It is the time of the year when a gardener has so much work that it is impossible to take a proper rest. And today the time has come to plant the main crop of this year, the mighty potato.

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It was only this year that I learned the term “chitting”, i.e., sprouting the tubers before planting them into the ground. I do not actually do that on purpose. The potatoes do that by themselves, and they force me to go along with it.

About a week and a few days ago, I noticed that the potatoes were sprouting, so I took them out of the cellar, sorted them out of the mesh bags into crates, and I put them outside in my tool shed. There they were protected from night frosts, but the temperature was a few degrees lower than in the cellar, so the growing stopped. And during warmer days, I actually took them outside, and I laid them out in the shade so the tubers get a bit of light. That way, the sprouts remain short, thick, and relatively strong, instead of becoming long, spindly, and brittle.

When doing this, I also noticed the differences between the varieties. The red varieties Bellarosa and Camel have white-pink colored sprouts. Dali has yellow-white sprouts. And Agria had sprouts of an interesting purple-lilac shade that I forgot to take a picture of.

I managed to plant both yellow varieties today. They went into the ground and will be hilled up. The Agria is an indeterminate variety, and I remembered from the past that Dali can also make more than one layer of tubers when hilled up. So both of these should benefit greatly from being planted deep and subsequently being hilled up with soil.

Tomorrow I will start planting the Bellarosa and Camel varieties directly onto the lawn.

The house in our map would need to be as close to being passive as possible, reducing the need for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer as much as possible, yet it is substantially large for just one person, and there is a reason for that. Let’s start a bit in detail from the bottom up.

Preferably, the cellar would need to be accessible from both outside and inside the house and consist of at least three rooms. One would be the boiler room, with a high-efficiency, modern wood stove, central heating with hot water storage of at least 2000 l, and enough storage space for fuel for two weeks in case of extremely bad weather. That way, the stove could run at peak efficiency just a few hours every other day, saving both fuel and labor. Then there would need to be a separate, cold, dark cellar for storing all the canned goods, and another, even colder cellar, for storing potatoes and other veggies.

Above ground, the living space would be situated at the north wall, preventing overheating in hot summer. And the south wall room would be the last growing space contributing to food production, a solar greenhouse. Not a tropical greenhouse, but one that does not freeze over due to a combination of utilizing most of winter’s weak sun and residual heat from the living quarters. Such a greenhouse would be ideal for starting sensitive crops with long vegetation cycles (butternut squash, lufa, cucumbers, peppers, etc.), as well as a choice of useful, non-frost-resistant spices and herbs (chilli, rosemary, basil, bay leaf, etc.). And lastly, in a sufficiently large greenhouse of this type, even in my climate, it would be possible to grow a few small, but really important trees and bushes – tea or coffee, and a few citrus trees. It would not be possible to produce enough coffee or tea for a serious addict, but it could be enough for an occasional treat. A large-ish lemon tree could provide an important canning ingredient – citric acid.

The attic would serve two purposes – it would need to be higher than the greenhouse to provide a chimney effect during an extremely hot summer, allowing the hot air to escape the house and draw in cooler air through the cellars. And it would be a storage space for all the seldom-used junk, as is the usual case.

Did I forget something?

The new garlic variant Dukát that I planted in the new raised bed started to poke out of the leaf mulch, so I scraped the mulch away so the plants have light. Also, the leaf mulch was sometimes too compacted, and the plants had trouble getting through. We shall see how this turns out. I will definitely use fungicides this year to try to protect this crop, since garlic is one of the most expensive crops that I grow, and I like it.

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The ten cloves of garlic Janko that I planted from last year also all poked out of the ground.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

That means they were at least healthy enough to not rot over winter. We shall see if they grow. I would very much like that, the variant is tasty, and it made huge cloves that are easy to peel.

Other than that, I continued to do some heavy work whenever the weather allowed it, until I was forced into a pause yesterday, when strong western winds brought with them rain, snow, and eventually frost. I did manage at least to prepare some of the potato patches. I have approximately 400 potatoes to plant, which means I need somewhere around 130 m total length of rows.  I am nowhere near that; it will be a lot of work.

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For the Ruth Stout method, I started to prepare the lawn by spreading rows of last year’s mixture of moss and soil, together with some rotten grass from the last mowing of the lawn in 2025. I will plant mostly the early potatoes Bellarosa and Camel in here, and since both of those are red tubers, I will put two rows of the yellow early variety Dali between them to keep them separated. For the Dali, I will plant the smallest tubers here. The bigger ones will go into deeper soil for better results.

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The patch between the big greenhouse and the bamboo patch is deep, sandy soil, not the natural soil around here, but one that I created over decades. It is not ideal, but it is easy to work, and I will plant the variant Agrie here, because it is an indeterminate variety which should benefit from the depth and sufficient hilling. On the south side is this year’s attempt at growing spinach. I have sown half of a 50 cm strip with spinach seeds, and the other half with pre-grown spinach plants.

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The patch in front of the entrance to the big greenhouse, where I grew butternut pumpkins and red beets last year, will also be planted with the variant Agrie.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Most of the Dali variant will go on the elevated mound, where I tried unsuccessfully to grow peas and wintering onions last year, and successfully grew outdoor tomatoes under a shelter. I will try the tomatoes in the same patch again, after supplementing the soil with compost and fertilizer, and the potatoes will go on every available bit of soil around it.

This year, I will use commercial fertilizers on all my crops since a lot of this soil is still far from optimal. I am planting 30 kg of tubers, and unless I get at least 300 kg in return, I will be sorely disappointed.

Pets are out of the question in our particular self-sustainability scenario with one singular exception (see later). Dogs and cats are carnivores and would add a significant burden on the need to produce animal protein. A working barn cat would be useful by keeping down the voles and mice, etc., a bit, so that option might be worth the hassle of having to increase the rabbit production a little, but on a small plot like this, the cat would spend most of its time somewhere else anyway (speaking from experience). So IMO not worth it.

But I do count on having five egg-laying hens in our scenario, producing about 1000 eggs a year. And those could also be pets. A friend of mine has bought retired egg-laying hens, with the intention of having them lay eggs for a year and then killing them for meat. His wife took to observing them after work (first mistake), started to recognize their individual traits (second mistake), and gave them names (third mistake). At that point, she became opposed to the idea of killing and eating them, so they were allowed to live until natural death. And AFAIK, they continue to do this still, about ten years later. The hens still provide them with eggs, and they live comfortable and happy lives until death. They are not cuddly like cats or dogs, but they can get affectionate and entertaining.

From spring to fall, five hens should be able to find enough food in the coppice, with occasional supplementation with kitchen scraps. Hens can and will eat virtually anything, although they prefer insects and small animals. In the winter, they would require feeding, but it should be possible to grow enough surplus to keep them alive through winter with a combination of food scraps, cracked grain, and boiled potatoes/potato peels (there will inevitably be some potatoes that are not fit for human consumption due to pest damage) mixed with shredded and boiled alfalfa hay. It is also not unreasonable to expect more walnuts than one person can comfortably eat, and hens will love those in winter.

Rabbits or guinea pigs would not be pets in this scenario; they would be meat. Their whole purpose would be to eat plant parts inedible to humans and convert them into something edible. They can be omitted entirely in favor of pet hens, but the plot will thus inevitably lose some efficiency by using all excess plant material (and there would be plenty) just for composting.

Like the hens, the rabbits should be able to graze in the coppice throughout the summer with the chickens, since they eat different stuff. The water cleaning facility, the fallow field, the coppice, and the orchard should provide enough plant material to make hay for winter to keep one buck and two does alive through winter. In the spring and summer, there should be enough surplus plant matter to get at least 10 kg of meat out of their offspring.

With rabbits, there would be a need for outward input – vaccination. Without it, a deadly outbreak of myxomatosis is inevitable at some point, again, speaking from experience.

10 kg of meat and 1000 eggs would provide about 90 Mcal, getting the total to 954 Mcal, enough to keep an active person alive.

Pests are another problem. The hens would help a bit with pest control by devouring any insects that travel through the coppice. But mice, rats, and voles would be a problem. Hens will kill a vole or mice if they catch them, but they are not particularly good at catching them. In my opinion, the best self-sustainable way to keep these pests under control would be to strategically put bucket traps baited with walnuts. And subsequently killing all captured rodents and feeding them to the hens.

What slugs and bugs get onto the veggies anyway can be in part destroyed manually, and in part by homemade insecticides. For that purpose, growing a few potted chrysanthemums would be necessary to make an insecticide spray if needed. Daisies growing anywhere in the garden should be cherished, because they can serve in this capacity, too.

To someone uncomfortable with killing animals of any kind and in any context and for whatever purpose, I do not recommend attempting food self-sustainability. Whatever spiritual connection one feels to fellow living creatures, that connection is inevitably strained beyond breaking point when said creatures literally threaten one’s survival by destroying their only food source. It is easy to be high-minded about this when the food comes from the supermarket. It is less easy when it comes from hard work and a yearly gamble with nature.