We try to eat nothing but organic, including our meats - range fed, no hormones, no chemicals.
We farm a little over an acre of our 6.5 acres. Each year we produce a large amount of raspberries, grapes, blueberries, and strawberries. Enough to eat, give away, can or freeze. These are easy to grow and take up very little space when trained on wire lines. I am also working with apple trees and peach trees from a neighbor who has neglected an orchard he created nearly 30-35 years ago. 22 acres of Peach and Apple trees with the finest blackberries ever and the meanest damn snakes of all varieties. I have three varieties of raspberries with the best being Caroline, producing 2 crops a year. I know someone who has a one acre plot of nothing but Caroline and his annual profit typically runs around $90,000.00 selling to local stores, markets, etc. We have very productive Scuppernog and Muscadine grapes that, again, take up very little room when trained.
This year we are going to try asperagas which will not produce until next year.
We grow leaf lettuce in spring and fall - head lettuce will not do well here. We typically grown 2-4 varieties of tomatoes with Roma being some of our favorites. We grow perhaps a dozen or more herbs.
We grow Blue Lake and Eagle string beans, Yellow and Silver Queen corn, red yellow green sweet peppers, Sugar Bush cantelope and Pie Pumpkins. I am sure I am leaving something out.
We let our neighbor (one that has the abandoned orchard) use about 1 acre to grow potatoes. He has several large fields (5 or more acres) that he grow three varieties of watermelon. One year he produced over 4000 watermelons that sold for $3-$5 bucks each. He has one field of Yellow Queen corn so we will stop producing that. They also grow numerous varieties of squash and ocra (both I am not crazy about). Between my neighbor and us, we could feed a pretty good size community - and we do. We share and give much of this away. We now plan our spaces and gardens to rotate and not duplicate the planting of crops in order to cut down on waste an increase variety. We will have tons of onions, peppers, corn, potatoes (Kennebec is best)
I guess our specialty is the berry crops, grapes, and cantelope as no one else around here seems to be able to grow them.
Honestly - if you have some yard, or a patio, you can grow a vegetable or fruit without much effort and have great results.
Absolutely nothing beats a cucumber, melon, beans, corn grown and pulled for dinner, ripened on the vine and all natural.
