Planning a homestead garden can feel like a daunting task! We want to design gardening systems that help us obtain a yield of fruits and veggies but we don’t always feel like we know enough to accomplish that goal. Here are some practical tips and troubleshooting for applying simple permaculture principles to increasing homestead garden harvests – get started right away!
I need to start this article by managing expectations! The topic of homestead garden planning and increasing harvests is a HUGE umbrella. One article cannot possibly answer every question or contain every element you and I need to understand in order to grow our own food. At some point, you just have to stop typing!
Which is fine because a homesteader’s garden education should be robust and varied. It should also be continuing – we’re never done learning about how to obtain a yield on the homestead.
The following discussion is meant to introduce important elements to designing a productive homestead garden and to encourage brainstorming on those elements. Further resources and reading are included.
We’ve also given you a challenge at the very end, sort of like homework, to internalize what we’ve talked about. If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to steer you in the right direction.
Let’s get started!
Increase Homestead Garden Harvests
For homesteaders, gardening isn’t just a cool hobby. The homestead garden is a major element of our quest to create a self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle.
Even those homesteaders who feel like their thumb isn’t the greenest, realize that plants play a vital role on a healthy homestead!
One of the best ways, in my opinion, to understand the role of the garden, the importance of intelligent homestead organization, and how to increase homestead garden harvests is to learn all we can about a design/lifestyle methodology called permaculture.
To help homesteaders understand permaculture a little better, I’ve broken down the main permaculture points and translated them into homesteader-speak. (If you’ve come up against a point you’re still trying to figure out, just leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to help!)
This article is the third in a series detailing the twelve principles of permaculture and how they apply to and are relevant to homesteading. Today’s article is on the third principle of permaculture which is obtaining a yield.
A Few More Helpful Permaculture Articles
A Short Introduction to Permaculture
How to Create a Permaculture Homestead Layout
Understanding Permaculture Zones on the Homestead
Permaculture Principle #3 – Obtain a Yield from the Homestead Garden
Every gardener understands the principle of obtaining a yield – it’s the whole reason we plant year after year! We take the time to design and implement a well thought out homestead garden in order to obtain a yield that will feed our family in the short and long term.
Since we know that homestead gardens often result in an overabundance of harvest on occasion, our garden designs include plans for what to do with surplus so it doesn’t go to waste. This can include learning how to preserve food (dehydrating or canning, for example) and sharing zucchini with our neighbors.
The goal of the homestead garden is to produce as much as possible. Any surplus can be:
- sold to improve our situation
- traded for goods or services
- used to grow the homestead
- shared with others
I like to keep my future harvests in mind – envision them, plan for them, clap my hands in glee over them. This dreaming keeps me motivated when garden disasters like early cucumber beetles and late frost make me want to throw up my hands and give up on the garden!
If you’ve struggled to grow food, or even if you feel like you know what you’re doing in the garden, the following information will be worth considering. All systems, including the homestead garden, can be improved upon!
Understand Annuals & Perennials for Planting & Scheduling Harvests
If you’re designing a homestead garden from scratch, you will have a very simple time putting your yields on a schedule. Harvests will be determined by when you plant each plant. This is true whether that refers to the time of year or which year you get them into the ground.
If you’re working with an existing garden, or trying to revive and old homestead, you will still be able to see how the harvests progress. Generally speaking, the larger the plant, the longer it will take to come into fruit.
For Example:
- A head of lettuce (an annual plant) can be grown from seed and be ready to harvest within about three months.
- However, an apple tree (a perennial plant) is planted one year and then must be tended for a further 3-5 years before it begins to put off any kind of measurable harvest.
Why?
Because an apple tree is a much more complex – or you could say “larger” – system than a humble lettuce plant. The lettuce knows in its genetics that it will only be there during the growing season. Once the frost comes, it will die.
Consequently, the lettuce plant spends its lifespan trying to create seed that will perpetuate its genetics. We gather our lettuce seed every year and plant them again in the following spring. This is how the lettuce plant ensures its survival.
An apple tree, on the other hand, puts down an intense and expansive root system in its first few years of life. It knows its a tree and that it will be around for decades.
The apple tree doesn’t have time or energy to spend on fruit the first few years because it’s too busy growing its root system so it can stand for years, even generations to come! (You can usually tell a perennial plant by its extensive root system.)
Perennial vines and bushes are somewhere in the middle of the lettuce plant and the apple tree. They do have more robust root systems than lettuce which take some time to develop, but they’re smaller in stature and come into fruit quicker than an apple tree.
Put the Harvests on a Schedule
Bottom line, as you begin to think about designing the homestead garden for the most abundant yields, you’ll need to understand which annuals and which perennials you want to grow.
You also need to be realistic about when they’ll be planted and when you might look forward to a harvest.
When you start working with a homestead garden, you begin with annual crops like lettuce and radishes that grow easily and pretty much anywhere. In fact, you don’t even need a garden to grow these veggies.
- Here are 4 Annual Crops to Grow in Containers to get you started.
A few pots on your porch will work just fine while you finish moving in. Starting a new homestead is stressful, so take it easy with these annual veggies the first year.
They will give you time to observe, think about, and intelligently design the homestead garden to come. As Bloom and Boehnlein remind us in the fabulous Practical Permaculture,
Our systems should start yielding early in their development and continue to increase yields as they grow until they reach maturity.”
Plan the Harvests Further
Your next garden planting and yields might come in these steps:
- A raised bed or two in the homestead garden that includes a mix of annual veggie plants like tomatoes and lettuce, and even a few select perennials like rosemary and horseradish. (To be accurate, tomato plants are perennials in their native habitat even though most of us grow them as annuals.) These next step garden spaces should include your favorite veggies – the ones you know will grow and that everyone will actually eat! You will obtain a yield from these the year you plant them.
- The next harvests might come from perennial veggies that you’ve started to place around the homestead in plant guilds or food forests. Plants like rhubarb, asparagus, walking onions, sorrel, and even garlic can be incorporated around the homestead anywhere plants are growing. These plants take at least one, sometimes two or more, seasons to start producing a measurable harvest.
- When you’re ready, add in perennial fruit bushes like blueberry and currant. Also,native flowering and perennial fruiting bushes like gooseberry and aronia are wonderful assets in the homestead garden because they’re hardy and often disease resistant. Not to mention, their fruit is delicious!
- About that same time, you might decide to put in fruiting vines like grape and hardy kiwi. These small bushes and fruiting vines start producing harvestable fruit with a few years, as opposed to fruit trees that can take 3-5 (or more) years to come into production.
Harvests That Come More Slowly
Take time the first or second year to plant fruit tree guilds (including nuts) as soon as you can possibly prepare the ground for them. These larger perennial plants are amazing assets on the homestead but, as I mentioned, they take 3-5 years (longer for standard sized trees) to start producing fruit.
For this reason, get them into the ground as soon as you can and plan for harvests in the years to come. Be sure to include their maintenance like pruning into your homestead schedule. Take some time to help them build a good foundation of growth and health, and then watch for those first years of harvestable fruit.
Now you might be able to turn your attention to growing mushrooms or specialty crops that require a greenhouse. In my climate, this might include figs and citrus.
These take more attention, so we’re not usually ready to take care of them in the first five years of establishing a homestead garden unless they’re already a special hobby. This will vary by homesteader, of course.
(After moving homesteads over five times, I’ve learned what I can handle taking care of and what I can’t in the first few years!)
A few more years out from your initial homestead garden plans might see harvests of nuts and firewood or coppice wood.
To learn more about planting fruit and nut trees with other useful plants surrounding them – AKA Fruit Tree Guilds – grab your copy of this short Fruit Tree Guild Printable Booklet. Simply join our newsletter and you will be sent these sheets to print off and put into your homesteading journal for further planning the homestead garden.
Remember, fruit trees serve multiple purposes on the homestead – they’re not only for fruit!
A Word of Caution About Homestead Garden Planting Stress
Though we can easily see how much a homestead garden can produce when we think of it in the long term, it’s important not to get ahead of ourselves.
It is NOT “good homesteading” to try to do too much, too soon. This short-sighted practice is based on fear and panic, which are never a good foundation for anything lasting.
You and I mustn’t waste time, but neither can we run faster than we have strength. Or in other words, we can’t plant faster than we can design our homestead garden and prepare the ground.
By all means, we should save our pennies to purchase those fruit trees and figure out into which area (or permaculture zone) we’d like to plant them. We need to prepare that area as soon passible and work hard to get them planted.
However, we shouldn’t waste our energy worrying, over-extending, over-exerting, and otherwise freaking out about getting everything done at once. We can’t do it all and we certainly can’t do it all at once.
Breathe deeply. Budget well. Design intelligently.
And then trust that nature, your homestead family, you, and your homestead garden will work it all out in time. Things have a way of working out.
Trust the process.
What Do You Like to Eat?
The simple fact of the matter is that, if you don’t like certain veggies and fruits, you’re not going to eat them. It makes no sense to try to grow these, at least at first.
(It often happens that as we grow a fabulous homestead garden, our tastes change and we discover we actually like a lot of produce that we didn’t before.)
Make a list of fruits and vegetables you and your family enjoy…
- eating fresh
- having on hand dehydrated or freeze dried
- spreading over toast in the form or jam or jelly
- throwing together for quick meals as home-canned foods
Don’t worry about whether you can grow anything on your list for right now; just jot down what you like.
Be sure to get your family’s input!
Start Planning the Homestead Garden by Stacking Functions
With your list in hand, you’ll need to start figuring out what will grow on your homestead. You also need to think about which plants will be the most useful to you.
To do this effectively, one of the first things we need to consider is selecting food producing plants that serve more than one function. In permaculture, we call this stacking functions, which refers to the many harvests that can be gleaned from even one plant.
A pumpkin vine is a very visual example of the many yields that can be obtained from one plant.
- Pumpkin vines have very large, sheltering leaves that shade the soil and block the growth of weeds.
- That shade also cools the soil which helps prevent moisture loss.
- Flowers from a pumpkin vine are showy and bright, providing beauty and attracting pollinators to the garden.
- Pumpkin flowers and fruit are both edible.
- Canning, dehydrating, freezing drying, and eating fresh are all easy to do with the pumpkin harvest.
- Pumpkins can even be grow in a large pot and trellised to save space in a smaller garden.
- The vines of the pumpkin plant grow prolifically and can provide a lot of biomass for the compost pile or as garden forage for goats.
A Broader Homestead Example
The goal for designing an entire permaculture homestead should be the same – you can obtain multiple yields from one homestead element all over your land.
Here’s another homestead example:
- Chickens lay eggs to eat.
- They also provide meat to eat.
- Chickens likewise scratch and lightly till whatever soil they’re on…
- Where they also consume bugs and grubs which provides pest control.
- As if that’s not enough, they poop out usable refuse that can be composted to feed the garden soil.
- An added bonus is that chickens will eat nearly anything, including your kitchen waste – they’ll even process it into compost for you!
Homestead Garden Example of Stacking Functions
The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited – the limit is the imagination. Keep finding new uses and spaces.”
-Bill Mollison, from Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (1988)
Remember our pumpkin example from the section above? This is what stacking functions means – one element of a design (in this case, a pumpkin plant) achieving multiple goals or purposes.
Here’s another example that is more spatial: a garden.
One Homestead Garden can:
- Be a source of food
- Serve as a teaching space for children, families, and the community
- Be a source of income or trade
- Be a storage “facility” for water, sunshine, and nutrients in the soil
- Be a place of peace and gathering for family and friends
Take More Notes
Here’s a short exercise to keep brainstorming these ideas.
- Take some time and jot down ideas about the plants you already know how to grow. If you’re new to gardening, write down the ones you’d like to grow and eat. You’ll learn more as you go, never fear!
- Write down all the yields you can think of for each. If you can’t come up with much, try a quick Internet search and see what other homesteaders are doing with these plants.
- Draw a few sketches with your house at the center. Where might you put these gardens? Think about where the sunlight lands on your property but don’t be too hung up on details. Draw where you’d like to put these plants – will you be able to access them easily? Sketch several different plans.
- Tuck these notes into your homestead journal and think about them for a few days. Come back and update them as you think of new ideas.
Know Your Growing Zone
After you’ve started thinking about what you want to eat and which will be the most useful plants to grow, it’s time to start some preliminary planning and design work.
It’s important to start with learning what will grow in your climate, aka your growing zone. In the US, the USDA has generated what’s called a growing zone map. This shows the high and low temperatures for each area and places them into categories known as growing zones.
FYI, these maps should be interpreted with a grain of salt – they’re not gospel, and they’re often not accurate for your specific area. For one thing, these maps can’t account for areas where winter temperatures all of sudden get very low and then spike to warm back up.
These fluctuations can cause significant damage to a plant if we haven’t planned accordingly by planting well for our growing zone, plus a covering a few others. Let me clarify.
How to Accurately Determine Your Zone
I’m technically in growing zone 6 but my winter temps can plummet to zone 4, though they don’t stay there for long. Just long enough to damage any plant not able to grow in zone 4!
Consequently, when I purchase or propagate perennial plants for the homestead, I always get those which are rated to survive in zone 4 whenever possible. Bare minimum, I get those that can survive zone 5.
After that, I plant intelligently, mulch heavily, and wait to see which plants survive. My area of the US is sort of like Hunger Games, but for plants.
Since this is a tiny part of a larger discussion, I suggest you go read our article Planting Zones: Understand Climate and Microclimates if you’re new to the idea of planting zones. (FYI, these shouldn’t be confused with permaculture zones, which we mention later and are equally important.)
If you’d like even more information, or you learn better with a course, my friend Angi at Schneider Peeps created a course on growing zone for homestead gardeners that I can recommend.
Ensuring All Kinds of Homestead Garden Harvests – A Recap
Nothing is better at creating abundant harvests than good design, however, here are some other things to think about for increasing our yields. Most of these will be reminders from our discussion today.
Some Ways We Increase Garden Harvests & Obtain a Yield:
- Make obtaining a yield a consistent goal. Everything on the homestead should be focused on this.
- Be elastic in our definition of abundance – it can look different for different people in different situations.
- Design each element to serve multiple purposes, or stack functions.
- Teach others, especially our children, these principles to ensure that the yield continues into the future.
- Harvest, use, share, and preserve all the yields so that as little as possible goes unused and to have provision against a day of want.
- Keep your systems simple and effective whether they’re in the garden or the kitchen or the barn.
- Grow plants that are appropriate for your growing zone and climate so that they will produce and thrive in your area.
- Study only the best resources and books so that your educational efforts yield the most reward for your investment of time.
The rewards are endless and can bless our home and broader community. They are so many positive outcomes from the homestead garden that they’re hard to quantify!
As a reminder, be sure that you are being nourished by the process, not just the end result of growing food. At its heart, a permaculture homestead should feed the souls of the family that lives there, not simply their bodies.
Homestead Garden Challenge for Obtaining a Yield
Here’s a simple activity that should help you get grounded in your local garden environment.
- Grab your nature journal and a pen and go outside to the areas around your home.
- Find a patch of something growing that wasn’t planted by you. These are plants that grow wild, or native, in your area.
- Make a note of what kind of plants are there – write down their names, if you know them. Sketch a picture if you’re not sure what they are.
Are there any plants that can be used by you for food, mulch, medicine, or otherwise? Get a foraging guide for your area to help you identify these wild plants.
Also, use the internet to search out topics like “uses for weeds” and “uses for herbs”.
Remember, these plants are native plants, or ones that grow naturally in your area. They are intrinsically adapted to live in your climate and growing zone, as well as typically being disease and pest resistant.
Do an Internet search or consult your local agricultural college/master gardener group to discover other native plants. If you have a botanical garden or conservation garden with a website, they may have a native plant database for your area online.
Look For Native Plants That Are:
- Flowering and fruiting bushes and trees.
- Native herbal plants.
- Nut trees, hedges/bushes.
- Nitrogen fixers – plants that pull nitrogen out of the air and store it in nodules on their roots to make the soil healthy.
- Habitat plants that shelter beneficial wildlife like insect eating birds.
- Woody plant that can be grow for coppice or firewood.
- Plants that will grow in standing water, dry areas, shady spots, or any other challenging microclimate you might have on your homestead.
- Species that prevent erosion or can be used as windbreaks.
- Plants that were used by Native American tribes – be sure to write down how they used the plants.
Plants are such versatile and useful things!
As you begin your homestead garden planning, be sure to incorporate as many of these hardy natives as you can in your designs. They will provide your garden with a solid framework that will serve your homestead into the future – far beyond this season’s lettuce harvest.
You can plant them in and amongst your vegetables, flower & butterfly gardens, with your fruit trees, and anywhere else you’re growing something on the homestead.
What Should I Grow in My Homestead Garden?
The type of plants you put into your homestead garden is determined by your garden goals.
- Are you interested in growing vegetables?
- What about fruits and nuts?
- Would you like to attract pollinator insects?
- Do you have shady spots that you’d like to cultivate?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then that will help determine where your homestead garden focus should be. Decorative flowers and a green lawn can be so lovely, but my main focus as a homesteader is to produce as much of my own food as possible.
However, while I do focus on food producing plants, I incorporate flowers, herbs, and native grasses everywhere I can to create what in permaculture parlance are called plant guilds. Plant guilds are collections of plants put in the homestead garden to help support each other.
To quote from our article, “Create a Vegetable Plant Guild“,
So, a plant guild is a collection of plants that all work together to support and care for each other, as well as the soil in which they grow. Often, each plant will often serve multiple functions in the eco-system of the guild, and even in the larger garden and homestead.
Like those that occur in nature, most often around trees, a plant guild is very self sufficient because it provides for it’s own nutrient needs, keeps its own growing medium rich, and even provides food and shelter for critters and humans.
In essence, you should grow plants that produce food and/or perform another useful function on the homestead. Since all plants sequester carbon, hold water in the soil, and promote microscopic beneficial soil life, pretty much EVERY plant serves a useful purpose. (Except maybe Bermuda grass. Grrr.)
So, do all the exercises mentioned in this article to narrow down the list of possible plants!
How Big Should a Homestead Garden Be?
A homestead isn’t any particular size; I know some people who homestead in apartments and others who have acres and acres of land. Ideally, a homestead garden should be big enough to feed the family that lives on the homestead with a little leftover to share with others.
I think managing the size of a homestead garden takes a lot of thought and good design whether you have lots of land or only a balcony!
Before you can make wise decisions about what your homestead garden should look like, you’ll need to get an accurate idea of what your homestead looks like.
- Where are the buildings?
- How does the sun fall during the day?
- Where will your garden equipment be stored?
- How close to the house can you locate your garden?
To help you answer these questions, I suggest you read and go through the exercises in the following articles:
- Draw a Base Map of Your Homestead – this helps you get an accurate idea of where everything is on the homestead.
- Understand Permaculture Zones on the Homestead – this is helpful for organizing where your gardens should go.
As you process through this information and do the exercises included in the articles, the size and shape of the homestead garden will begin to naturally emerge.
I encourage you to think of the homestead garden as any space that can support plant life. Any space.
Not just the veggie garden beds in the backyard or the fruit trees in the orchard. Anywhere and everywhere can be considered the homestead garden if it will grow a plant.
More Permaculture Homestead Garden Resources
More Permaculture Homestead Garden Resources
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Don’t forget to install a greenhouse. Organic vegetables will improve your health. Protected soil will yield much more than open beds. For greenhouses you can use polyethylene film, glass, but better – polycarbonate. It is much stronger than glass, flexible, transparent, and has good thermal insulation.
Thanks so much for stopping by, Emilia!
Greenhouses do have multiple wonderful uses on the homestead! For those who can afford them, there are many varieties from which to choose, too. Not everyone is comfortable using plastic products, but for those who are, polycarbonate is a good choice. Walapini-type greenhouses can reduce the amount of plastic needed, too, by using the earth as the primary insulation material.