If you are planning your garden as a way to sustain yourself then careful planning is needed. If you don’t eat complete proteins then you will actually starve even if you are getting fat from eating lots of carbohydrates. Normally a vegetarian diet requires more than just a hobby garden. It requires understanding of the nutrients that you can get from a plant based diet.
Remember that harvest time is normally in the fall that means food you grow will need to last all winter and throughout summer until you can harvest the next batch of product from your garden. For this reason there are many options to extend your harvest time such as starting seeds early in late winter, planting food that can be stored easy and understanding storage methods like canning, dehydrating, freezing, smoking and cool storage. It is a lot of work even before you begin but if you understand what and why you are planting something you can increase the yield and be more effective. In other words although it is part of enjoying your garden don’t just plant things you love to eat and forget about things that are important to eat.
Creating A Plant Based Diet That Is High In Protein
The first thing you should understand is that although there are many vegetables that are delicious to eat they don’t all have the proteins necessary to keep your muscles growing and body healthy.
There are many great books that can help you understand a vegan or vegetarian diet and you need to read them before you plan your garden. If you plant a lot of superficial items then you won’t have room for the ones that will actually keep you and your family healthy.
Legumes, Seeds, Nuts are all good sources of protein. Legumes like beans and peanuts are easy to grow but they must be grown to maturity and harvested for the bean seed and not just the green been you normally have on your dinner plate. It is the seed that holds the protein. Seeds are also a good source of protein the most common would be sunflower seeds. Nuts are different than peanuts and are harder to grow and harvest. They often require a specific growing zone to do really well but can be found in walnuts, almonds and other tree nuts.
However to create a full protein that will grow muscle these items need to be paired with a grain like corn, rice or wheat… so things like bean tacos, a plate of beans and rice are good choices.
So to survive you really need to grow a large amount of beans. You need to allow them to fully mature on the plant until they dry and then store the dry bean. The green shell can be eaten but it has little or no protein.
Traditional vs Vegetarian vs Vegan Diets
Vegan diets are totally plant based but Vegetarian diets can range substantially. Its almost a joke what some people get away with thinking is “Technically Vegetarian” and is no different than any other diet.
However if you like eating Eggs it is pretty simple to raise a few chicken for their eggs and if you’re not a vegetarian you can also use the egg laying hens for meat. You do want to make sure you have a new flock established before you cull your older birds and normally you wait to cull your egg layers until they are 4 years old or more. If you want to raise birds for meat that only takes 12 weeks or less to grow to harvest weight. If you are pasture raising the meat birds it might take a bit longer as they will be consuming non-commercial food that won’t increase their weight as fast. Each Bird will require 1/2 to 1 cup of corn per day and additional protein. This is true for egg layers and meat birds. This means you will have to have a large quantity of commercial feed or dry stock you can mix into feed for them.
Milk is also a source of protein but the effort to raise goats, sheep or cows is much higher. You need a large amount of space to even raise a single goat but reasonably you will need a few to produce enough milk.
Supplementing Your Diet With Your Garden
For most people that don’t have a large plot of land you should consider using your garden to its best to supplement your diet vs using your garden to replace all your needs.
Because of the space needed to grow enough legumes, raise chickens or other animals and their food, along with raising other food that isn’t high in protein but has other necessary diet requirements supplementation is really your primary concern.
Final Note
In other how to articles we cover the best ways to optimize your garden for production and other aspects of gardening. It is very possible for someone with enough space to cover a very large portion of their needs throughout the year but you should not start your gardening experience with the idea that your first garden will allow you to live completely independent from other food sources.
Whether you are a hunter and live in a location where this is easy or if you want to raise your own animals this can be an option that you should consider. However if you have never attempted any of this there is a lot you need to learn before you get started.
If you don’t consider all of the aspects of gardening from the initial ground preparation, seed costs, even the cost of watering can sometimes outweigh the benefits of having a garden so you have to understand the cost and reason you are doing what you are doing. If you end up raising chicken for eggs but the eggs cost you double what store bought ones do then you have to factor that into your planning. Time is also a very big consideration and even if you aren’t raising animals you will likely spend an hour a day in your garden just pulling weeds and watering let alone planting and harvesting.
Gardening isn’t an instant thing. Look at the back of all of your seed packets and it will tell you that you are looking at 2 to 3 months minimum before your first harvest. You will then need to have plants that you can transfer into that harvested bed that are near maturity because you won’t have another 80-90 days in your season unless you live in the tropics.
And most of all and what we started off with and emphasized is if you want to live off your garden you need to understand the nutrient values, protein levels and what each square inch of your garden will give back to you.