The 12x12 Backyard Corner Producing More Food Than a Quarter Acre

Comments · 40

• BS

  @BS-detector · 2 months ago

  Home gardening needs to make a come back...nobody knows what's in the food they buy at the store anymore. Labeling is a joke and expecting corporations to tell you the truth is a fool's belief system. The more you respect nature and do for yourself, the healthier you become. Simplicity works. Learn as much as you can about plants...we cannot live without them!

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• DE

  @dentaliban4445 · 2 months ago

  For everyone new to gardening, instead of breaking your back by double digging use a broad fork and preserve the biology in your ground at the same time.

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• JC

  @JCC_1975 · 2 months ago

  I'm 51. Growing up, we only went to the grocery store for tp, coffee,  and aluminum foil.  I was 19 before I ever stepped foot into a grocery store myself. I was confued and shocked at all the foods in one. So grateful I was raised this way. I grow 90% of my families food. Still only buying tp, coffee and aluminum foil. I don't trust what's in those shelves. Especially lately and we rent, a small yard I can't plant in but containers are great!!

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• SA

  @SariClark-z9j · 2 months ago

  Thank you for crediting Mr Bartholomew in detail. I like the background and "proof of concept"as you call it. Sorry that  some people have no patience for analysis.

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• AN

  @anonymouse2675 · 1 month ago

  Ever heard about edible landscaping? Basically, instead of planting a hedge just to look good, you plant something like raspberries. You still have a pretty hedge, but now it produces a crop as well. Do the same thing with shade trees. Still a shade tree, but now you get nuts, or apples, or cherries, or serviceberries, or whatever. A friend of mine has an L shaped raspberry hedge in the corner of his yard, one side is maybe 8 feet, and the other is around 10. &nbsp;He doesn&apos;t sell the raspberries, he just gives them away to any poor soul who visits him... You cannot escape his house without multiple armloads of frozen berries, dried berries, raspberry preserves, vinegar, something. <br><br>I do agree with several of your videos about how everything produced should be part of a system, with one thing feeding into the next. Where I disagree is that I think every stage should also produce something for human consumption as well. For example, Beets were a major fodder crop in medieval Europe. Not only were the greens fed to livestock, but so were the tubers. Feed wise, one acre of fodder beets out produces hay by about 10 times. While I&apos;m not personally a fan of beets, many people are. The same goes for things like radishes, sunchokes, and turnips. Cooked radishes have a taste and texture very similar to potatoes, and are low carb for people trying to control blood sugar. Sunchoke hay is a fairly high quality animal feed, the tubers are edible for humans, and can be stored for winter as food for both humans and livestock, and can fetch a pretty decent price at farmers markets. While not invasive, once a patch is established sunchokes are hard to kill off, coming back year after year. A lot of people survived off sunchokes during WW2. Oh, and to &quot;Fix&quot; the gas problem, simply cure the sunchokes in a warm dry place for a couple weeks... Bean straw can be fed to animals as well, while the actual beans can be harvested for human consumption. Same thing with peas. While you don&apos;t want to feed exclusively bean or pea straw, it can be added to other types of hay or fodder to boost protein levels. &nbsp;<br><br>Sea buckthorn. A super hardy nitrogen fixing plant that&apos;s heat tolerant, cold tolerant, drought resistant, and frost hardy. It&apos;s currently being use by the Chinese government to reclaim deserts. It&apos;s a superfruit, and absolutely loaded with vitamins, including vitamin E! It has actual medical uses, including treating burns, and radiation poisoning... Yep. The leaves are a great animal feed, and were used by the ancient Greeks as a horse fodder to help sick animals. This stuff grows in pretty much any climate, from Europe, to the Tibetan Plateau, to Chines deserts, to the Mongolians steppes, to Siberia, to the Canadian prairies. Sea Berries are found in everything from &quot;Superfoods&quot;, to beauty products, to fruit juices. Low in sugar, the taste is a tart combination of pineapple, lemon, and orange. Try to find it in a farmer&apos;s market! Oh, did I mention that you can extract oil from the seeds? Yeah, that&apos;s a superfood too, and It&apos;s also used in beauty products. If you get an oil press, you might want to contact one of these beauty product manufacturers. <br><br>Amaranth. Once a primary grain crop of Mexico, right next to corn, the leaves are also edible by both humans and animals. The grain can be popped like popcorn, ground up into a flour and used however you use flour, or boiled like oatmeal... Leaves from young plants taste kinda like spinach. Because the leaves are edible, it makes a decent fodder crop for livestock. There are dozens of varieties that grow in almost any climate, including ornamentals like Love Lies Bleeding. These you can sell as pretty cut flowers, grain, or salad. Or use the leaves as animal feed. <br><br>Both Beans and Peas can yield multiple products, depending on what type you choose to grow. You can get both green beans as a vegetable, then later dried beans from the same plant. Peas can give you sugar snap peas, then dried peas later on. <br><br>For the animals. In a very small space like a backyard, then rabbits and chickens. I like Silver Fox meat rabbits, because their fur is a valuable product as well. Once you&apos;re up to a quarter acre, then add in a small breed of goat. Either pygmy goats, or Nigerian dwarfs. Now you&apos;re getting milk! At 1/2 acre or so, you can add in Kune Kune pigs. They are a small extremely friendly pig that doesn&apos;t &quot;root&quot;, or dig up the ground. While much smaller than an American hog, they are fairly feed efficient. You can also look at dwarf Scottish Highland cows. Look, even more milk! You can sell both the dwarf highland cows and the kune kune pigs as pets, though they are still cows and pigs, thus beef and pork. If you&apos;re growing the plants mentioned above, then you&apos;ll have enough feed for your animals. &nbsp; <br><br>In medieval Europe, Hedge Rows were a thing. They grew everything from fruit trees, nut trees, berries, herbs, and lumber trees in these hedge rows that surrounded their fields. The trees acted as a windbreak for the crops in the fields, as a shelter for birds, and as a place for wildlife to travel through.

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• GA

  @GARDENFLOCK · 1 month ago

  Homesteading explained in the most simplest way.. <br><br>Amazing one here buddy👌

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• TI

  @ticktock2383 · 2 months ago

  I am raising a 4 ft x 6 ft mound garden with wooden supports for tomatoes and melons. Planted them close together. Looking great so far.

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• SH

  @sherimatukonis6016 · 2 months ago (edited)

  scientific evidence stated that no till digging is the clear superior method compared to double digging with the sole exception of hard pan or dense clay soil

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• RO

  @rozimarmelo3546 · 1 month ago

  Meu nome é Rozimar e moro no interior do Brasil, e acredito que uma horta doméstica não é só sobre economizar dinheiro no Hortifruti,mas,sobre ser auto suficiente, produzindo seu próprio alimento sabendo exatamente o que está comendo,sem pesticidas e adubos químicos que envenenam a terra.

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• PH

  @ph6561 · 1 month ago

  Use no dig methods ( adding home made compost on top of cardboatd covered soil to grow in) to improve yields, protect &amp; slowly improve the soil structure &amp; microbiome - reducing watering &amp; feeding needs in the process. &nbsp;Or particularly if your soil is very😢 poor try huegel culture mound beds instead. Building up layers of branches, compostable mayerisks &amp; siol to create a mound which you plant all over - increading the ground surface area. &nbsp;Again no digging instead effectively creating the equivalent of a forest floor soil which requires very little watering or feeding overtime &amp; lasts many years. &nbsp;PS we call what you described square yard gardening in the UK. A raised bed - 3 foot X 3 foot sub divided into smaller 1x1 squares each multi planted. They can be linked together with some areas raised further for deeper rooted or perennial crops - underplanted by shade loving quick growers of course😊 &amp; some covered by coldframes. <br>Or made into deep hot beds - covered by coldframes to aid early germination of direct sown crops or to provide heat for tender crops. A technique used in europe for centuries.🇬🇧😊

• TI

  @tinawilson2160 · 2 months ago (edited)

  in baby boomer times - the show of how well off a home was could be seen by little to no garden of vegetables and fruit trees but rolling lawns, flowers to look at &nbsp;and plants that gave little to nothing but looks and smell - if you were well off you wasted space and mowing lawns was status symbol for many ...many young adult baby boomers chose to work and party and mow the lawn and buy cheap foods at the supermarkets which then demands caused supermarkets to stock more and grow in options and grew in size and got bigger -for many &nbsp;people they wanted to have status and worried what others thought so by showing how well off they were was shopping for needs at supermarkets and other stores as providing what people needed or wanted was less work to hand money over and they were paid better if people were working back then.....over time old knowledge got lost or put aside for modern times and everything lost quality and value in wear and tear -tools purchased lost quality along with healthy foods and low quality and cheap nasty stuff grew in throw away society - clothes , tools, equipment and quality of foods declined as greed of industries and businesses plus councils and govt gave back less and less while taking more and more ....things made to last lifetimes stopped or downgraded or you unable to fix yourself as it provided money and feed greed for some &nbsp;so more money could be made and people rushed to earn money in the boom time of party culture while neglect of the family was considered normal and over looked abuses and greedy people got away with much....home grown, home made or home crafts were looked down on by the rich so many gave up doing such wise things ....plastic has done more damage than most BS they decided was good for the world ,,,,

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• AN

  @Anna-ow7cp · 1 month ago

  Uv made something simple convoluted

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