Two posts back, after a friend imagined Mike and me living
indefinitely off our backyard garden during the COVID-19 lockdown, I promised
to dig more deeply into why that idea is mistaken. Basically it comes down to
three interrelated issues: seasonality, space, and opportunity costs. In this
post I will examine how these three factors affect the possibilities and reflect the limitations of
backyard gardens.
Before I begin, please do not get the idea that I am dismissing
backyard gardens! If I did not recognize the continuing value of my own garden
to Mike and me, I would not be gardening. At the same time, thinking that all
you need to have is a few packages of seed, a shovel, and a gardening book and
you will grow more than you can eat whenever you think you will need to is misguided
at best and dangerous at worst.
Let’s start with seasonality, because the timing of the
COVID-19 pandemic brought that to the forefront of my mind when I read my
friend’s comment. In St. Louis County, MO, where Mike and I live, restrictions to
the size of gatherings began to be applied in early March, with the fullest
extent of the lockdown going into effect on March 23. The first stage of
re-opening began on May 18.
At the time the first COVID-19 restrictions began, Mike and
I had no vegetables or fruits from the garden left to eat, except for some
garlic. Everything else had already been eaten, with about a month to go before
I could plant anything in the garden, and about two months before the first
significant harvest, of strawberries, would begin. It is only since mid-July
that we are eating garden vegetables at every meal, with enough extra to make
some pickles and tomato sauce for later (though we did have a few weeks of
salads and some bok choy and cabbage for stir-fries in June). For about three
weeks or so from mid-May through early June we ate strawberries every day and
made 2 gallons of strawberry wine and about a quart or so of strawberry cordial
from what we couldn’t eat, but except for a handful of apricots and a couple of
pounds of peaches we haven’t had any meaningful amount of
fruit from the garden since early June. That will change in August, but please
pay close attention to these long time lags during which we had no fresh fruits
or vegetables from the garden. Notice that we are talking not days, not even
weeks, but months.
This is the problem of seasonality. In a climate with a
long, cold winter there will be months that go by when an open garden has
nothing to harvest in it. If a gardener can store some of their harvest then
the time when food starts running low is delayed somewhat, but there is a
reason that the phrase “six weeks’ want” is associated with the transition to
early spring, as this was traditionally about the time when the stored vegetables
and fruits ran out or spoiled in the warming weather. Because of the time lag
in the growing season between planting seeds or seedlings and harvesting, and
because harvest ends months before it can begin again, gardeners in cold-winter
climates will be eating mostly fruits and vegetables that farmers grew for at
least several weeks before their own gardens begin producing again. This is the inevitable result of the compromises I and all gardeners
must make between seasonality, garden size, and opportunity costs.
Suppose you live in a cold-winter climate and are
determined to minimize the issue of seasonality. You could grow more food so
you can store some of it, for instance. How could you grow more food to store?
You could increase the size of the garden, but only if you have the space to do
so, and only if you have time, not just to tend to the increased garden size,
but also time to put up some of the foods that you grew (the opportunity costs
I mentioned, because you’ll have to not do something else in order to garden or
to put up pickles or tomato sauce). Or you might decide to
freeze some of the crop, but you’ll need to find the time to prepare and freeze
it, and if you don’t already have enough freezer space, you’ll need to get a freezer. That’s another kind of opportunity
cost, because you can’t spend the money on something else if you spend it on a
freezer, plus you’ll need to pay the cost of the electricity to run the freezer
(and what happens if the electricity shuts off?). Or you could store some fresh
produce in a root cellar or a smaller-scale version of a root cellar such as a
buried cooler, but again you’ll have to increase the size of the garden to grow
the extra produce, and you’ll have to improvise a storage system like our
anteroom, or use space in a cool closet, a basement, or your living areas
(Carol Deppe stores squashes in her living areas, and I store them under a
table in our living room), or perhaps fashion your own root cellar. Even then,
when the ground begins to warm in early spring, in March here, I have found
that anything I still have stored deteriorates rapidly. Or you could cover part
or all of your outdoor garden so you can harvest something in the winter, but
again space and opportunity costs will limit what you can do in a backyard
situation. My experience with cold frames and the front porch suggests that to
get a substantial amount of food you will need a lot of covered space, and
you’ll have more pest problems in a covered space than you will in an open
garden. So these three interrelated factors will determine how much of your
vegetable and fruit harvest you can store, and it is almost certainly going to
be a lot less than you think if you have a standard-sized urban or suburban backyard
garden, nowhere near enough to get you into the following summer.
You can partially mitigate the six weeks’ want by adding
grain and dry bean crops to your garden. Even though Mike and I were out of
fresh garden food (except for garlic) by March, we had over 45 pounds of stored
flour corn and at least 10 pounds of stored popcorn to eat, representing harvests from the previous few years. I also grow blackeyed peas as a
dry bean crop most years, although I didn’t grow any in 2019. One of the best
ways to use these crops, since they can be stored for a few to several years,
is to hold them in reserve until the winter squash and root crops, like
potatoes and turnips, have been eaten. Then start eating the grains and beans,
supplementing them with whatever you may have frozen, canned, or dried, plus
the earliest leafy greens from the garden (sorrel, spinach, asparagus) or
foraged from the yard or elsewhere (dandelions), until you begin to get enough
of the salad and cabbage-family greens to eat a real salad. Still, to do this
you’ll need to devote a significant amount of garden space to grains and to the
dry beans, because they do not yield as heavily as most vegetables or fruits on
a square-foot basis. Besides that, you’ll also need to grow enough grain plants
for sufficient genetic diversity for seed-saving if you plan to do that, and
enough of both for replanting as well as eating. Plus there is an opportunity
cost not just for growing the plants but also for the time you’ll spend in
processing them to a state in which you can cook them and in the equipment
required to grind the grain.
In the next post I will describe how I have balanced these
three factors – seasonality, space, and opportunity cost – in my own garden,
and how that balance has changed over the years. By giving you a real-world
example I hope to make the general principles I’ve discussed here easier to
apply in your own gardening efforts. Till then, I wish you well.
