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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in a farming area, and my family had a 30'x30' garden.

Farming is a lot of work. It's a job, not a hobby.

Even the garden was a fair amount of work, but more importantly, it's a lot of veggies to eat after harvest. I had tomato sandwiches daily for months. Plus insects to control. Doable, but not glamorous like the "cottagecore" photos.

If I did a serious garden again, I'd focus on becoming a skilled grower of certain veggie strains over a period of decades, and not focus on quantity.

Also, know your soil. If you're in an urban area (or downwind) that used to have steel or auto factories, then your soil is contaminated with heavy metals.

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Eh, you can do it the hard way, or the fantastically lazy way. We just grow tangles - basic trellis of offcut branches, and then seed with a variety of complementary species, a few sacrificial pest magnets, and a few pest repellers. Irrigation is all automated drip, no feed - river (lovely and clean - there’s very little upstream of us, no industry) floods our garden each winter, does the job nicely.

What grows, grows, what doesn’t, doesn’t - and this year, even through a bitter drought, we have enough that we’re giving it away. Harvesting involves rummaging, so it isn’t exactly scalable - but for feeding a household, it’s perfect.

We have deer and boar here - so we also plant hemlock around the border of the garden, which they stay well away from. Also helps to piss on their trails nearby - discourages them from visiting. The boar, we actually take advantage of - there’s a meadow they love to turn over every spring, digging for tubers - which we then throw potatoes in.

I mean, outside of that, off grid life is humblingly challenging - but I’ve never been in better shape, and growing food is easy enough if you just let nature do its thing.

I like your description of "pest magnets", I have been referring to them as plant tanks. My overgrown raspberries tank the japanese beetles for the blueberries. Plus the yield of the raspberries isn't significantly dented by the japanese beetles.

My favorite piece of equipment is my wood chipper: I can turn all of the delivery boxes into mulch. And yard waste. And... basically any other biomass that will turn to dirt in 6-12 months.

We are not off-grid (dude, that's so much work). But I build most of my projects out of found materials (raised beds out of old fencing, etc). I tried my hand at making a basket out of grape vine, but grape vines are really "shreddy" and the basket is no fun to use. I was going to try coppicing some willow next -- baskets are really useful.

It's a fun hobby, but I am lazy. And I still end up with too much produce (though I have a lot of space, so that makes it easier).

Agreed on the wood chipper - we’ve fed vast volumes of organic waste through ours as we’ve 8ha of badly overdense and bramble/suspended dead wood choked woodland to manage, and the mulch is dead handy for paths and garden beds - our soil is very low in carbon, so everything helps.

Re: weaving, vines are impossible, rett them first - soak ‘em, maybe in lye, and then pound them with a rock to get fibres. Baskets, willow works great - we’ve goat willow all over, here, and use it for smaller stuff. Bigger stuff we use olive, as green it’s supple and dry it’s like a rock, and very rot resistant - we’ve made half baskets on a steep hill slope to catch runoff and encourage tree growth - the oldest ones (two years) are hosting self-seeded oak saplings now, which is kinda cool.

We just had a Porcupine break into the protective cages to dig up and eat our entire Potato crop last night.

It can be challenging.

I hear they can be used as a substitute for beef in stews.

And the vegetarian option is.... ;)

Get rid of the Porcu- and keep the -pine? :)

Finding an adventurous gardener friend who is willing to trade you fresh veggies for a dead porcupine

Grow chilli peppers amidst your spuds. That should do the job.

My focus is on "lazy gardening" -- or how much can I get nature to automate things. How much can I use waste biomass as a resource. Etc. I end up with a lot of failures, but the successes are really satisfying. The main challenge is that the feedback loop is ~1yr which means that it's not a hobby for the impatient. :)

Have you researched "forest gardens"? Lots of good information about lazy gardening there. In reality it is extremely thoughtful gardening which lets you (hopefully) get to a point where the garden runs itself save for a few hours/week upkeep.

I’ve been watching a YouTube channel called Parkrose Permaculture by a woman in Portland. She doesn’t even have to water in the summer, which in this Mediterranean climate blows my mind.

This is exactly what I do. I try out things and if they aren't mostly hands off they just not for me. But I learned enough that if I had the time I could grow other stuff too.

Cabbage doesn't do well without a fight here. Potatoes? Grow themselves! Carrots? Very finicky to get to grow at all here but if they do they are just so much better than store bought and hands off too. Cherries are awesome once I wasn't lazy enough to skip the netting. Not that much work in the end.

Yeah, in my country, people like to buy a "lifestyle block" when they've acquired enough capital and reached their mid 40s - 50s - usually a big house with say 10 acres of land or so.

Not enough to run a financially viable headcount of stock. Maybe enough to run a midlife crisis horse for your spouse who desperately wanted a pony as a child but couldn't get one. Now you have a horse that's desperately lonely, and costs a metric shit ton to keep in reasonable health.

And then, you find out the maintenance required... ...how the local government will fine you if you let your grass grow to the "massive fire risk" level, so either you acquire sheep/goats etc. to graze it - and lose money on doing so, or you buy a ride-on mower / small tractor with mowing attachment, and spend one day a fortnight (at least) mowing, wondering what the hell the "lifestyle" you were buying actually is.

Oh, and of course, maintaining your own water supply. Nothing says "living the dream" like E Coli in your private well from your grass maintaining animals shitting too close to it (or your well being too shallow to avoid aquifer contamination from dairy farmers upstream).

...and fighting off deer, literally sent by Satan to devour my tender green shoots

Six foot fence keeps the deer moving along... but those fat groundhogs climb right over.

Run a wire around the perimeter near the top with a fence charger attached and you'll solve that one quickly.

I was thinking barb wire, too. I need to do something because I bought a lot of my fruit trees fall of 2019 and so they should be producing next year and they’re pruned low, not to mention I upped my berry game this year.

Not barbed wire: high voltage electric fence wire. Run a single strand near the top with a charger (you can get solar powered ones if there's no AC nearby) and that will stop them in their tracks.

Ok you convinced me.

Metal fences are tricky for groundhogs. my parents have one that is welded wire (comes in a roll) and its not sturdy enough for a fat groundhog to climb all the way up and get over, they aren't the most athletic. once they shored up some holes along bottoms of the fence the groundhog wasn't getting inside anymore.

I have the similar plastic-coated hex but ran a cable across the top because I was thinking about deer. Never knew those porky groundhogs could climb so well. I buried a few inches and that’s enough to keep them from digging it seems.

That's just venison delivering itself.

Not if you have white collar standards for "sportsmanlike behavior" it's not.

That said, I agree with you. If I want X pounds per year of venison I'm gonna get it and I see no reasons to spend a few hours sitting in the woods during a particular part of the year to do it.

It's not just a lot of work, depending on how much you can automate irrigation and weeding, it's a fairly sure-fire bet that you cannot travel during the summer.

At least these days you can hire a task rabbit to come by and water.

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