One of the great delights of self-sufficiency is to embrace seasonal eating. Even better seasonal eating is a brilliant gateway to the joys of seasonal living. Both feed off each other, help you get closer to nature and our ancestral roots.
It's possible to take another path to self-sufficiency though, one that just involves growing for the freezer and then treating the freezer just as you would the supermarket. That doesn't appeal to us.
We don't like frozen food. We don't like the nutritional degradation, the taste or texture, so we reserve the freezer for exceptional circumstances, normally just emergencies.
If you like frozen food and want to take that route to self-sufficiency, you will still find plenty to like in this book when it comes to the specifics of how to grow vegetables, but the over-arching approach won't be as relevant.
Most of the content related to seasonal eating is already in other chapters, so this chapter will focus on the overall approach, the big picture.
When you grow for self-sufficiency, embrace seasonal eating and eat fresh like we do, you really get close to nature. You get to deeply observe the lifecycle of a plant. Work hard to figure out how and why it grows the way it does, how it responds to temperature, light, day length and wind.
You get to get to watch the weeds, understand more about how disease develops, learn about the pests, when they matter and when they can be ignored.
It's a wonderfully, unexpected side effect of watching your food grow, every day of the year.
When I describe my day to friends and family, it sounds superficially as if I do the same things every day. At one level that's true, because "gardening" or "growing my own food" does indeed feature in most days of the year, but "growing my own food" is so varied an activity that it's really meaningless to use it as a descriptor of an activity, it's almost synonymous with 'living'.
Gardening and eating fresh food, year round, introduces even more variety in life.
Turning a compost bin provides an excellent workout, combined with a fascinating nature study thrown in. Sowing and nurturing seedlings exercises the memory, is excellent for improving fine motor skills and provides a daily dose of delight as I eagerly watch their progress. Planting/interplanting is a wonderfully creative and artistic process as I strive to optimise yield, timing and aesthetics. Each of dozens of daily activities, drawn from a yearly pool of hundreds has it's delights.
Because we don't really like frozen food we've chosen to grow a fresh diet. That means that we blend three strategies: we embrace the intellectual challenge of extending the season for our favourites, we seek out alternatives for favourites when extending the season fails us and we change our diet significantly to suit the season.
This means we are eating a very wide range of different foods. We typically aim for 15-20 fruit and veggies a day, drawn from perhaps 30 a week. What makes up those 30 changes substantially from season to season.
Eating this way involves a lot of indulgence in our favourites when they are available and a lot of anticipation of our first harvests.
Although extending the season is an important part of the way we garden, it's not a big part of our actual diet. We focus mainly on growing what grows best in each season, so as to maximise yield and to grow plants that are at their peak of health and nutritional value.
Eating only what grows best though is boring, this is what farmers do and it naturally results in growing only a few dozen different foods. We find that using simple strategies to extend the season we can more than double the range of produce we can grow and add one or two extra harvests from the same ground.
We love the intellectual challenge of season extension and glory in the early and late harvests that we achieve. We use a few simple strategies: