What real food tastes like.

[Gardening with Rabbits]

have you tried dehydrating hash brown potatoes? We like them better than fresh!

The first thing I put in the dehydrator was hash brown potatoes and they are really good!

 

[so lucky]

GWR, I think people respond to someone else's success in a negative way because they don't like to see others succeed when they haven't. It would be the same if you were a champion athlete, or made a killing in the stock market. Your success just emphasizes their "failure." So they ignore it, or belittle it. I don't think you will change their attitude. All you can do is rise above it, and understand that their opinion comes from a dark and unhappy place.
I am amazed at your beautiful produce. You have obviously worked very hard.

 

[baymule]

@Gardening with Rabbits if they get hungry, they will beat a path to your door! Kinda like the story of The Little Red Hen..... Don't let the downers get to you, just keep on with your garden. If your friends and family don't want to talk garden with you--WE SURE WILL!!

 

[ninnymary]

Gardening with Rabbits, I usually don't talk about my gardening with friends. They don't listen and don't seem to get it. I do enjoy immensly talking about gardening with my preschoolers though. Now there is an attentive crowd! lol I think gardening is best spoken with other gardeners. Then we can go on for hours.

You are doing such a good job with all that processing. I love to see all of you take it a step further with dehydrating. Right now it's something that I don't have an interest in.

Mary

 

[AMKuska]

Wow. You can dehydrate potatoes? O.O Do you just shred them and stuff them in, or do you have to treat them first?

Do you guys know how much of each plant I would need to feed a family of 3? My garden is getting gobbled as fast as it produces, with hungry people watching for more. Obviously a little 10x15 plot isn't good enough for us, but how much can we produce on 0.26 acres?

 

[TheSeedObsesser]

Kuska, what are potato chips?

As for how much of what you should plant - I'd say that it would mainly depend on what does good for you, in your garden. It would also depend on how much each person eats/ what those people like to eat/ how long you plan on feeding them for. I know that we're all pigs here, so I plant a large garden. Okay, maybe we're not all pigs - I'll be honest here and say that a big part of it's me.

 

[seedcorn]

Wow. You can dehydrate potatoes? O.O Do you just shred them and stuff them in, or do you have to treat them first?

Do you guys know how much of each plant I would need to feed a family of 3? My garden is getting gobbled as fast as it produces, with hungry people watching for more. Obviously a little 10x15 plot isn't good enough for us, but how much can we produce on 0.26 acres?

Quite a bit on .26A. I could feed 2 families with mine but we no longer can. Depends on what you grow and how intense you want to get. Now I don't grow potatoes currently because I have no success with them in sand and gravel. In summer, we give food away and still have things go to waste. Good news is waste feeds chickens and becomes next years fertilizer.

 

[digitS']

Somewhere on here I tried to use USDA information on per person, average food consumption. About the only thing I remember off the top of my head is that the average American eats 125# of potatoes each year.

I was just thinking about that when I admitted that I don't have the storage conditions to keep my potatoes more than 6 months. 100# is enough for DW and me, and I can (maybe) grow them in 100 square feet. (I grew 199# on 200sqft, keeping track of every pound, 1 year. It isn't anything remarkable.)

Your .26 acre = 11,326 sqft. Think you need that many spuds, @AMKuska ??

A 1,000 square foot garden should get you a lot of real food.

Steve

 

[digitS']

Rutgers has a:

Yield expectations for a mixed stand small scale agriculture (pdf link).

Steve

 

[thistlebloom]

@baymule and @Gardening with Rabbits, could you share the process of dehydrating hash browns? Dh loves hb's and drying them would free up more storage space for the fresh ones, which is where it all came off the tracks for me last year.