For most Americans (and residents of the post-industrial world in general), obtaining food means shopping at a grocery store or going to a restaurant. But there’s a lot to be said for being able to walk out your back door and pick a few peppers, leaves from several varieties of lettuce, some cherry tomatoes, a carrot or two, and a small onion and then heading back into the kitchen to make a salad.

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Food you’ve grown just tastes so much better than food you’ve picked off the shelf at Piggly Wiggly (where I’ve never shopped, but what a great name for a grocery store chain).

Of course, producing your own food can be a lot of work. There’s much more to it than just planting some seeds and hoping for the best. There’s a learning curve with lots of trial and error. There are plenty of books and YouTube channels that can give advice, but there’s nothing quite like doing it yourself and learning from experience what does and does not work on your property.

In our case, we do mostly raised bed and straw bale gardening. Some container gardening too, and two raspberry patches. If that’s suburban homesteading, it’s on a relatively small scale. No chickens, quail, rabbits, or anything like that. Just vegetables and a bit of fruit. A permaculture food forest is so far only a dream.

Some things work, some don’t, at least not consistently. The raspberries have been going gangbusters for several years now but our attempt to grow blueberries was a flop, they just weren’t happy (blueberries tend to be much fussier about growing conditions than raspberries). We had a bumper crop of apples last year but just a few this year, and those tasted bleh. It’s possible that the trees didn’t enjoy the summer, we’ve had an unusually wet growing season.

And producing food can mean more than just growing it. Our apples were disappointing this year but we got some from the Apple House affiliated with the University of Minnesota’s Landscape Arboretum. We canned some chunky applesauce (yes, my wife did most of the work) that tastes *much* better than anything you’d buy in a store.

In the winter, you can make plans, learn more from books and videos, and look forward to the arrival of seed catalogs.

For next year, I want to add an extra raised bed. I’ve learned from experience that a three-foot wide one might work better for my creaky back than the standard four-foot width. I’m going to try growing a bunch of potatoes in containers, I’m skeptical that raised beds and potatoes are a good match.

And every bit of garden added is that much less worthless grass to mow.


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