If you're thinking of starting a garden to provide for you and your family's needs for home grown produce, there's a number of things to consider before you till up a patch of lawn and start planting. Producing a large enough amount of food to live off of is not a small affair, thought there are many tricks and techniques that will allow you to grow as much as you can in the smallest space possible.
Before you till.A list of of factors to consider in planning a garden are as follows:
Tillable space. This is the most limiting factor to any garden. Whether it's due to property lines, buildings, terrain, rocks, trees, city or county ordinances, drainage, easements, or other factors, the area you have to till and realistically use is going to determine the space you have to grow stuff.
This can be optimized with things by season extension structures like greenhouses and tunnels, double and other intensive cropping methods, fertility building, and the like, in the end you'll be limited to what's on your property.
What you eat. Obviously nobody's going to eat what they don't like, so that's an easy factor to quantify as to what to plant. That's pretty easy to determine when going thru catalogs and online stores to decide what to buy.
How much you eat. How much is a different story. Whether it's a matter of keeping a long of what you eat and how much, inventorying the freezer, pantry, or keeping track of store receipts, the better you can estimate you usage, the better you will know how much you will need to plant.
Your budget. While gardening can be done on the cheap, the reality is that there is an upfront cost. Tillers or wheel hoes, garden tools, seed, fencing and stakes, canning and freezing supplies and other items cost money. Except for seed, hey can be bought used to save cost, or borrowed, and many other things can be repurposed, but it can't be done for free.
Determine what you need and your budget beforehand to decide it is feasible to do what you want to do right now, or if you need to build up to it.
Time. There are a number of tricks and techniques to lower the amount of time needed to be working in the garden in a given season. Like costs, most of the work can be done up front in the spring and steady maintenance after that, but if you don't have a solid day's worth of hours a week, it's going to be difficult to keep up, or mean a much smaller garden.
Help. You can of course garden by yourself and your own efforts, but the more the merrier. Two people can do the work of three separately. Spouses, kids, other families, or bartering produce for work will force multiply and cut the work down significantly.
Storage space. Putting up all the produce is going to take some room. If you don't have that room, or it's not conducive for storage, like an unheated garage, it's going to make your enterprise much more difficult. It may be a matter of acquiring shelving, reorganizing, cleaning out, or other tricks to give you the right kind of space you need. There's also a need for space to store tools and machinery.
Other indirect factors are good recordkeeping, learning, observing, experimenting, especially with the growing process, as well as good discipline and persistence to manage things from the first spring till to harvest. Ingenuity and creativity are important too.
This is the starting point to a successful homestead garden, considering all these factors before the tiller hits the sod will make your efforts more successful.
