I’ve never done much more than toy with a vegetable garden. My wife was into it when she was younger, but even then it was mostly a hobby to have fresh vegetables for a few weeks out of the year. Does anyone here actually grow enough food that it’s a significant contribution to your yearly intake? I’d like to hear about it. Specifically I was wondering about the effort-to-reward ratio: what gives the best payoff in calories per man-hour?
I don’t really think about it in calories.
For several years now I’ve been in desperate financial straits. I have grown a significant amount of the vegetables we eat. Specifically, large quantities of spinach, chard, bok choy, and other greens, beets, turnips, carrots, radishes, onions, green beans, squash, kohlrabi and lettuce. Also, I haven’t needed to purchase parsley or dill for some years now.
I do purchase fruits, grains, and meat, and also vegetables when the prior year’s garden harvest runs out. Lettuce doesn’t keep indefinitely and some things, like onions, we go through really fast. Some things - greens, beans, beets, turnips, and squash for instance - I haven’t needed to purchase for several years now.
The best pay off varies depending on several factors.
Normally I’d say potatoes are your best payoff regarding effort-per-calorie but regrettably potatoes do not do well in my present location, there may be some sort of fungus in the soil because I do not get potatoes, I get mush. Fortunately, potatoes are cheap to buy. So local growing conditions can certainly have an effect.
For my garden, chard and green beans are probably the biggest pay-offs. Fortunately, they’re also two of my favorites. Lettuce can be very productive until the heat sets in and they bolt. Items where I can eat the whole vegetable - kohlrabi, turnips, and beets - are great because, well, you can eat the whole thing.
I do three crops a year (yes, even in northern Indiana). A “cool” group in the early spring, things like chard, radishes, and lettuce. Then the “hot” group - beans, squash, corn, etc. Then replant the cool group again in August for a fall crop. Some very hardy things, like chard, will keep going until Thanksgiving and can survive a light snow, some years it goes all the way to Christmas depending on the weather which is why I not only have a year’s worth of chard by the end of the year in my freezer but I’m giving it away by the bagful.
It is a lot of work though. Due to finances I can afford to neither buy nor rent a rototiller so I break all ground by hand. This is not fun. Keeping up with the weeding isn’t too bad, it’s a couple hours a week and not particularly difficult, just tedious. Harvesting is the fun part. Then there is the processing whether you can, freeze, or dry to preserve your crop.
Trimmings and vegetarian kitchen scraps go into the compost heap. This has taken the great soil I started with and made it fantastic.
The best pay off is what will grow and thrive under your local conditions, and what you will eat. The other thing to remember is that you can trade your surpluses with other gardeners. I don’t grow zucchini, for instance, but I do trade for it because zucchini growers ALWAYS have more than they can use. That’s another way a garden can pay off.
My sister and her husband have a chicken coop. The eggs laid provide a significant % of calories for her family the whole year. She ends up with more than her family can eat themselves. I walk away with a dozen or so every time I’m at her house. They added on this spring to be able to raise meat birds as well.
I come from people who depended on what they grew and preserved, year round, so it does pay off. They bought flour and sugar but tinned fruit and vegetables weren’t even in the realm of their thinking. Every home was proud of their row after row of canned goods. Potatoes, onions, and turnips were kept in a cool dark place and gone through every mealtime, using the ones “about to turn”. My grandmother dried sliced apples and cherries on an old window screen outside. Herbs were grown around the back steps; every glass of iced tea had torn mint leaves in it. Raising a garden doesn’t have to be expensive if you use your head. Let a few potatoes sprout and cut out the eyes to plant. Prune your fruit trees. Save some seeds for next year. Hoe, hoe, hoe. Speaking of which, it’d be great if every Christmas tree had a Troy-Bilt under it, though. 
What do you guys do for insect control? We tried growing tomatoes one year and just ended up feeding the bugs.
What kind of bugs? A hornworm can strip a tomato plant bare in a matter of hours, but if you pick it off (and, if you’re Keweenaw’s sister, feed it to some chickens) you’re all good.
I try to, most years I get a good harvest of a few things, plus a small crop of quite a few more, but I’m only feeding myself, and at least for the summer I’m only really buying stuff that doesn’t grow well locally.
I really wouldn’t count the calories/man hour, go for what you like, or what you spend money on. There’s no point in growing buckets of (say) parsnips because they’re easy and high calorie if you don’t like them and you don’t really want to eat them.
Salad leaves can be a great start- they’re better fresh, the range you can get for home growing is much wider than a supermarket and you can get several decent harvests of cut-and-come-again leaves for very little effort, fast, from a small space. Plus they’re expensive to buy, at least round here, if you want any kind of quality.
If you’re not sure if you want to go all out, don’t, at least at the start. Try a few high cropping things, and add more if you enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, frankly, it’s probably not worth bothering with unless you’re desperate.
As for pests, yeah, can’t say without knowing what pests you have (and living in another continent, I doubt I’d be able to suggest much anyway). Here, the main problem is slugs.
What qualifies as significant?
I’d guess that about 1/3 of our diet is stuff we grow, forage, catch, or hunt.
My garden is about 1000 sq.ft, divided into ten raised beds and it isn’t a lot of work anymore but it used to be.
I use WeedBlock fabric in every other bed and plant started plants like tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, etc into holes in the fabric. Then the next year I shift everything down one bed, so a bed that had WeedBlock last year will now be open. I find the fabric prevents enough seeds that weeding is almost unnecessary the following year as long as you don’t till up the soil.
I tend to grow a lot of things that store well. If a vegetable is described as “keeps well” or “long keeper”, I grow it. So winter squash, carrots, onions, potatoes, winter radishes, etc.
We also have quite a few fruit trees, although it looks as though we’ll get almost no apples this year.
Nothing.
I don’t use pesticides. I think because the compost heap is near the garden and it’s not all closed up a lot of the local birds who pick through the kitchen scraps also visit the garden and take care of most of that. I certainly see a lot of bug-eaters like robins going through the garden very methodically every morning and after rainstorms.
Yes, I do get losses. I plant extra to compensate.
My biggest loss last year was the swallowtail butterflies laid their eggs on the dill (oh, so THAT’s what they eat!) and I lost about 2/3 of it. I still have more than enough for my needs and gave some of it away.
Sometimes I will pull up and destroy a particularly badly infested plant.
The rabbits, deer, and turtles are more of a problem, honestly. I use coyote piss to discourage the herbivores, except for the turtles (apparently, being naturally armored, they aren’t much deterred by mammalian predators) which we deal with via relocation.
Mr Magnet has a substantial allotment that, depending on the time of year, contributes significantly to the main meal of the day. He’s a vegetarian, and I am not, but I cook for him (although I will gnaw on the cat when I need something’s flesh. Or hit up Waitrose for some chicken legs, whichever’s closest and depending on how much change I have available.) So veg is supplemented with Quorn stuff or various species of pasta. We hit a weekly fruit and veg to fill out whatever isn’t in season in the allotment at the moment.
He’s the garden guy; I just cook it.
But he grows
- several varieties of potatoes every year, usually enough to last from autumn into early spring when they come in to harvest.
- He’s got a big section of sweetcorn, so we’ll be eating that for a few weeks come autumn.
*We also go through a season of runner beans; - half of his greenhouse is currently taken over by tomatoes and the other half by two cucumber/triffid hybrids.
- Another big section of the allotment is fruit; we’ve already had the strawberries come in, but he’s been picking enough red & black currants, raspberries, and loganberries to make up quite a few jars of jam.
- He’s got a gage tree which is loaded this year;
*he’s also newly planted half a dozen apple trees (although they’re babies, one has seven apples on it this year).
*Finally, he’s put in about a dozen red sprout plants – I think they’re a fairly new variety of veg which are a cross between kale and brussels sprouts. Last year we had romascue broccoli and plain broccoli through the winter, but he’s not got any in yet.
So, quite a bit of supplement, albeit seasonally. The added bonus is that he spends a hell of a lot of time down there.
For weed and pest control, he uses
- some sort of slug-fuck pellets to keep them off most things otherwise they’d eat the lot
- weed blankets
- netting for the berries against birds and finer mesh netting on the broc, sprouts, and cabbagy things against moths and catepillars
- he builts ‘Fort Fox’ every year around the sweetcorn (wire mesh fencing)
South of England, if you’re polling for climate and conditions.
Since I have stopped growing a significant amount tof the food I eat I have grown a significant amount from the food I eat. Funny how that works…
If I really worked at it (and grew less ornamental stuff) I could probably grow most of the fresh vegetables we eat, although whether that would translate to significant cost savings is another matter. But I do it mostly for fun.
Rabbits have been such a plague this spring/summer that if I was inclined, I could put a dent in the meat bill by eating what I live-trap and release.
I suppose the only garden crop that makes up most of what I eat in a year is garlic. I plan on harvesting about 140 heads of garlic this weekend.
I like garlic.
I have a pretty vigorous vegetable garden every year but I don’t know that it would count as a significant portion of my fruit/veggie intake - I still buy plenty at the store. Every year I expand my garden a little bit, and I do freeze quite a lot for winter. This year I planted a large asparagus bed so in two or three years I should have enough asparagus to satisfy my addiction - I adore asparagus! This year I have several varieties of tomatoes, summer and winter squash, chard, brussels sprouts, okra, Thai dragon and scotch bonnet peppers, cucumbers, red and yellow bell peppers, cucumbers, radishes and various herbs. Next year I plan on adding space for more greens and root vegetables.
I also have lake fish in my freezer from a friend, who recently discovered the joy of fishing. 
Trout, walleye and bass, so far. He is hogging the salmon for himself.
Pests - I use neem oil as a general pesticide. Slugs are my biggest bother because a lot of my garden is in straw bakles which is fantastic for yield but slugs love straw bales. I have a stack of old asphalt roofing tiles from when I had my shed re-roofed last summer and I read that they make a great weed barrier/slug deterrent. This year I used them in my garden and fingers crossed, not a single slug yet. (Slugs won’t crawl across anything rough and scratchy.)
Great tip!
Southern California 50X150 garden
Small orchard, oranges, apples, apricots, plums, peaches.
Vines, concord grapes and some kind of blackberry but it was red.
Peppers, bell peppers, jalapeno, green chilis
Roots plants, radish, carrot, potataoes, garlic, onion, beets, turnips,
Tomatoes, okra, cucumber, mellons, corn, artichoke
Small variety of legumes
brocolli, brussel sprouts, egg plant, cauliflower.
Several squash varieties, and many salad greens,
Most of it we gave away and plenty for us.
Just like Becky2844 I grew up on a farm and we - the extended family - all depended on what we grew and raised. To answer Lumpy, you must look at what it is worth to you in terms of time and money. It takes a lot of time to grow your food and a lot of work. It is not just planting and harvesting. You must keep it for more than a few days to make it worthwhile. Canning or freezing is most common. Can you raise animals? Also lots of time and effort. The payoff is great if you love doing the work. Or if you and your family own the farm and must put in the effort to survive there is really no option. To make a major contribution to your diet you must do the math to see if you will save money or not. A few tomato plants may be all you want or care to deal with. A big crop is a big consumer of you time and energy.
The most aggressive thing my stepfather ever used was Sevin dust, and only sparingly. He’d studied animal husbandry and horticulture in college and would experiment, changing what he grew next to each other depending on what bugs they attracted. Even though farming means dirt/shit/mud he was a bit of a germaphobe and cautioned us about washing everything. But while picking of course we’d still rub the dirt off on a pant leg and eat as we went. One year he grew the best cantaloupes I’ve ever eaten; it was like slicing into peaches. He confided to me he thought it was because he’d grown them in with the pumpkins. But he believed in using the hoe more than anything.
I have a square foot garden, about 4x20’. I usually grow and freeze enough tomatoes to last me most of the year, and I use a LOT of tomatoes when I cook so that’s a decent savings.
I also grow green beans, sugar snaps, basil, onions, collard greens, squash, okra, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cucumbers, cutting flowers, and the odd melon or pumpkin. Of that lot, the only things I would buy on a regular basis are maybe onions, greens, and very occasionally squash and broccoli.
I want to expand my garden next year and see what else I can manage. I give away a lot of what I grow already…sometimes to neighbors and friends, sometimes to the local food bank.
But OH! the tomatoes!!! So delicious!
ETA: I also don’t use any pesticides or anything. Which means I don’t have many collards now, just lacy green ribs.
We usually have a big garden, and we have cows, chickens, and a milk cow. The milk cow is more work than anything else except the garden, but she turns hay into milk, butter, and cheese for us, feeds beef calves, and fertilizes the garden. We still buy our grain and some fruits and veggies, but there is something that grew here on the table at every meal. It may or may not be a significant cost savings, depending on how you look at it, but we sure like what we grow better that anything you can buy in town.
It’s not only about the cost savings, though. I grew up largely on (smaller) farms too - we had goats, chicken, geese and ducks, grew gardens, etc. But there’s also the pleasure and enjoyment of eating something you grew from scratch, and some people enjoy the whole process of growing a garden and eating what you grow. I do, at least; I love fussing over my garden. It’s relaxing and therapeutic. I think overall I save a little bit (and get tastier vegetables, especially as papergirl says, those amazing tomatoes) but a bigger part is eating what I grew myself, and sharing it with friends.
It’s a lot more meaningful (especially in a world where most of what we eat has been farmed and produced on an industrial scale) to bring a bowl of tomatoes, or herbs, or whatever, to a friend that you grew yourself. Randomly bringing someone tomatoes you just bought at Kroger doesn’t quite have the same significance.
papergirl - there’s some sort of bug (can’t recall what) that attacks greens. Look on the undersides of the leaves and if you see little white spots, those are the eggs. Brush them off with your fingers. Shouldn’t take much time at all unless you have a serious field of collards. It works.