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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I tilled the whole big patch on which I tried the three sisters system last year and a bit more.

I had to use a garden fork, because the tractor is not powerful enough to cut through long-established turf. And most of this soil was undisturbed for about a hundred years, if ever. And parts of it were compacted by the honeywagon driving over it once a year when emptying my septic tank. However, on that front, I found out this spring that I can convert it into proper vegetable patches, because the honeywagon has a long enough trunk to not need to drive directly over it. Thus, I tilled even more than I initially intended – a rectangle approximately 10×6 m. In the first picture, it is almost all done, and I took that picture when fighting the compulsion to make the edges tidy. I lost that battle, and the day after, I spanned a string along the edges, and I did make them nice, straight, and precisely 6×10 m.

I had a race against time when flattening it with the electric hoe. The weather forecast predicted rain, and I wanted to finish flatterooning it before it came. As you can see, I did not manage it. I did flatten most of it, but I could not manage to rake out the big lumps of grass from the last three meters or so. Now it will be a bit harder to do that, because it is all wet. And the wetness also makes sowing it a bit more difficult, because this is heavy, claggy clay that sticks to everything, mainly the soles of one’s boots.

Since I can use it to grow food, I do not actually need to sow it with alfalfa as was my initial plan. I will sow part of it with green peas, and the rest will be sown with alfalfa anyway. This is because I had to remove a lot of organic material when tilling and flattening it, and because the soil is not of particularly high quality. I have grown legumes on it last year, and another year of doing that should improve the soil further.

However, I won’t let the alfalfa grow for several years and use it for compost. I will chop and drop it in the summer, and till it all under in September. Since I disturbed the soil, shredded the turf, removed all dead tree roots (from my late cherry tree), and several buckets of stones, I should be able to use my tractor for that.

At this size, it is not a vegetable patch but essentially a mini-field. Therefore, I would like to grow grains on it next year. Either spelta, oats, or both.

Despite some grumbling about how the rain did not politely wait until I was finished with my work, I was glad for the forced pause today. My whole human hurts, from top to bottom. The good news about that is that I still did not hurt my back; I am just extremely tired. The remedy for that is simple.

In our hypothetical plot map, there are two areas designated for producing mainly fruit – the fruit shrubbery along the south border of the fields, and the small 12×10 m orchard. Let’s look at what fruits would be, in my opinion, most useful in a self-sufficiency setup. First, the orchard.

The orchard is small, but it is big enough for one plum tree, two quarter apple trees, two pears, and some frost-resistant grapes growing on the fences.

Apple would not bear fruit reliably, but when it does, it can be sliced and dehydrated for later use. The most valuable component in apples would be the pectin, because it can thicken into marmalade even fruits that do not do so on their own (like blueberries, raspberries, etc.). And although I did not test it  (because I never needed to), I see no reason why dehydrated apples, rehydrated and blended, should not work too.

Plums and pears would not bear fruit reliably either, but an occasional glut can be processed into something long-lasting – they can be dehydrated, they can be boiled down to fruit butter that will store in jars in a dark cellar for years, and if there is really too much of all of it, they usually contain enough sugar for fermenting and distilling liquor. Which is useless, but…

And lastly grapes (which I would actually recommend on any sheltered south-facing surface available). They cannot be stored, but they contain enough sugar to either be boiled into molasses-like syrup or fermented into wine, so an occasional glut could be made into something that lasts.

Both hard liquor and wine are useless as far as self-sufficiency goes, but they are an indispensable step in making vinegar, and vinegar would be essential for pickling and preserving some of the vegetables. It would require some work, but winter nights are long, and making vinegar is not that difficult.

The fruit shrubbery would consist mostly of small fruits, like raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries, blackberries, currants, etc. These can either be made into jams/marmalades when mixed with apples, or they can be dehydrated for fruit teas.

In this regard, these three fruits would be essential: briar rose, sea buckthorn, and black currant. All these contain so much vitamin C that even tea made from heat-dried fruits contains enough of it to keep scurvy away.

I estimate that all these fruits together should produce approximately 60 kg of fruit per year on average, which would correspond to about 30 Mcal per year.

In the post about the coppice, I mentioned that there should be one walnut tree and a few hazelnuts in there for nuts, instead of firewood. I estimate those would produce about 20 kg of nuts per year on average, adding a whopping 133 Mcal per year. That would still not be enough to keep an active person alive the whole year, the rest would have to make up meat and eggs – and about those, next time.

I have sown the first seeds of the season. In my main best soil, I made rough rows, and I sprinkled peas in them. It is a variety that is used both for food and as a green fertilizer, and I am only sowing it for the second purpose here. They should grow a bit before the end of May, when I can finally plant various squash/pumpkins, corn, and beans in their stead. I won’t work them into the soil; I will just chop and drop them in place.

And then I was working on this.

Like I said in the last article, I tilled a new approximately 21 m² patch. I intend to try to grow naked oats in it.

First, I bought organic naked oats in the fall to try them out in the kitchen. I liked them as a substitute for rice, so they are a viable addition to my food even if I cannot process them into anything other than whole grains (like flakes or flour). With that being decided, I tried to see if they germinate, to test if they are a viable crop in my garden. Unfortunately, they did not germinate at all. I was searching the whole winter for a supplier that would sell me organic naked oats in a small amount, but all the webshops I found were selling the grains from the same supplier. Until two weeks ago, when I coincidentally found another supplier. I bought the seeds, and they had 95%  germination rate. So I calculated how much I need to sow on my patch, I divvied it into 20 cups and went on to sow 20 rows.

I do not have any sowing thingamajig (yet), and the soil was worked for the first time, so making the rows was not exactly easy. I kept hitting pieces of turf the whole time, and my pile of stones grew by another three buckets. In the end, I had to make a row with a hoe, sprinkle the seeds in it, cover them by digging the next row, etc. I ended up with a really nice, flat, 3×7 m mini-field in the end.

The soil is not dry, but not too wet either, so I watered it a bit, and I will probably water it a few more times until the seeds pop out. After a cold and somewhat snowy winter, the spring is now abnormally sunny and warm.

I really hope it goes well and I get some meaningful harvest out of it. If it goes tits up, at least I have already got another 21 m² of arable land, which should be easier to work in subsequent years.

So far, I have managed to work in the garden without hurting my back this year. Let’s hope that holds.

The weather became suddenly very unseasonably warm and sunny. Essentially, we have spring weather now, and the “mud season” after the snow melted was very short. And I have spent a few days outdoors, working in my garden as much as I can. I am pleased to say that so far, I do not have any back pain, except for tiredness. After almost a year of nearly constant lower-back pains, that feels absolutely great. I hope it lasts.

I managed to de-branch all the longer and thicker wood pieces. I will probably not use any for beans this year, because I think I have found a better, permanent solution, about which I will write at some later date. Right now, I will simply cut these into 50 cm pieces that fit into my stove, bag them, and weigh them so I know how much I have.

I managed to shred, bag, and weigh most of the thinner pieces that are worth using as firewood (i.e., poplars and maples). I cut a few pieces of wood, and I weighed them fresh and then dry, in order to be able to estimate how much dry mass I have based on how much they weigh now. I know, therefore, that poplars and willows lose 60% mass when drying, maples and ashes lose 40%.

All that remains to shred now are thin twigs from trimming the hedge and the raspberries. Those won’t be bagged and weighed, they will be used as mulch on my vegetable beds.

And as the title says, I started tilling the soil. I tilled the patch where the butternut squash were last year, and I enlarged it from ca 5 m² to ca 12 m². And yesterday I tilled the approximately 21 m² patch that you see in the picture. It is in the place of one of the three Three Sisters experiments of last year. On this specific patch, the beans froze, the corn failed, and the zucchini underperformed really badly. But at least the soil was worked a bit because of that, so it was slightly easier to turn with a garden fork than if it were completely untouched.

I will need to break the big lumps with an electric hoe and flatten the area a bit. And since I finally managed to get my hands on viable seeds of naked oats, I will try to grow that in here. Oats are not too picky about soil quality, but I will probably use some synthetic fertilizers to boost it up a bit. Next year, I will plant some legumes here to boost the soil naturally. If soy beans work out well, this will be their next-year’s home. If not, then green peas or bush beans.

Technically fruits, in the kitchen usually used as vegetables – those are the things that I choose to call fruigetables, to avoid any “whell, akshually…”. This post is going to be mostly about tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and similar.

As you can see, there are three greenhouses in the map. There is a reason for that – in a self-sustainable setting, reliance on outside inputs should be reduced, including various -icides and fertilizers. And three greenhouses would allow a three-year rotation between these:

Soybeans, beans, peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, and, eventually, also radishes and peas as pre-crops. I think with greenhouses this size, it should be easy to grow about 50 kg of these crops together, adding about 16 Mcal to our tally. But more importantly than calories, these would add other nutrients and, most importantly, flavors. With two-three varieties of tomato and pepper, a wide span of variously flavored sauces and chutneys can be made, all the way from sweet, across savoury, to hot. The soybeans would take care of fixing nitrogen and breaking the cycles of nightshade family-specific diseases and pests.

The rodent-proof raised beds could further provide, in my estimate, 20 kg of green peas (as a pre-crop), 15 kg of carrots, 15 kg of onions+garlic, and about 50 kg of various pumpkins and squash, providing an additional 42 Mcal and more nutrients and flavors.

I think these are conservative estimates, averages, that account for occasional glut and occasional crop failure. Most of these crops can be preserved in various ways – pickled, dehydrated, in compotes – and some can keep fresh for several months over winter (winter squash).

With this, we are almost there as far as plant-based foodstuffs go. The next thing to look at will be fruits from our orchard and fruit shrubbery.