Grow a year’s worth of food for your household! Read on to get your seasonal guide to planning a kitchen garden for 4-season harvests!
This post also contains affiliate links based on my personal experience with products that support a seasonal lifestyle. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I hope you find them useful.
Be sure to download the harvest planner to help you get the most from this post!
Start Planning Your Garden with the Information in your Pantry
When your goal is to grow a year’s worth of food for your household, you need to first know exactly what you eat!
The best way to grow the foods you actually eat is to begin by planning your pantry. There’s an easy and effective process for that, and you can learn more about it here.
It’s a simple 9 step process that reveals what you eat. You take that information and actually plan out your food preservation strategy for the growing season! Click the image below to learn more!
Use this planner to plan your seasonal harvests!
Grow a Year’s Worth of Food Seasonally
It’s east to grow a year’s worth of food for your household with a seasonal approach to your kitchen garden!
Make your kitchen garden a 4-season garden. It’s pretty easy to do this by adding perennial and overwintering crops to your garden beds and using good frost protection during the winter months.
A 4-season garden is one in which the household can harvest fresh vegetables every month of the year. It is a wonderous experience to walk out in the winter garden and collect enough spinach for your December meal. With a little planning, you can be the first in your neighborhood to collect strawberries and rhubarb in early spring!
Eliot Coleman is the father of 4-season growing and this presentation is an exceptional overview of winter growing.
This planner will help you grow enough food for your family this year!
Please use these links to get a better understanding of growing in all four seasons:
This is a 4-Season Seed Starting Guide
A comprehensive garden planning guide is at this link.
Everthing you wanted to know about winter growing but were afriad to ask is here!
The free monthly garden tasklist ebook is right here!
You might also want to join our Facebook community. It’s all abuzz with 4-season gardeners, food preservationists, and creative seasonalists!
A Spreadsheet to Guide Your Crop Rotations for a Year’s Worth of Food
I designed this seasonal planner to help you organize your kitchen garden. By working with this template, you can get the most from the space you have every month of the year!
Once you have your garden designed, and your planting schedule sketched out, use this planner to make sure you plant what you actually eat. It is organized by seson with examples from my own household for each season.
Supplement with a CSA or Farm Share
Vegetable gardening is hard work. Achieving the goal of growing a year’s worth of food for your household can make the endeavor all the more challenging.
Many of us may also be working with limited space. Consider joining a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) or farm share program to supplement your garden. These programs allow you to buy into a farm’s annual harvest and get weekly deliveries of fresh, local produce.
Participating in a local farm share program allows Bob and me to focus on growing the foods we enjoy the most. Tomatoes, herbs, cooking greens, salad greens, onions, and garlic are our 4-season kitchen garden staples.
We get our peppers, eggplant, many squashes we enjoy, and other specialty items from our CSA weekly delivery. Knowing the traditional methods of food preservation allows us to preserve any surplus from those weekly shares.
You can use this directory of local farm share programs to find a farm near you.
The Seasonal Living Framework
Want to dig even deeper into the rich soil of seasonal living? Check out the Seasonal Living Framework and download the Workbook! It’s also a free resource to help you create your seasonal life. I hope you find it useful, perhaps healing.
There’s a party happening and we’re waiting for you to arrive!
A bunch of us meet every day in the Create Your Seasonal Life Facebook Group and over on Instagram!
We also gather over email once a week to focus on one specific garden, kitchen, or wellness topic in-depth, with lots of step-by-step how-to’s. The best way to jump into the email conversation is with the Seasonal Living Workbook, you can download it here and explore the seasonal living framework with an email course!
So much love and free information in one place, but it’s not the same without YOU!
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