If you are looking for a sustainable garden that can feed you and your family then you need to know what plants to grow in an intensive garden!
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This post is part of a new mini-training series! I’m passionate to help people grow organic food at home and have food security. You can join over 20,000 people who listen to the Homesteading & Gardening In The Suburbs Podcast and listen to this post by clicking play below or read on to learn more.
How to convert your garden to an intensive one
One of the wonderful things about gardening is that you can change how you grow whenever you decide to! There is such a huge diversity of seeds available and one of the key pieces of an intensive garden and a self-sufficient garden is to have a food supply that is independent. Independent from the grocery store and even independent from buying from seed suppliers each year.
How do we do this? By growing open-pollinated seeds.
Open-pollinated seeds mean you can have a continuous supply of food. You can save these seeds year after year and keep growing food.
Open-pollinated seeds are those, if properly isolated from other varieties in the same plant species, will produce seed that will result in a plant very similar to the parent.
Seeds
Growing open-pollinated seeds helps to encourage insect pollinators and biodiversity into your garden. We want these to visit the garden often to help with managing pests and of course pollinating the flowers to improve yields. I encourage you to grow heirlooms, open-pollinated and organic seeds in your garden so that you can see what grows best for you and your garden. Seeds produced organically are used to low inputs and are great for adapting to local climates.
Some of my favorite seed suppliers are:
- Restoration Seeds
- Giving Ground Seeds
- Adaptive Seeds
- Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
- Ferry-Morse
- Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
- Territorial Seeds
- Delectation of Tomatoes
- High Mowing Seeds
- Seed Savers Exchange
Check the catalog or the online descriptions carefully. They will identify if the seed is an heirloom or open-pollinated variety. If it says F1 or hybrid, these are not GMO seeds but if you save seeds from these then the plants that grow from them will not be anything like the parent plant that you saved the seed from. You want to save seeds from non-hybrid plants to take the next step in sustainable gardening. These plants are open-pollinated varieties.
Becoming self-sufficient
One of the best benefits of growing open-pollinated varieties is saving the seeds. There’s such a lot of history and diversity in seeds and the overall health of our food system relies on this diversity.
We are losing the genetic diversity of our seeds and if you are fortunate enough to see old seed catalogs from the early 1900s, you will see that nearly all of them are no longer available. They have been lost.
How did we lose seed diversity?
Loss of seeds is partly due to centralization as companies come in and buy out smaller companies, plant varieties are dropped if they are not commercially viable (such as harvesting on an industrial scale), or trendy and popular with home gardeners. Other causes are singular locations that are growing those crops geographically, legislation changes such as utility patents, loss of skills.
The skill loss is an interesting reason we’re losing seed diversity. Once farmers and gardeners always saved seeds from their garden and fields to grow again in the following years. Once seeds were passed on in a family to steward and maintain. One look at an heirloom seed supplier will show wonderful names like Auntie Ida’s bean or Cairns Family rutabaga for example. The seed has a story behind it and has been valued and cared for by each generation. My grandparents and parents taught me how to save seeds and what an amazing skill it is to know!
Knowing how to save seeds and growing your own seeds means you can sidestep vulnerability and have thriving food security.
Now you know what sort of seeds you are needing to look for, let’s talk about the plants you want to be growing in your intensive garden.
What to grow in an intensive garden
An intensive garden will need to grow calorie crops, plants to provide vitamins and minerals, and plants to manage the health of the soil.
Growing calories
Your intensive garden is going to be feeding you and your family so make sure you grow the plants that you like to eat! I know it seems simple but often when we’re reading about methods of growing feed we can very easily wind up growing the things in the book just because they are in there! There’s no point in growing a garden bed of sunchokes or beans if you hate eating them. Sure they’re full of calories and nutrients your body needs but if you hate to eat them, give them a pass! Grow what you love to eat.
What is a calorie crop?
A calorie crop is simply a crop that provides lots of calories. These are usually grains like corn, wheat, barley, rice, or staples like potatoes. There are other crops that have more calories like onions, sunchokes, and garlic but you might not want to be eating those in large quantities!
So where do you go when you are looking for info about calorie crops? John Jeavon’s book How to Grow More Vegetables, (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land with Less Water Than You Can Imagine
Growing vitamins and minerals
It’s true that calorie crops also contain vitamins and minerals. Fruits, vegetables, and herbs contain different levels of vitamins like vitamin A, or one of the B vitamins for example. Your garden needs to grow a variety of edible plants to provide your body with the vitamins and minerals it needs. You want to grow things you like to eat of course! Sure kale is loaded with nutritional benefits but if you hate eating it don’t grow it!
Some examples of plants and the vitamins and minerals they contain are
- Collard greens have vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and vitamin B6.
- Winter squash has vitamins A, C, and B6, iron, magnesium, and potassium.
- A humble beet is packed with folate, manganese, iron, vitamin C, and potassium.
- Mushrooms that are grown outside or exposed to sunlight provide vitamin D.
Grow different types of fruits and vegetables and different colors to get a variety of vitamins and minerals.
Growing compost
Now, this probably sounds weird. Growing compost? You make compost Emma not grow it! Well in these intensive gardening techniques used in victory gardens and in farming practices long before that, compost was made on-site and not brought in from somewhere else. If you have listened to my composting podcasts before then you might remember me talking about greens and browns or nitrogen and carbon materials.
Growing compost is really capturing carbon from the atmosphere in plants that then become the carbon source or the brown materials for the compost heap. This helps to keep your garden self-sufficient because those stalks and trimmings, kitchen scraps, etc are all going into your compost to help fuel the garden soil.
What crops are good for compost?
Compost crops produce biomass. They grow big and tall capturing lots of carbon. Grain crops and grass family crops like corn, sorghum, and broomcorn are good examples. You eat the grain and the stalks can get chopped and added to the compost bin.
Learn More
This post is part of a mini-training series. Click the links below to take you to the next training.
Double Digging and Soil Improvement
Cover Crops
Integrated Pest Management
Training not live yet? Check out some related posts below:
- How Can You Help Keep Seeds Patent Free?
- Tips For A Thriving Seed Bank
- Landrace Gardening
- The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Right Seeds To Grow In Your Garden
I want to hear from you! Let me know what you are planning to grow! What are your calorie crops? Your favorite nutrition plants and what is your compost crop? Let me know in the comments or over in the Facebook Group!
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