After being a resident of NYC, and lving such that growing any food was near impossible. I'm not about to try gardeing in a north-facing apt. with windows that only crack open and no balcony. Our house is nearly done, and I am about to become a resident of the suburbs with about an acre of land.

I've been reading about Square Foot Gardening, and it seems like a relatively easy way to go about trying to learn how to grow some food for our table, as well as something to store, and to gain some experience should it all come crashing-down.

So, if one were trying to do this, what would you grow? What would anyone suggest growing?

I don't want to grow a whole bunch of anyone crop, but would like to leanr how to grow a number of things and learn to do it in a manner that I could sustain, should that ever become necessary.

Suggestions?

Summer squash (zuchinni, crookneck) are prolific producers, and their fruit can be put up fairly easily. They will grow in milder climates, and they don't have runners like winter squash, cucumbers or melons do. They are quite bushy. With a family of four, I planted 3 plants one year in Walla Walla, and I had to give away quite a bit because I was filling my freezer with them and we were getting tired of eating them every day.

Carrots are also a good crop. The fruit is durable and stays fresh as long as it stays in the ground through and past the growing season and into winter if you keep them a little insulated. I've pulled carrots out of the ground in December that were crisp and delicious.

Spinach can be prolific in northen climates, especially with lots of nitrogen in the soil. The plants will quickly bolt to 3 feet or more in 30-45 days with a prodigious number of leaves. We used to pull spinach plants out of our garden as a kid every week and mom would have us take them to all our neighbors.

Chard/Kale are good second crop plants, meaning you put them in the garden in places where other plants have been harvested, late season summer, and they will stay viable into the winter. Not quite as durable as carrots, but we've picked Kale in early December, and lots of it.

Pole beans will generate a lot of fruit on a few plants if you have something for them to climb. We got over 50 lbs of fruit off one 12 foot row in one season.

YMMV

Vitamins and nutrients are relatively easy to acquire from wild sources (for me). Long term supply of calories are what I'm aiming for in my survival garden. With this in mind I've focused mainly on dry hard beans (cowpeas and black eyed peas), beets, turnips, sweet potatoes, blackberries, etc... I am currently also growing things like tomatoes and spinach, but only because I have the time/space right now.

I'm considering adding some more planter boxes or fruit trees to grow food for sale/barter.

Square foot gardening is the way to go.

-Blast

try the Native American method. Plant corn in a mound, then plant beans around the cornstalks so that you don't have to use a beanpole. Then plant squash around the beans and corn in the mound. You will have what is supposed to be a fairly balanced diet with those three crops...

The "sqaure foot gardening" method is certainly a viable way to get some crops from a small area... it's essentially another variation of "raised bed" gardening, which can be done on any scale.
Because they can be "roomy" plants when thriving, Tomatoes seem to be missing from most square-foot plots. So, for me personally, that's one thing that I would try to find some separate space for. Search around the web, and you'll see lots of space saving options for growing tomatoes.
But, if you've got an acre lot to work with; finding an area for a few tomato plants will probably not be that difficult.
(of course, this is assuming that you like tomatoes)

Also, I would recommend 2 books to anyone interested in learning more about gardening ... "The Joy of Gardening", by Dick Raymond ... and "Burpee : The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener".
Those are both large books, think "garden bibles", with tons of useful information for gardeners, and gardens of any size.

Best of luck ... nothing tastes better than fresh veggies just-picked from your own garden!

The last time I had a garden was a few years back. I made 2 raised beds out of landscape timbers, they were 1' tall x 12' long x 4' wide. I grew mostly peppers: bell, jalapeno, habanero, cayenne, thai, and serrano. I also grew a few tomato plants. I used most of it for making salsa and hot sauces.

The raised bed system makes it a lot easier in my opinion. And I bought pretty much everything from Burpee. I built a grow-light table so I could start the seeds in February in my basement, then move them outside once it got warmer and have a good head start.

I made the table from 2x4's and plywood and hung 2 - 4' long florescent fixtures from it with swingset chain so the lights could easily be raised or lowered. I used a cheap Walmart timer for the lights to turn them on and off. It worked extremely well with no problems whatsoever, despite how cheap it was to build. I recommend putting 2 or 3 seeds into each hole and culling them back to 1 plant each once they start growing, remove the weakest ones.

Given the climate, you might try big pots too - you can move them in on colder Fall nights and get a few weeks of extra growing time. Strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, peas...to start.

Grow for flavour instead of cost.

You won't ever beat the taste of tomatoes that actually ripened in the garden, or real new potatoes that you can rub the jackets off with your fingers, sweet tender baby carrots from thinning your carrot patch...

I suggest Nantes carrots, Bib lettuce, Bonny Best or Best Boy tomatoes, Lincoln green peas and "Peaches and Cream" sweet corn.

Young beets the size of golf balls or a bit larger cooked with their tops are a treat. (Detroit red or cylindrical beets)
Swiss chard, spinach, mustard and all those other greens.

Yukon gold are good potatoes and so are any of the Pontiac type red potatoes.
For squash I really like the Hubbard and the acorn squash. Don't grow more than 2 plants of black zucchini unless you have recipes for zucchini relish, zucchini cake, zucchini muffins... because zucchini is hard to keep up to.
Hubbards take up a lot of area but they can crawl where they like over a lawn or other wasted space

Don't forget your herbs and spices, fresh basil is a much different thing than the dried stuff.
If you grow chili peppers they make lovely garlands. Sew a strong thread through them and hang them up to dry in the kitchen. Then you just break off what you need when cooking.

Garlic is easy to grow and you store it by braiding the tops into a rope with the bulbs sticking out and hang it up too.

I like berry canes,(rasberry, himalaya blackberry, etc) and strawberry plants. Currant bushes are fast producers too.
Even though they take a few years to produce small fruit trees like Weeping Mulberry, dwarf apple, dwarf cherry are good things if you have the space.

Crops like Rhubarb and Asparagus are easy to keep once they are established, but they should be let grow for two years before you start harvesting them heavily.

Flowers are nice to grow.
Not only will they look nice but some like Nasturtium, Violets, Day lilies and Roses are nice in salads too. (Pluck the white part off the rose petals to avoid bitterness, Nasturtium is the same as Watercress)
Don't forget that squash blossoms can be eaten.

Don't try planting seed from store bought vegetables because most of it is hybrid or carries plant diseases.
Buy Natural or Heirloom seeds and you can save seeds from your own garden to plant the next year.

About weeds. One of the first things up in the spring is Lambs Quarters (Chenopodium alba) and it is a better spinach than spinach is.



I also suggest you look at hazel bushes. They make fairly good hedges and produce hazel nuts.

Maybe I should point you at an edible landscaping site or two.

http://www.ediblelandscapes.ca/

http://ediblelandscaping.ca/

Here is Burpee seeds. They are a noteworthy seed catalog that will give you lots of ideas

http://www.burpee.com/

I am sure your search-fu is good enough to find more.

The problem isn't with suggesting what to grow, it is with suggesting what not to grow.
I would say not to bother with pineapple and coconuts in New York state.

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One last thing is that some plants are for arts and crafts. Things like hardshell gourds, ornamental corn, garlic braids and so on can be quite profitable hobbies.

May I suggest that befor you start planting, go to the Local feed store and ask what would be best in your area. Most of the people I have delt with at feed stores are more than willing to help.

If you have the time, take the master gardener course through your local extension office. My parents have taken it three times in three different states and learned a ton each time. They'll teach you what to row in you area and how to grow it.

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

shouldn't? call me a sourpuss, but you can always use more sour lettuce (ok sour cabbage, never had sour lettuce