You wouldn’t think a lot could be done with a suburban 1/2 acre homestead. You’d be wrong. Here, we fully embrace the philosophy of “do what you can with what you’ve got”. Six years ago, we landed in Sumter, SC and bought a little place beside the railroad tracks. We cleared out overgrowth and removed strangled trees, we fenced the backyard for our little dogs, and we set about making a plan.
That plan outlined a beautiful raised bed garden, hexagon shaped, with spaces for vegetables, herbs, and strawberries. While year one was growing in the backyard, we added floor to ceiling pantry shelves in the back hall. That fall, we filled some of the shelves with peaches, tomatoes, tomato sauce, strawberry jam, and pickles. Year two, we raised the garden beds to accommodate root crops and added beets and carrots, lettuces and spinach. We switched the strawberry bed to peas, and the herb beds to cucumbers. In year three, Covid came. Life turned upside down.
The year of Covid was pretty disastrous all around. I relocated back to NY to be childcare for my daughter, who’d lost hers due to the virus. A couple months later, the fall storms flooded our house, and Gary had to juggle the pets, the harvest, and the remodeling alone. Two days after that, my dad died. We are no strangers to adversity, but we were stretched way … too … thin. Somehow, we made it through that year.
The garden of year four was almost all tomatoes, almost all of which we just gave away or left rotting on the vines. Priorities were a little out of sorts and we needed to figure out where we were and where to go from there. So, we tore down the whole garden and built a gazebo, planted grass seed and went to the lake.
This is the end of year six. We have begun again. Now we have two greenhouses full of hydroponic tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce and cauliflower. A mighty fine chicken coop with seven residents, blueberry bushes, and a growing orchard of fruit trees. We’ve just placed a seed order that terrifies me, I’ve completed my Nutrition Coach Certification, and I’m about to start my second semester at USC Sumter.
We can as much food as we are able. We also freeze and dehydrate. If we don’t grow it ourselves, we have found local sources instead. The plan today is to find out just how much produce we can produce on this little 1/2 acre piece of ground.