“How much land would we need to be nearly self-sustaining with food?” I mused to my wife while on the road trip to Washington State. We had some discussion as my wife thought it through, talking about how she grew up in a family with a huge garden, and even raising a cow for meat. She reminisced about always having a ready supply of fresh vegetables in the summer and a fully stocked pantry of home-canned goods for the off-season.
Ultimately, the answer depends on how much you actually want to be “off-the-grid.” The more self-sustaining you want to be, the more space you likely need to be able to pull it off. Some radically independent people suggest quite a bit of land (20+ acres!), and others have produced up to 6 tons of food out of a tenth of an acre within the city of Pasadena.
While on our vacation, we got to visit with a family that lives way off the beaten path. Out near the foothills of Mt. Rainier, there’s a small town called Mineral. The town sits in a valley, surrounded by a forest, and is about as quiet as you can imagine. Neighbors live far enough away from each other so as to not be seen, or heard. Just guessing, I’d say the family lived on about 3 acres. They had handcrafted their beautiful home, going so far as to side the house with planks they had made from logs on site. I saw two other buildings, one a large garage that they had lived in during the home construction, and the other being kind of a man-cave. They also had a good-sized garden – again, just guessing, I’d suspect it was about 2500 square feet of garden space.
They served up a bounty of food for lunch, with a huge salad featuring at least 8 different vegetables picked fresh that morning. They had home-canned dilly beans and snap peas. They also served sausages, sliced pork loin, salmon, pepperoni, and smoked cheese. The meats were the territory of the man of the house. He had killed the elk that became the homemade pepperoni. He had caught the salmon himself in Alaska, then had it prepped to bring home. He bought pepper jack cheese at the grocery store, but smoked it himself. And the pork had been raised by a friend in a clean, organic, natural environment. Twice a year, he heads out to his buddy’s farm, selects a pig and has it butchered just for his family. He then has a supply of fresh meat that he turns into his own homemade varieties of sausage. The food was incredibly good!
With the huge garden supplying their vegetable needs and the meat coming from places where it was hunted, caught, or custom raised and butchered, this family really only needed to head to the store for items like coffee, beer, and toilet paper.
I love living in a city because I love having access to virtually anything. Restaurants, grocery stores, medical care… really anything! I have access to a massive variety of options. And, that access is now – no waiting.
But, a simpler time of hard work and self-reliance has tremendous appeal. Wouldn’t it be cool to be excited about a great harvest of freshly grown vegetables, straight from your own garden? Instead, I sit disappointed that I have to do a battery pull on my Blackberry and confused that OSX Lion scrolls in the opposite direction from OSX Snow Leopard.
Maybe it’s time to build a raised garden in the backyard.
