If a person intends to make wise decisions with financial investments, they would be told by a financial adviser that a diversified portfolio is a safer option than putting all your money into one stock. Here at BackwardsProgress.com, we have found that this same principle works well with a person’s investment of time and energy into a sustainable lifestyle.
When it comes to growing most of your own fruits and vegetables, we have learned that planting large volumes of only your favorites can sometimes lead to disappointment. Being that every year’s growing season is a little different, each thing that you are growing will give you a different yield each year. Our standard plan for each year is to have a little bit of everything so that even in a poor growing season, we still have enough groceries for the year. For instance, one year was unusually hot and dry; therefore, the things that like cool and wet conditions did not do well at all. However, the quality of our wine-grapes were the best we had ever seen due to the very low humidity (here in northern Wisconsin, summer humidity makes growing quality grapes a challenge). Another example would be one summer that was cooler and had more frequent rain than usual. We had great quality lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, and spinach that year, but the tomatoes and corn harvest were mediocre as those require hotter weather.
You should always plan for unpredictable weather, insect populations, and plant diseases to interfere with achieving an identical harvest every year. It is our advice to everyone who grows most of their own food to keep in mind that every year might be different, but with good planning, every year can be a great success resulting in a tiny grocery store bill. Our motto is: “Every year is good for some things and bad for others”.
To give you an idea of how we have invested into having most of our own fruit throughout the whole year, let’s take a look at our fruit portfolio. Currently we have:
- apples
- pears
- cherries
- plums
- mulberries
- juneberries
- raspberries
- strawberries
- blueberries
- grapes
No matter what the year holds for us, even if some of the above fail, we only end up buying a few apples or bananas at the store in the winter.
As mentioned earlier, each year is different. Not every tree and bush is guaranteed to give us something every single year. But with the above list of trees and bushes, we almost always have plenty of either fresh or frozen fruit to eat daily year round. This is a special treat when it comes to the grocery bill because fresh organic fruit can become very expensive in a big hurry. I once held a job at a grocery store in which I monitored prices of many items. While working there, I noticed how expensive Honeycrisp apples are, and I developed the habit of calling them “money crisp” apples because they could cost as much as $3.50 each! It is fairly difficult to afford a steady diet of high quality fruits and vegetables with prices like that. (Of course this is an extreme example)
We think it is more beneficial for a sustainable lifestyle to not have your supply of food be dependent on fluctuating food costs or a variable income. From experience, we can tell you that it is a real pleasure and a sense of security opening the fridge and seeing hundreds of dollars of fruit that we probably wouldn’t have had otherwise, had we needed to spend our money on it.
Stay tuned for next weeks blog on:
“How to Heat Your Home with Only One Hour of Wood Cutting Per Week”