Food & Growing Forum

What this board is for

Gardens, orchards, season extension, preservation, and food storage: growing food where the season is short and the nearest supermarket is a drive, and keeping it once it is grown. It covers the planning questions before a bed is dug and the practical ones afterwards, when something is not producing or not keeping.

It is also the board for the storage side, which off grid is frequently the harder half. Growing a surplus is achievable in most climates; keeping it through a winter without a reliable freezer is a different skill.

The questions that come up most

What can I actually grow here? A function of frost-free days, summer heat, and water, and the number to start from is the gap between average last and first frost. Averages hide the frost that arrives two weeks early, so plan on the short end.

Is season extension worth building? Often, in a short-season climate, and the cheap versions frequently pay back in the first year. Whether a heated structure makes sense off grid is a different question, because heating a greenhouse is a serious energy load.

How much should I plant? Nearly everyone overplants in year one and underestimates the processing. A smaller planting that is fully preserved beats a larger one that rots while you are building something else.

How do I keep it without a freezer? Canning, drying, fermenting, and cold storage, in roughly that order of reliability off grid. A root cellar or an equivalent cold space is the classic answer where the ground and the climate allow one.

What a useful post looks like here

Give the location or at least the frost dates and the elevation, because a growing question without them is unanswerable. Say what the soil is like and what water is available, since irrigation off grid is a pumping question as much as a gardening one.

For storage questions, say what conditions you can actually hold: temperature, humidity, and whether they are stable. Most storage failures are condition failures rather than technique failures.

The mistakes that cost the most here

Planting before fencing, in any place with deer, elk, or livestock. The fence is the garden, and the lesson is usually learned in a single night.

Ignoring water. A garden that depends on hauling or on a pump you did not size for it competes with the household, and in a dry August it loses.

Building a greenhouse that needs heat you do not have. Passive design and season extension are cheap; heated growing space off grid is a major load.

Preserving without following tested procedures, particularly for low-acid foods where the risk is genuinely serious rather than merely a matter of quality.

And planting the crops you like rather than the crops that store. A vegetable that must be eaten fresh is a pleasure in August and nothing in February.

Storage, in the order it usually gets built

Start with what needs no infrastructure: drying, which needs air and time, and fermenting, which needs a cool corner. Then canning, which needs a heat source and tested procedures and turns a glut into shelf-stable food.

Then cold storage. A root cellar, an insulated space against the north side of a building, or a buried container all work on the same principle, and the variables that matter are temperature stability and humidity rather than absolute cold. Different crops want different conditions, which is why a single cellar rarely suits everything.

Refrigeration and freezing come last off grid because they are the parts that cost energy every day of the year. Where a freezer is used, it is usually worth siting somewhere cool and running it hard in summer surplus rather than treating it as a constant draw. The storage calculator works out what a year actually looks like in volume.

Livestock, wildlife, and the rest of the ecosystem

A garden off grid sits inside a food chain that includes deer, bears, rodents, birds, and whatever your neighbors keep. Planning for that from the start is much cheaper than reacting to it, and it changes fencing, siting, and storage.

Composting is the other half of the loop, and it is worth designing rather than improvising, particularly in bear country where an unmanaged pile is an attractant. Livestock and gardens interact well when planned together and badly when they are not, which is why the homesteading board is the neighboring conversation.

For the arithmetic, the garden calculator works from your own frost dates and household size, and the food and growing section of the journal goes deeper on individual crops and methods.

How much of this is regional

Entirely. Frost dates, summer heat, rainfall, day length, and soil decide what grows and when, and the same plan produces a glut in one region and nothing in another. The frost-free window is the single most useful number to start from, and it changes with elevation over remarkably short distances.

Water availability shapes the whole approach: irrigation from a well is a pumping cost, from catchment a storage question, and in a dry summer a garden competes with the household.

Post your location, frost dates, and elevation with any growing question. The site report gives frost dates and precipitation for any address.

What it costs, and whether it pays

Honestly, a garden rarely pays for itself in the first year or two once fencing, water, soil amendment, and tools are counted. What it does provide is food security, quality, and a substantial reduction in the number of drives to town, which off grid is a real saving in time and vehicle wear.

Preservation is where the economics improve, because it converts a seasonal surplus into food that displaces purchases all winter. That is also where the labor concentrates, and it is worth planning the processing capacity before planting the surplus.

Fencing is the item most often left out of the budget and most often needed first. In deer or livestock country it is the garden, not an accessory to it.

Tools for this topic

Most questions on this board come down to a number somebody has not worked out yet. These do the arithmetic and show their working, so an answer here can be checked rather than taken on faith.

• Tools/garden calculator: plan beds from your own frost dates
• Tools/food storage calculator: work out what a year of storage actually looks like

How this board works

Posting needs an account, which exists so that answers have a name attached and so that the same person can be asked a follow-up six months later. It costs nothing and it is not used for anything else.

The conventions here are the ones that make a small forum useful. Say where you are, at least to the state or region, because almost every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules. Say what you have already, and what you have already tried. Give numbers where you have them, and say when you are guessing. And when something works or fails, come back and say which, because the thread is read by far more people than post in it.

Answers here should be able to say where they came from. Experience is welcome and so is a rule of thumb, as long as it is labeled as one. Where a claim is about safety, code, or law, it wants a source, because the reader on the other end may be about to spend money or wire something themselves.

Boards next door

Off-grid questions rarely stay inside one department. A water question is often a power question underneath, and a land question is usually several at once. These boards field the neighboring subjects:

• Homesteading & Livestock: Animals, fencing, and the day-to-day of running a productive off-grid homestead.
• Water: Collection, storage, filtration, and pumps: getting clean, reliable water when there is no tap to turn on.
• Heating & Cooking: Wood and rocket stoves, propane, and off-grid kitchens: staying warm and fed without shore power.
• Health & First Aid: Staying healthy far from a hospital: first-aid and trauma kits, remote medical skills, telehealth, prescriptions, and a ...

Asking a question that gets a good answer

The difference between a thread that gets three useful replies and one that gets none is almost always in the first post. Four things do most of the work: where you are, what you already have, what you have already tried, and what you are actually trying to achieve.

Location matters because nearly every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules, and the same question has different right answers in Vermont and Arizona. What you have matters because advice that assumes different equipment wastes everyone's time. What you have tried stops people repeating it. And the goal matters because the best answer is frequently that the problem should be solved somewhere else entirely: a load reduced rather than a battery added, a parcel checked rather than a design revised.

Numbers beat adjectives. Give the figure where you have one and say plainly when you are guessing, because a guess labeled as a guess is useful and a guess presented as a measurement sends people down the wrong path.

Answering well, and the standard here

Experience is the most valuable thing on a board like this, and it is most valuable when it comes with its conditions attached: what you have, where, for how long, and what went wrong along the way. A rule of thumb is welcome when it is labeled as one.

Where a claim is about safety, code, or law, it wants a source, because the person reading may be about to wire something themselves or spend a large amount of money. Direct-current faults, combustion appliances, and structural decisions are not places for confident approximations, and saying you are not sure is a genuine contribution rather than a failure.

It is also worth saying when something has changed. Equipment, prices, and regulations all move, and an answer that was right three years ago can be wrong now.

Coming back with what happened

The most underused post on any forum is the follow-up. Threads are read by far more people than post in them, and a question with no resolution is a question the next reader has to ask again.

So come back and say which suggestion worked, what it cost, and what you would do differently. Say it even when the answer is that none of the advice helped and you solved it another way, because that is the most useful outcome of all to record.

If what you learned contradicts something published on this site, please say so. Corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page with the date rather than quietly edited away, and readers who have called the county or walked the ground are the best source of correction this site has.

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