Everyone is suddenly looking into whether or not they can grow all their own food and uh, no.
But also I did grow about 100 lbs of potatoes last year, so if you wanna know if you can do that, maybe?
You need to be medium fit, by which I mean not "buff" but "can do a couple of hours of moderate labour without taking a hit to your HP"
And you need some at least medium quality dirt.
And a shovel.
And for it not to be miserable, you need a second person who is willing to labour alongside you.
also, if you want to grow more than 30 lbs of potatoes, you'll need a cold place to store them, or else you'll need to eat hella potatoes real quick.
It'll take about three shifts of at least an hour, and if you want a hundred pounds of potatoes, more like a couple hours, and if you're not hella buff, do it on a saturday so you can spend sunday enjoying your new awareness of muscles you have never thought much of before.
A weekend when the ground thaws, to plant, a weekend when your potatoes break the dirt, to hill, and a weekend before the frost, to harvest.
That's doable for a lot of people.
If you got the dirt to put them in.
@Betty that sounds like a v cool garden project!
there are a number of urban farm projects around here which seem to do pretty well at supplementing a communities food needs but while they have the potential to be answers to “this community has limited access to fresh fruits and veggies due to being a food dessert” the areas of my grocery bill that i’m expecting to really hurt in the coming months is all fats & protein which generally require a bigger operation than an urban farm can manage (historically the solution here would be chickens which are extremely practical in small plots and help w/pest management for your veggies, but bird flu is already causing problems there….)
@Satsuma also the one person in the US who had died from bird flu (last time I looked (and I guess, if we think the CDC even knows who's alive and dead anymore)) was a back-yard chicken keeper, so. Yikes.
@Satsuma at this time honestly, if you're looking to grow your own protein, uhhhhh how do you feel about eating bugs??????
@Betty i would probably go for turning my basement into a tempeh farm first tbh 😅
@Satsuma @Betty FWIW bird flu doesn’t tend to affect smaller flocks as much as it does big flocks! You still need to be testing and keeping disease in mind, but frankly this should be the norm for any domestic animal.
for *meat specifically* rabbits are better on average- they mostly require access to greens, and reserved feed for when there’s no greens around. If you know of an area that’s fallow and green near your area that’s not too polluted contaminated (roadside grasses are liable to accumulate toxins) then it can be relllatively easy to collect enough grasses to graze the rabbits- 20 minutes of gathering per day, plus travel time?, about - and that’s discounting lawns and the ability to plant greens specifically for rabbits.
Rabbits don’t have very much fat, so you would still likely need an alternatively there.
Fishponds are also pretty good and require relatively little input, especially if other plants are grown alongside them (eg: rice-crab-perch systems, western aquaponics, duckweed accumulation systems)
Plus ofc, beans.
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse Of course, beans. Beans are more work than potatoes, imho. They need more weeding, and where I am, I have to start them in pods to keep some goddamned thing from digging up the seeds as fast as I plant them.
I have heard epidemiologists discourage back-yard chickens, though. I think the thought is that the casual chicken farmer has a lot closer contact with the birds than the industrial one, so the zoonosis possibility is higher.
@Betty That makes sense! I was mostly worrying about my chickens and bird flu back before it made contact with humans.
@Betty Ya, beans are also very very easy and efficient to grow at scale industrially in warmer parts of the world (like mine!) and are MEGA cheap to ship and store because of how well they dry.
Home growing for cost/resource efficiency works best with stuff like herbs or fresh veggies, which are more delicate and often need to be eaten fresh, or are preserved primarily canned/pickled and thus take more weight. Delicate veggies/fruits also tend to be more difficult to industrialize, and thus benefit the most from spreading labour out.
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse I mean, if the economy changes significantly, who knows! But under sensible conditions, yes. Dried beans are so easy to ship and store it makes sense to grow them where labour and sun are cheap, and ship 'em.
@Betty Trust, even if the economy changes dramatically, beans will Still Be Pretty Cheap And Low-Price Goods- this is even true in places like iceland. Plus, there are 100% native beans in your area that go uneaten because they require substantial leaching to be edible- bitter lupine are the most notable example of this in the temperate regions, being very common and widespread across near the whole northern hemisphere.
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse Yeah, I grow beans to eat them green, and then when they get away from me, I let them dry on the vine and eat them that way.
The mysteries of which lupins are edible with preparation vs which are just not (apparently??) has so far dissuaded me.
@Betty My understanding is that all can be edible with preparation. Some have highly reduced alkaloid content to begin with, and require simple brine baths to be edible- these are an entirely mediterranean thing to my knowledge. whereas most require substantial leeching systems on the level of acorn processing and will tend to lose nutrients as you perform these leachings.
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse Yes but. How do you know which is which without dying.
@Betty If they’re not in a field being grown specifically for eating, or like. are in iceland. just assuming they’re the more toxic variety is my general practice for everything.
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse @Satsuma If you're willing to slaughter animals, rabbits make a lot of sense in the back yard.
@Satsuma @Betty Can’t believe i hadn’t thought of this also- nut trees!!!! are very very easy to harvest (nut rollers are bonkers, but you can bash out a bagful of nuts in an hour even by hand), tend to be fairly high in fats and protein, and are almost totally passive after the tree’s established (minus watering if you’re using an unsuitable tree species for your local area.) Foraging-wise, they’re about the best you can get, tied with lotus.
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse *cries in Canadian*
@Betty yeah sorry i just kinda assumed nut trees would exist there bc i thought it was universal to have some kinda available nut. Forgot the effect being high can have.
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse we have. a couple of exotic nut trees from the extension farm. And all the burr oak you can de-tannin.
@Betty Burr oak are actually pretty good if you’re doing harvest+processing in bulk just bc of how many acorns they produce. but yeah sorry i forgot about cold places existing 
@lapstrakeleptocephalapse and our burr oak acorns are substantially smaller than what I read about in the south, just from daylight hours, I assume.
@Satsuma Yeah, even the irish who survived on potatoes generally needed a cow to stay alive, and. Also. Photos from that era do not depict healthy looking people. Like. Damn.