A bit of background

Many years ago, when I started growing, I bought a lot of gardening books, listened to a lots of podcasts and watched a lot of YouTube videos.  I also walked around my allotment site every day for two years and visited quite a few other allotment sites as well as the great kitchen gardens.  I was trying to develop a good conceptual understanding of gardening, basically how everything fitted together into a complete system.

I ended up quite disappointed.  All too often the people who wrote books had done great research but didn’t themselves have particularly impressive vegetable growing systems and they were rarely self-sufficient, often not even close.  Those that were usually grew in summer and froze most of their winter and spring diet and I had no interest in that. Frozen supermarket veg often tastes better than home frozen veg and yet my main motivation for growing my own was to ditch the supermarket experience of food.

I did find some inspirational YouTube growers, who had great plots and grew great fruit and veg, but they didn’t document their systems, or their focus was on growing big veg for shows, rather than a year round fresh food diet.

Occasionally I would find a homesteader who inspired me, but they were often spending 60 hours a week gardening and I only wanted to spend 10-15!

In the end I got most of my inspiration from market gardeners, who did have systems, but then after watching them for a few years I noticed that they were all burning out, due to the pressure, or they basically lived to garden.  They also grew for market, rather than to eat and that turns out to be very different to the way I wanted to grow.

My objective was to grow 30-40 different – mostly fresh – fruits and vegetables for every week of the year, feed my big family and still have plenty of time left over for my other hobbies and responsibilities.  No market gardeners were doing that, they were growing just a handful of veggies each month, basically just the ones that grew best in each season.  The veg box growers were better, but they stopped production in October and didn’t start again until May,  I wanted to eat between October and May, so that wasn’t much help.

I decided I needed to educate myself and start with the basics of gardening and work towards my goals through personal experiment and lots of discussions with expert gardeners,  I also took a lot of inspiration from the Victorian kitchen gardeners at the great houses and the French market gardeners of old, who grew year round.

After about a year I realised that I was putting in a lot of effort creating information that would be very useful for others and if I put in an extra 1-2 hours a week I could share it.

The rest of this article describes the complete system that I came up with.

My most important guiding principles

I used to be a strategist so I started with the principles that would guide my approach:

1. I am never going to be the best grower, the most entertaining presenter, or the best writer, I just don’t have the time, talent or personality (I’m mildly autistic) to achieve any of these. What I am trying to be is a good guide to efficient year round self-sufficiency. I’m also trying hard to not cannibalise anyone else’s business
2. I won’t be subsidising my gardening with my content creation revenue, or working every hour of the day, so I won’t be creating a beautiful show garden that no one else can achieve, everything I do will be funded from savings in the food bill and just a couple of days a week of work
3. My main focus won’t be content creation, it will be feeding my large family and a few friends any content created needs to spring forth from practical growing experience
4. The kids don’t want a random bag of low quality, unwashed, slug infested veg each week, so I’m trying to provide them with a ‘better than supermarket’ experience, every week of the year. Better tasting, healthier, more variety, seasonal and low carbon food
5. Consistency is key when growing a fresh food diet, I want about 30-40 different fruits and veggies every week of the year. We will freeze a little and make preserves, but 80% of our diet will be fresh
6. I don’t have much time, so I need to be organised, I spend on average 12 hours a week gardening, Debbie spends a lot less. So for each person we feed we spend less than an hour a week. That said only Debbie and I are 99% self-sufficient in veg and seasonal fruit
7. I’m an 80/20 gardener, trying to find the 20% of activities that deliver 80% of the harvest and ignoring the rest, in other words, I like to be efficient and I don’t have any interest in being perfect