Chapter 2 The Requirements

To be self sufficient in vegetables, fruit and eggs. That was my goal. But what does that actually mean? How much food is that? You might already have a good idea. If you don’t, this might help.

Let's calculate just how much fruit and vegetables you and your family would consume in three months. If we think about lunch and dinner only, that's 14 meals a week. Multiple that by 13 weeks and we're talking 182 family meals in one season.

So what does that look like? Picture your weekly grocery trolley, assuming you prepare most of your own food. Maybe you have in there a bag of peas, a bag of potatoes, broccoli, tinned or fresh fruit, garlic, onions, a bag of tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, a bag of carrots, a zucchini, a packet of basil, and a dozen eggs. (It's a wild guess). Now add another 12 trolleys with the same quantity of fresh food and line them up. It's a huge amount!

What I wanted to do was replace those shopping trolleys and bags with all home grown organic produce. In other words, I would need to grow and harvest this amount of food every season. Eeek! I realised my garden, whatever it looked like, would have to be a decent size to grow this much food. But how big?

Being on a farm, I had unlimited space to create a garden, which was a luxury not afforded everyone. However, the cost and quantity of building materials, organic matter and the time to create and manage a large space set a limit to the size. Instead of having a huge area, I decided I would focus on maximum production within a smaller, more manageable footprint.

The next criteria was about livestock. I wanted to be able to collect and eat fresh eggs. So somewhere in the garden area, I needed a chook pen, a nest box and some chickens.

The next basic requirement was protecting the garden from the local wildlife. Our beautiful farm was home to hundreds of wild rabbits, kangaroos, cockatoos, parrots and crows. There were other animals too but these ones were well known for enjoying the fruits of a gardener's labour. It's a nice way of saying, if given the chance they would eat or flatten everything in the garden.

Then there were foxes. Foxes wouldnt eat the garden but they certainly enjoy a chicken dinner. We knew our farm was home to foxes so to keep chickens we had to come up with a very secure pen. I heard too many stories of people's chooks free ranging... and not coming home. Or attacks in the middle of the night in an unsecured pen. Don't be fooled into thinking foxes only come out at night either. I've seen them running across our front lawn at midday and wandering along suburban streets at dawn!

So my requirements were to be self sufficient, to have a very productive space, to ensure the garden wouldn't be eaten by wildlife and my chooks wouldn't be eaten by foxes.

I'll show you how to make your vegie patch a safe place for plants and poultry in the next chapters. Firstly, let's look at how I selected the best site in Chapter 3, Selecting a site.