kohlrabi, broccoli, cabbage. You have to keep brassica seedlings covered because cabbage butterflies are out until the first hard freeze, and inevitably, a wind shifts the netting and you have to put it back to rights every day. (Some people buy pricey net cages, and that's nice for them, but make do with a $10 half-bolt of tulle I found on sale.) Lettuce and spinach go back in around the first of September, and if you're lucky with weather, you'll be eating it until Christmas.
Tomatoes are coming in very enthusiastically, and once a week, you're canning some sort of tomato product. All those tomatoes you parked in the freezer come out for that. Tomato sauce, salsa (so much cutting up into tiny cubes!), and plain quartered tomatoes are my choices. This takes a lot of time. Cherry tomatoes get dehydrated for soups. Once you're so exhausted by canning that you can't manage another canning session of tomato whatever, it's time to bag and freeze them again, until the you get a break in November or so.
Beans are dehydrated for soups, as are summer squash, onions, and some bell peppers. Garlic is braided. Corn on the cob is yummy as is. The excess is blanched, cut off the cob, and frozen--not too time-consuming a job. The majority of the red peppers that you don't eat fresh, you just cut up and freeze, then bag once they are frozen. Easy preservation! (Finally, you think, something that isn't exhausting to preserve.)
There's some seed saving in there--tomatoes and peppers are easiest, but I'll be going beyond that and saving cucumbers, beans, and other seeds.
Then the long-term crops planted back in May come to fruition, the pumpkins and winter squash (also easy preserving--cold storage in cardboard boxes lined with newspaper or straw) melons (eaten fresh or given away). Sweet potatoes take a little bit more work--you need to cure them in dark heat, which my shed often works for. But then they too should store in a cold room all winter without rotting.
Shell beans dry on the vine and are shelled around the first frost. Easier than shelling peas, but still time-consuming.
Do you have fall berries or grapes? Yummy! Then picking, freezing and making jam, jelly, wine, or pies is on your chore list.
For gardening purposes, fall gardens last until about December here. It'll frost by Nov 1, and growth will stop about then (more due to low light than cold temps), but a lot of plants stay happy until a series of hard frosts and the shortest day of the year. The peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes don't, and you clean up their debris to compost or burn, depending on if there are any diseases on the leaves.
There aren't many weeds growing in autumn, for which you thank your lucky stars! But there is still bed prep. Maybe you're planting a winter cover crop like winter oats, cowpeas, or crimson clover. Maybe you cover your beds with plastic tarps or with heavy mulch. Ooops, it's back to the free mulch place and a ton of mulch per week for that. While you're there, fish for fish that are fewer but bigger. Or if it isn't a mulch day, you're seeding the winter cover crop, or spreading and weighing down a heavy tarp. No soil should be left bare for the winter.
If you can get a free load of wood chips from an arborist, this is the ideal time. Spread them on your paths, and over cardboard anywhere you want new beds next year. A big load is 10 tons. It'll take 10 days to spread that, working two or three hours per day.
It's a busy time of year. You're back up to 25 hours per week through the first day of frost, and then it slows down a bit.
My, I was wordy! But in a sense, that's my rebuttal to the youtube gardeners who say "A garden only takes 15 minutes per week." Balderdash!
Fully half of the year, mine takes me 25 hour weeks. A quarter of the year, it requires half that much time. A quarter of the year, not much time at all, and it's purely fun stuff. Total time in the garden or preserving its bounty or fishing for the table, then? 825 hours per year in 2020 is my prediction. That feeds me all year, plus a few other people a few meals, and it provides my birthday and holiday gifts of canned food or pies.
Sorry to sound like Debbie Downer. But it's just what I find I need to do for a big garden!
