I had fun today drawing this little map. As per convention, north is on top.

I chose a 50×60 m rectangle because it allowed me to get exactly 3000 m², unlike a 54×54 m square (and drawing meters to a decimal point is pure nonsense). And whereas a square would, theoretically, need the least amount of fencing, the difference is just 4 m overall.

There is a logic behind all these placements and orientations, and I will talk about them in subsequent posts. In this one, I will talk a bit just about the utility buildings.

The buildings are positioned around a small front yard and close to each other, so a person can easily move between them when needed, and the walkways are short enough to clear snow with ease.

A one-story house with a cellar solves one requirement from the “storage” post, and the attic can work as an additional storage space for junk, as is usually the case. I store electric gardening tools in mine when not in use. 10×8 m would be plenty of space for one person, which is what this whole mental exercise is about.

The toolshed, workshop, and garage form one big unit. And the storage barn is as close to the house as it is to the toolshed and the workshop. The garage is 6×6 m, which should be big enough not only for a car, but also for, as previously mentioned, a small tractor, a lawnmower, a verticutter, and assorted accessories.

So, we have our not-so-small plot of land, we have the house and all the storage buildings, and now let’s look briefly at all the tools that one person would need to be self-sufficient in firewood and food. If I were to write it all, it would be  quite a long list, so I will try to be brief

• Full set of hand tools for gardening, orcharding, and landscaping, including such old-school tools as a scythe and sickle. No matter what, there will be a lot of earth moving, so a lot of work with a spade, a pickaxe, and a shovel will be involved.
• Woodworking and woodcutting hand tools – saws, a hatchet, an axe, and a machete.
• Some power tools, like at least a small chainsaw, and a small electric hoe.
• Some medium-sized gardening machinery – a verticutter, a lawnmower, and a small tractor with a plough, a rotary tiller, a harrow, and maybe even a small cart.
• A deer and hog-proof wire fence.

Let’s not forget that we are trying to do all the necessary work to feed and keep warm one person on 3000 m². Ideally, it would be a square of land 55×55 m2. It might not look that big on a map, but walking it back and forth the whole day, dragging dead trees behind you, or carrying sacks of potatoes, is not easy (I am talking from experience). And if we are trying to do without a mule or an ox, machinery is necessary.

I must say, I do have fun with this mental exercise. We will look at how to partition the land next.

Most food production is highly seasonal or dependent on other seasonally produced products, so storage is essential. And whilst one person can live comfortably on about just 100 m², they would need significant space to store all the food, feed, firewood, and everything else that is necessary for self-sustainability. And since both food and firewood production can also wildly vary from season to season, I think storage of at least 2 years’ worth of supply is necessary to get through a few years of bad harvests, or even one with complete failure.

• A barn for firewood and hay – at least 50 m².
• A tool shed of at least 12 m², with a workshop just as big nearby.
• Rainwater storage of at least 30m³, either as a big pond or (better) as a covered tank.
• A small garage for a small tractor, lawnmower, hoe, and similar small machinery, and their fuel(s).
• A rodent-proof, dark, cold cellar, circa 12 m²
• Large-capacity freezer.
• If electric self-sufficiency is intended (I won’t concentrate on that), then sufficient battery storage is needed.

So now we know how much land one would need, and what fixtures would need to be on said land for long-term survival. And it appears to be a lot – and it is.

 

Finally, we are getting to something really interesting – how much land would a person need to be self-sufficient with food and firewood? It does, of course, depend on a lot of the previous factors, but let us talk about a moderate climate and moderately fertile soil, like I talked about at the end of the previous post.

I was not actually thinking about this whole issue that much until a few years ago, when one commenter on Affinity brought up the concept of vertical growing of vegetables at home. In their opinion, vertical farming was supposed to be an agricultural revolution, including this small-scale home version. I have immediately expressed deep skepticism about this idea, and in the years that followed, I feel fully vindicated. Vertical farming boomed off big way, and then busted, as I expected. Not to mention that most of the startups that I saw were growing salads and herbs, neither of which are foods; they are condiments.

And thus, there is one thing that I feel confident in saying right off the bat – the land use needed to feed one person is probably a lot more than an average city dweller’s idea. And one of the reasons for this is that most people actually have no real first-hand experience growing anything except perhaps that bonsai/orchid they got for a birthday from a clueless relative, which then hung on for dear life for a few months before it inevitably died.

Talking about my own experience in my garden, I estimate I’d need at least 500-600 m² of arable land for food, and ten times that for wood. However, I am currently heating the house for three people, not just one. With a domicile for one person only, it could probably be reduced to 2000 m², arriving at 2600 m² total. This counts only the production areas; there would need to be more for the house, the storage spaces, animal sheds, paths, etc. Let’s not count too much and round it up to 3000 m² overall, for just one, very thrifty person.

We shall see how I personally would use said land in order to meet my food and firewood needs.

All numbers are, and will be, estimates. After all, I am writing blog posts, not a PhD dissertation.

Needless to say, not every environment is suitable for an attempt at self-sustainability. Neither desert nor tundra is a good choice. Funnily enough, in neither of those live very many people, for some reason.

As a rule of thumb, anywhere where people can live, an attempt can be made. But let’s spell out what criteria the local climate and environment must meet in order for a person to be able to grow their own food/firewood in sufficient quantities.

• The latitude dictates day length and seasons, which, to some extent, dictate what crops can and cannot be grown, regardless of any other factor. There is a bunch of edible plants originating from, for example, high altitudes in South America (Perú) that cannot be grown in temperate Europe or North America at lower altitudes, despite the climate being in all other regards suitable. And day length is the sole reason for this – the plants start bulking/flowering at a certain day length, which in Perú is achieved relatively early in the growing season, whereas in Europe that specific daytime length comes too late. This is one of two main reasons why my planned soybean experiment has a huge question mark over it. But other than that, it does not impede self-sustainability; there are plenty of crops to choose from for most latitudes except the farthest north/south extremes. At the extremes, heavily carnivorous sustenance through hunting becomes necessary because agriculture simply is not possible.
• Altitude, together with latitude, determines temperature. The interval between the first and last frost of the season plays a huge role in the growth-season length for many crops, and climate change throws a wrench in the works here in a big way, pushing some environments higher up (or farther from the equator).
• Sufficient rainfall is absolutely essential. Everything being soaking wet all the time is bad, but not as bad as everything being bone dry.

However, apart from these three main factors, multiple other factors also need to be taken into account.

• Local geology. The bedrock often determines the soil chemistry. Not all soils are suitable for all crops. There are even soils that are more suitable for pastures than fields, and an attempt at self-sustenance would, by their very nature, have to be weighted more towards the meat-eater diet, with all its drawbacks.
• Local light conditions. Living in the shadow of a huge mountain or on a north-facing slope (in Europe) can have a significant impact.
• Local hydrology. Distance from a big body of water or a water stream affects temperature and air humidity. As well as how deep the underground water table is.
• Local air currents. Frost hollows can be a real pain in the nethers. Huge winds are not pleasant either.

So, taking all this into account, what environment would be best suited for self-sustenance? Probably a tropical one, with thick topsoil rich in organic content, and reliable rain. I have only limited and purely theoretical knowledge about such environments. Of all the possibilities, I can only talk with some minuscule authority about hardiness zones 6b to 7b, with slightly acidic, loamy topsoil containing relatively little organic material, because that is the environment where I live. And that is what I will concentrate on when talking about detailed plans later on.

The weather got warmer, a lot of the snow thawed, and my garden got covered in molehills, as well as the surrounding meadows. Usually, moles make a few hills throughout the winter, but this year, they have outdone themselves.

I do not mind them that much. They rarely go directly into the vegetable patches. And I do not maintain a lawn, my garden could be best described as a mown meadow.

The scale is not very well conveyed in the picture – the biggest one in the right lower corner was almost half a meter across and over 15 cm in height.

Normally, I just kick and spread these around when they thaw. But since this year I need to fill the vegetable patch between the row of bamboo and my greenhouse, I gathered them all into a wheelbarrow and carted them over there. And I got four full wheelbarrows this way, which is really a lot. They actually did save me some work this year.

This part of the 2026 gardening work started actually in 2025, a few days before Christmas. And not only is it the first gardening work of the season, it is also the first experiment.

I found this idea on YouTube last year, unfortunately, after I had already started all my small-seed plants. But since I decided to have one more try at growing my own onions from seeds, I also decided to try out this idea. It is, in principle, very simple. First, wet planting substrate is put in a roll of some sort of rot-resistant material (people were using bubble-wrap, mirelon, or other plastics). I am using old black landscaping cloth. The rolls are then bound together with a string or with a container and sprinkled with seeds on the top.

I switched my yoghurt-buying to big, 1 l buckets, because I have enough of the 500 ml ones and I need the bigger ones too. And their first use this season is to contain the seed snails.

I am trying three varieties, one red, one yellow, and one shallot, and I marked them with popsicle sticks to keep track of which is which. The shallot packet had really few seeds, barely enough for one snail, whereas both the red (č=červená) and yellow (ž=žlutá) had each enough for three.

Everything sprouted nicely so far. After about one month, I will probably try to move these into even bigger pots, or possibly split each snail into two pots.

The idea of sowing small seeds into seed snails is that when the snail is unrolled, one gets a row of tiny plants that is much easier to separate than the tangled mess one gets when simply sowing them in a container. It should be especially easy on the roots. I will also try it for the initial sowing of tomatoes, and maybe even other plants with tiny seeds, yet to be determined.

Making alliterated titles was a fun (for me) exercise, but I do not think I would be able to keep that up for the next year, even if English were not a foreign language. So this might be the last one.

It is winter, so I cannot do much in the garden. But there are works that need to be done, because I did not manage to do them in the fall due to prolonged lower back trouble. I am fine now, so I am trying to catch up, slowly and carefully.

One of the works was to replant the bamboo that I planted years ago as a sort of wind shield for my greenhouse. It grew extremely poorly where I planted it, and it started to sprawl into areas where I did not want it, and it grew strongly there. I took the opportunity of warm-ish weather, and I dug a 4×1 m hole, lined it with old PVC flooring to contain the spread of the plants. Then I dug out all the bamboo plants, and I planted them inside, covering them with enough sieved soil to, hopefully, shield them from frost. If they survive winter, good. If they do not, I will use this area as a vegetable bed in subsequent years. Between the bamboo and my big greenhouse is a circa 20 m² of tillable soil.

Once the bamboo was planted, I tilled (with a garden fork) the rest of the area where I grew potatoes this year. I could not do it with the plough in the fall, because it was covered with a heap of aforementioned sieved soil. This area is circa 30 m², and I plan to plant it with soy beans.

BTW, it was probably working with the plough that caused me the lower back trouble both in the spring and in the fall. In the future, I will have to spread this work over several days to not overstrain myself. I probably should not do more than an hour or so in one go.

I cannot fill the raised beds now because even when it does not freeze, the soil is all soggy and gluey, and I cannot mix it, neither manually nor in the concrete mixer. I have the type of soil where if you start walking over even a small tilled area, you are several cm taller at the end of it. When I was a kid, I once walked home from school several hundred meters over a tilled field. I never did that again; I had to scrape off the soil from my soles every few dozen steps because the shoes became heavy and unwieldy.

I haven’t done much to my main vegetable patch, except digging out lemon balm. I planted it years ago, but I found out I do not like to use it in any way, anywhere, so I decided to liquidate it. This patch is circa 70 m², and it is the best soil I have. It is still clingy when wet, but it has had stones removed from it for decades, and organic material as well as sand added, so in comparison to what is normally here, it is prime estate. I did not till it, and some of the spinach plants are still surviving. If they survive into spring, I might get some small use out of them after all.

Overall, my tilled/tillable vegetable patches add up to circa 170 m² over the whole garden. That is a respectable area. Just like last year, I want to expand my growing ambitions onto the lawn itself. In one area, where I grew beans this year and where the soil is very poor indeed, I am now trying to kill the grass overwinter by covering it with some old rubber and PVC flooring mats. I do not need to till the soil for beans, and I will probably plant them in rows spaced enough to be able to mow the grass between them with a lawnmower. But if I manage to kill the grass now, the planting should be easier in the spring. I do not count this area into my “arable” land yet, nor the area where I will grow potatoes on the grass, just like this year. I do think, however, that I will be able to expand my growing area by a further 30-50 m², just like I did this year, and hopefully till it in the fall without hurting my back again.

A little timeline – the 70 m2 patch was started by my grandfather. I added circa 50 m² last year and 50 m² this year. I would like to keep this trend up as long as I can. I have to plant this area with vegetables and harvest them, but that is not more work than mowing it uselessly every two weeks.

I am still contemplating what to do with the 25 m², where I grew runner beans this year. Once a year, a honeywagon has to drive over it to empty the septic tank in my water cleaning facility. I could plant it with runner beans last year, because the septic was emptied just before that, but I cannot establish permanent vegetable patches there. I am thinking of tilling it manually and sowing it with alfalfa. Alfalfa could outgrow the grass and establish a permanent growth that survives the occasional truck wheel running over it, and whilst I cannot eat it (and I do not plan on having rabbits), it would still fix nitrogen for superb compost, thus I would get a use out of the area. And alfalfa, unlike grass, does not cause hay fever, so I could let it grow taller between the mowings.