We Maxed Out Our Half Acre (Here's Everything We Planted)

This is our most ambitious garden year yet. We are growing food for our family and food for our animals on less than half an acre of growing space. Is it even possible? We're going to find out. Before I show you what we planted, I want to show you how we prepared this ground, because this year something was very different. Last fall, after the crops finished, we ordered 20 Cornish cross chickens and grazed them in tractors over this entire field for two months. They ate every weed, they fertilized the soil, then we harvested those birds in December and covered the field with a tarp again to keep any weeds from sprouting through the winter. When we pulled that tarp off this spring, the soil was darker than I can ever remember seeing it. Having meat birds fertilize the previous year's garden was the best thing we ever did to this ground. Then we raked the rows into clean beds and started planting. That right there is a closed loop system. The chickens feed us, their presence feeds the soil, and the soil feeds the next year's garden, and nothing gets wasted. Six years ago, I created this large garden area by laying a 40 foot by 100 foot tarp over the grass to kill it. That established our 4,000 square foot garden. I brought in compost and built my first rows. Over time, I expanded it to closer to 5,000 square feet after clearing more of the wooded edges of the land, and this year we're using almost every inch of it. Starting in the main field, we planted broccoli early this spring, and because of the extended cold and wet spring, this might actually be the first year we get a real spring broccoli harvest. I really hope it doesn't get hot too fast, because I'd hate to see these bolt right before we get to eat them. We have potatoes in here too. Last year, we planted 60 pounds of seed potatoes and harvested more than we needed. The big lesson wasn't growing them, it was storing them. They got too much light and sprouted early, so we just used those sprouted potatoes as seed potatoes this spring, and we didn't have to buy any. Green beans are going in between these two rows of potatoes. I think that'll work well in between two heavy feeding crops. Carrots we planted back in March, and they look great, but they could use some thinning so they can fill out, but we've been missing carrots and didn't grow nearly enough last year. We will plant another row of carrots for the fall too. And then I randomly planted squash and pumpkins and watermelons at the ends of a few rows. I honestly don't remember what I planted where, so whenever they start producing, it'll be a fun surprise. In the center of this area, which is about 2,000 square feet here, I'm planting six rows of corn. This is a dent variety for the chickens and the ducks, and here's what I'm really excited about. I planted different colors and different varieties, and I'm hoping they'll all cross-pollinate and create a really unique colorful corn you can't find in stores. An animal feed that nobody else has. The back half of this plot is entirely for the chickens and the ducks. Different varieties of tall sunflowers and amaranth. I just planted pole beans to climb those stalks since now they're tall enough, but it was a struggle because I think I waited a bit too long, and some of these sunflowers I planted here are already so tall, it was hard to maneuver my earthway cedar past them. Last year, I planted each bean by hand at the base of each sunflower and corn stalk, but this year I wanted to use my cedar so planting is easier on my back. Last year, I proved pole beans climb sunflower stalks even better than corn. It's going to be so beautiful back here in just a few months, and I planted some really unique varieties of sunflowers here, and I'm really curious to see how tall they get because some of them can grow to mammoth sizes. And here's the thing about all of this. People think you need acres to homestead. You don't. You need a plan, and you need to use every inch you have. Our front raised bed garden is the original space. It's what my book is based on. I haven't done a great job weeding this area lately, but it's still producing. I'm growing mostly onions in these beds right now. I made the mistake of planting raspberries too close to the raised beds, and they keep sprouting inside these raised beds. It's a losing battle, I know. The middle row under the trellis, I'm planting tomatoes and cucumbers. The back row is full of perennials like asparagus, strawberries, walking onions, and sunchokes. The sunchokes are growing everywhere. They're so invasive. I need to start harvesting them before they take over the area completely. This front plot here was another area I added by simply killing the grass. And now I have 14 rows that are 20 feet long. Last year this was a corn plot, and this year it will be again, but sweet corn this time. I also used the ducks and tractors to graze this space over winter, and the soil looks fantastic. Dark and almost no weeds. This is going to be another experimental breeding project. I really want to create my own sweet corn variety over several years, combining modern sweet varieties with heritage colorful varieties, and a variety from the 1800s that has a long harvest window. Something you can't find anywhere else. I'm also delaying planting this corn a bit this year to give my blueberry row a few more weeks of sunlight before the stalks get so tall and start shading them. These blueberries haven't grown much, and I think it's because I keep planting corn in this block, and the corn has been shading them too much every single summer. Behind the garden here are the chicken tunnels. It's almost too overgrown right now, and it's time to let them back in. But I'm doing it smarter this year, only letting them access portions at a time so other sections can recover while they graze others. Last week I posted a full video update on that, so check out that video if you missed it. The last and newest part of our growing space is this small greenhouse right beside the front garden. I moved two of my raised beds inside and planted 20 Amish paste tomatoes, 10 tomatoes in each bed. I've never grown tomatoes in a protected tunnel before, and I'm really excited to see what a longer harvest window does for the yield. The goal is enough paste tomatoes to never buy sauce or salsa at the store again. In this row here we're going to plant tomatoes out in the field, and you'll see I got a tarp here keeping it all all the weeds down. I'm going to take this tarp off first, and then I'm going to show you the different varieties here that I'm experimenting with, see which ones that I like the best. This one's called Tasmanian Chocolate. One is called the New Yorker. Galahad. Last one is called Mountain Princess. These are all determinant style tomatoes, so those kind of tomatoes kind of grow to a determined size. They're not, they're different from indeterminate ones that'll just keep growing and growing and growing if you trellis them. But we're planting these in the field, so I wanted to do some determinate ones and see which ones I like the best. Now I'm going to take this tarp off. The benefit of keeping this tarped is that I have a really clean seed bed for when you're ready to plant, so it's kind of like a cheat code for gardening. Over here you see where I didn't have any tarps there, that's what ends up happening. You have a little green jungle space there. That's a lot of comfrey that's going to seed that I need to cut. All right, so these trays I got from Epic Gardening. They're called the Epic 4-Cell Pots, I think, something like that. And what I like about these specifically for things like peppers and tomatoes is, you can see I have two here, but usually you would need to up-pot them. So you would start the tomatoes in a smaller cell tray, and then you would have to move them into a larger pot or something like that as they start to get bigger. But with these, you could just start them in here and let them get to a good size, and then when they get to the right size, you can just plant them directly in the garden when they get big enough. So that's what I like. I think I put two seeds in each just in case one didn't germinate, but these did really, really well. And we'll see which ones perform the best here, and if I like these, I'll just keep growing a certain variety that does the best. That is everything we're growing this year on half an acre. It's a lot. I think we've honestly maxed out what this space can hold. You do what you can with what you have. We also have fruit trees, but they all got hit by the late frost, so I'm not expecting much from them this year. That's just part of it. But this is what we're trying to do. Grow more of what we typically buy at the store and at the feed store. Cut those two bills down as much as we can. We're going to find out if it's possible. Come back later this summer, and I'll show you what happened.