I'm a big fan of perrenials - things that you plant once, and then only require minimal work to maintain and harvest. Things like fruit trees and berries provide delicious fruit that can be storred in the form of preserves, cider, etc.

I also reccomend Hops, which are extremely hardy once established. While they don't provide calories, they are a valuable trade comodity for homebrewers, as their is currently a worldwide Hop shortage. They also have medicinal uses, and of course you can use them to brew your own beer.

While not exactly gardening, I highly reccomend cultivating mushrooms, since that offers a lot of return on your effort, and can be cultivated in heavily shaded places where you would have a hard time growing anything else. Mushrooms also make a valuable trade commodity, and can be dried for storage. If you have access to freshly cut logs, they can be innoculated with mushroom spawn easily and fairly cheaply, and will fruit(produce mushrooms) for years afterwards- about 1 year for every inch of the diameter of the log. 2 good sources for mushroom spawn and information are Field & Forest Products(www.fieldforest.net) and Fungi Perfecti (www.fungi.com). Note that the print catalogs from both companies have a greater selection than the website.

One last plant I would reccomend is peppermint. Once planted it grows like a weed and will spread in no time, yielding lots of delicious and medicinal tea, which can easily be collected and dried as well as used fresh.

edit: I second the garlic reccomendation. It is very easy to grow, and can be planted in the late fall as well as mid-summer, yielding two crops a year in the same bed. I've got 2 beds of garlic growing right now in the middle of winter, which will provide all the garlic we can use in a year plus some to trade.

I just took a Beginning Gardening course through my cooperative extension office and even though I am far from a beginner (at least in my mind), I found it very informative and learned quite a few things! I highly recommend the cooperative extension service.

Grow what you'll eat, and keep it close to the house. Many people put the veg garden way out back like a poor relation. Keep it close to the house and it will get the attention it needs. And it's easier to PROTECT, if you get what I mean.

Perennials (live from year to year) are asparagus, artichokes, cane berries, blueberries, rhubarb, horseradish, small bushes like cranberries and lingonberries.

Fruit trees that are dwarf or semi-dwarf produce sooner than the large standard types, and they're easier to harvest.

Potatoes are easy. Lettuce family are quick. Figs root easily from cuttings if they grow where you live.

If you have chickens and a bit of land in the back corner, you might want to grow some grains. You can harvest some to hang on stalks for winter feed, and the chickens can harvest what's left if you just knock the stalks down. Chickens also like berries, and will harvest them themselves if they can reach them.

Many things will reseed fairly easily if you let the best ones go to seed (herbs, esp).

Sue

You know what my family calls fig trees? "Bucket Trees" - NYC is right on the edge of where you can have fig trees, so the trres have to be wrapped and either burried or they put a 5 gallon bucket over the top in the winter. You drive around from fall till spring, and you see these "things" sticling up wrapped in green/black plastic, with a 5 gal bucket on to

I knew I'd get a ton of input at this forum.

I want to keep it mixed as far as crops go, because variety makes for more interesting eating. But, I also realize that is likely to interfere or defeat my desire to be able to make it sustainable. Sue's post on collecting your own seeds is really helpful.

My thinking, incorporating some of the comments, is as follows:

1. If I do not have enough calories, then enough vitamins will not matter in the least. So, I want to concentrate first on calories and then try to have some way of completing protein requirements, without meat. (We're not vegetarians, but I'm not about to begin to raise animals for livestock, yet.) If getitng enough calories and protein is doable, then the final part of the calculations would be to try to fill out the rest of our nutritional requirements, but I don't know that I am up to planning all that at this time.
2. If the plants I grow year are either no around or providing seed for a crop next year, then it's not sustainable. So, I need to stick with heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. Pursuant to Sue's advice in her thread, I am going to need to minimize the varieties to avoid creating my own hybrids, which may not produce in the following years.
3. I think I could get a fair amount of storable calories, so I can store food, seed, etc., by growing some varieties of legumes, squash and root vegetables. Also, from what I can discern, the seeds are relatively easy to harvest from many legumes and squash. So, if I grew some heirloom squash, beans and/or peas, and some root veggies, I should be able to put a fair amount of calories on the table, and my guess is that the combination would provide much in the way of completing other nutritional needs. Not sure of the specific varieties.
4. I'd also want some greens such as spinach or lettuce's in the picture, as I know these grow early, and we'd desperately want some greens if we ever had to make it through a winter on what we had grown.
5. In the middle of summer, I'd want summer squashes, and would probably want them planted early enough so that I felt I had my fill of them before switching to winter squashes for storing.
6. I probably should add in a dehyrdrator for summer veggies and greens.
7. Adding some perrenial fruits and nuts would be a great idea. The ones I am considering: apples (maybe McIntosh and something that would pollinate it well), cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, filberts and sunflower seeds.
8. I like the idea of edible landscaping, and I think I need to have a grain somewhere. I might try some corn for a grain, but I intend to grow some amaranth. It's an ornamental, and both the seeds and leaves an be eaten. I also understand that tiger lily tubers are edible, are our area has tons of them.
9. While I don't need to feed DW and myself out of this, if I am not putting a significant contribution to the table from the garden, then it's not something that can I'll know can be ramped up easily to take care of us. Additionally, I don't know that we'll be the only ones of which I need to take care. I'd want enough seed to step the whole thing up by a multiple, assuming I could get more labor from others.
10. It's one thing to have food and another to want to eat it. If it does not taste good, then we won't want to eat it. That means we need some flavorings to improve the taste of some things that we don't alrady enjoy eating. If I was in a longterm scenario, then I have to think we would be eating some things opportunistically, to save our stores, etc. I suspect some of these would not have a great flavor. So, I think i also need to add some things just for flavor: herbs, hops as mentioned by urbansurvivalist, some chili or hot peppers.

Thanks for the comments and any others you might have on the above.

Edit: I have been a homebrewer and appreciate the reminder. It's the right time of year, so I just ordered hop rhizomes.

Remember to call before you dig Dan.
Also keep in mind telephone installers and cable installers have a nasty habit of running their lines on the surface of the ground before the lawns are laid, so the cables are often just under the sod.

Sunshine matters but planting beside the house matters too. You can often extend your season by one zone or more by planting against the south or west side of the house.

Grapes should do well in most of your area too. The are usually trained on a trellis.

For square foot, my first thoughts would be carrots, radishes, salad and cooked greens, and cherry tomatos. I've seen those grown in a 3 gallon bucket in a dorm room. (Yes, my school had a bad cafeteria.)

The main problem with a vegetarian diet is that you have to plan for COMPLETE protein, which is protein that contains all nine essential amino acids. There aren't an awful lot of plants that contain it, but you can make up the complete total by eating certain plant foods at the same meal (or within a few hours of each other) that DO make up a complete protein.

Eating a combination of legumes + seeds, or legumes + grains, or legumes + nuts will provide complete protein. Remember all those Mexican meals that always had beans and rice? That was legume + grain, a complete protein.

Plants that contain complete proteins in themselves are soybeans (and soy products), amaranth and quinoa (South American grains), hemp, spirulina. At this very moment in time, I am sprouting three kinds of quinoa that I found in a new health food co-op, red, white, and black. All three kinds have sprouted. It probably won't grow everywhere, but I am hoping to sow three small plots of them, both for a seed source and as chicken feed. In fact, every kind of seed that I have bought in a store that has bulk-foods has sprouted, with the exception of the milled millet, and the milling is probably the reason. (Be sure never to eat seeds or sprouted seeds that appear dyed, as some seeds have been treated with the pink fingicide Thiram or other chemicals.)

It may be easier to plan for animal protein if you get away from the large-animal idea, and think about small-animal complete protein sources like eggs, goat milk (and cheese and yogurt), rabbit and fish.

If you feel you don't have the knowledge/interest/situation for animals like these, you might have neighbors that do. It's really hard for a family to grow everything that you would want to eat, esp when food production is new to you (there is a learning curve). Working out a neighborhood food barter system could be ideal, and you might have people you could depend upon in a sticky situation.

Sue

I've been using the square foot gardening method for 8 years now, first on the side of our townhouse, now in the (small) back yard of our house. I have two 4'x4' raised beds, the beds are high enough to keep the local bunny population from getting easy access.

What I grow (in Northern VA): cabbage, brocolli, lettuce, spinach, peas, carrots, peppers (bell and hot), tomatos, cucumbers. I grow 4 tomato plants vertically along one side of the block, the other block has a trellis for the cucumbers. I try to rotate in crops throughout the year, but not always able to keep the entire block running. I would advise putting in a low pressure drip irrigation system. My tomato plants grow to 6ft+ high and drink a lot of water.

Last year I planted a bush type patty pan squash that did very well without taking over the entire block.

One thing to remember is that salad crops in particular shouldn't all be planted at once, as you usually won't need 100 lettuces that reach optimum size all at the same time.

One nice thing about the Square Foot Gardening method is that it seems easier to plant a week's worth of some things. One square foot of soil can grow at least four lettuces. You could plant a few more, then thin and eat the ones in between, and let the others get larger. With the loose-leaf lettuces, you could just harvest the individual leaves (a few from each plant) every few days to make them last longer. Every ten days or two weeks, you can plant another square. If you harvest the entire heads, you can sow more seeds immediately after harvesting, as part of the rotation.

Square Foot Gardening helps you to focus on what you're planting and how much you need, more so than other methods. You can also start some things indoors or in a container and have young plants ready to pop into a spot that you just removed something else. (Not carrots.)

Sue