Well, it varies by the item or at least category, because I'm not one of those lucky ones who live in a year-round climate. If I were willing to work harder at it and use more season extending techniques and indoor gardening I could do better even on things like salad crops, but there are only so many hours in the day.

But, these are some of the things I NEVER buy from the grocery store:

Processed tomato products and fresh tomatoes in season (I do buy the cardboard ones in the winter for salads, I try to mostly buy grape tomatoes because they have some flavor).
Corn
Green Beans
Zukes
Cukes in season (obviously, I have to buy them in winter)
Pickles
Winter squash and pie pumpkins and jack o lantern pumpkins
potatoes
peppers in season (once again, I have to buy them 2/3rds of the year if I want a fresh one, but use my frozen for cooking)
Onions
Garlic
Herbs, fresh and most dried
Melons in season (I buy them in the winter when desperate and sick of citrus)
Some root crops (Varies by year, the last couple of years I've been bad about getting them planted)
Cabbage/Broccoli/Cauliflower/Kohlrabi
Greens in season (I NEVER buy salad greens from May until November)
Fruit fresh in season plus frozen -- I'm sure I've got over 100 fruit trees planted now, plus all kinds of small fruits. I don't have to buy fruit between the time strawberries start and basically December when I start getting sick of stored apples and pears and want citrus. Of course, I have to buy exotic stuff that I can't grow here, like bananas and pineapples and citrus.
eggs, honey, and maple syrup

I freeze, can, and preserve tremendous amounts of things. Generally, I can somewhere around 300 to 400 jars of things a year, probably put close to that many packages into the freezers, and dry a number of things as well.

It's extremely doable IF you are willing to commit the time and work to it. But it's definitely a lifestyle choice. I don't go out and do a lot of the things most "normal" people do. I haven't been to a movie since 1996. I rarely go out to eat. I don't go to concerts or sports events. I spend most of my free time tending to my garden, home, and animals. I haven't been out of town overnight for probably 10 years, and I look forward to vacation as a time to get caught up at home. It's what I enjoy, but it's definitely not for everyone.

We live in an all-round year gardening climate here in zone 10 (Sunset 23-24). I retired about 10 years ago - and decided that my backyard "dirt" was going to have to produce if we were to make it on good ol' SS.

I planted lots of fruit trees - most of them survived - apricot, plum, peach, almond, low chill apple, and a few strawberries and boysens. Most of my veggies are grown in 4 x 6 cedar boxes, filled with amended compost that I make myself from yard waste - 9 boxes in all.

It is an every day routine - cook - using foods canned or frozen from garden, start new seedlings under lights, plant, water, harvest, can or freeze excess, dehydrate tomatoes, fruits, etc., and organize pantry and freezer space to keep using foods in appetizing recipes that my family likes.

I also bake quite a lot - mainly on cooler days in winter -home made breads, cakes, etc., as we all seem to enjoy them more than store bought.

However, my grocery bills run around - perhaps $150 -$200 a month for 4 of us, not to mention the occasional treat to Jack-in-the-Box or pizza parlor - when I don't feel like cooking.

I still will buy lugs of tomatoes or fruit in the mountains in season - if my own garden doesn't produce. Although the day-to-day yields don't always seem like a lot - *bushels and pecks" still being able to pick some celery, parsley, cherry toms for salads, few berries for cereal, 20 or so oranges for juice, limes for drinks, and seasoning, harvesting seeds and leaves for seasonings, supplementing greens to salads, etc., seems to offset the cost of buying the more costly produce in stores.

I'm getting a bit on in life, so my daily garden stint is only an hour or so, more or less, and if I worked a bit harder, it would yield better. Still, it is a way of life, and it really does seem to be paying off.

Like denninmi - social life isn't much - but with the San Diego Padres winning baseball - and with great TV coverage, life really "ain't" all that bad.

Just my 2 c's.

Bejay

Like denninmi says, you can produce all your food if you want to put that many hours of work in.

I grow a lot of our fruit and as the trees and berry plants mature, I will be producing all of our fruit.

I buy veggies that are cheap and grow stuff that is either expensive or impossible to buy with good flavor. I also buy stuff that we don't eat a lot of. No point in growing anything that isn't going to be eaten.

I think that the preserving is more time consuming than the growing. I am currently dealing with lugs and lugs of peaches. It's a good thing they don't all come ripe the same day. I work on peaches until I am tired and them do it again the next day.

2 lugs of peaches dried, 2 lugs baked into desserts and frozen, 2 lugs of prepared pie filling frozen, 2 lugs of raw frozen, several lugs eaten fresh, over the sink, 2 more lugs to go. I'm tired of peeling peaches.

Young strawberries are producing just right for breakfast every day. We stand by the strawberry bed and eat them as we pick them. Next year I will be freezing and drying strawberries. At least they don't have to be peeled.

I like to walk out to the garden and pick stuff for a green salad just as I need it. That means planting must be staggered all season.

You have to balance the hours vs the benefit. Remember that pioneer women produced everything their families needed and they were dead by the age of 30 from over-work.

I'll grow pretty much anything my small space allows.

I can't remember the last time I bought okra, tomatoes, and especially peppers in the summer. By the time friend's squash harvests peak I have no trouble getting those for free.

The only stuff I don't grow and probably never will solely based on cost vs. return are onions, potatoes, and garlic. I understand some people love their expensive-in-store fingerling potatoes or like non-common garlic, but I'm not one of those people.

I'm ready to have more room for greens, beans, and peas, though. Well, I could do pole beans, but they're cheap locally compared to the limited space I have.

I very much look forward to having enough space to grow expansive seasonal selections.

I tend to look at this question in a big picture way: how many calories of food do I produce compared to the amount I consume. Most of my production is fruit, pecans, melons, and sweetcorn. So I have a lot of fruit for sale at the farmers market. But I buy greens, tomato products, cereals, and grains.

I think I produce more calories than I consume. But I only know one other person at the local farmers market that I could say the same about. Producing more than you consume and selling or utilizing it in an efficient manner is a big job. That's why I'm not optimistic about the grow your own movement making a big dent in US food needs. JMO

I try to focus on vegetables that are either expensive at the store, way-better-tasting at home, or on the "Dirty Dozen" list for chemicals and such. (Potatoes are the exception--always on that list, but I won't be growing them again anytime soon--way too much work for too little return!)

I don't have hours available for endless preserving, so I work with what I have at any particular time. I use seasonal greens for meals, so lettuce during spring and fall; swiss chard during summer; and kale, arugula, and corn salad during the winter. That also means less produce bought at the store... we just don't have tomatoes on our winter salads!

I also focus on stuff that's easy to preserve. Winter squash needs no work at all. Peppers just get sliced and bagged for the freezer, and often still taste crunchy when I thaw them during the winter. Beans are blanched and frozen in bags. Tomatoes are quartered and roasted with olive oil, skins slip right off, and they get frozen as well.

Unfortunately I don't have space for fruit trees, although I'm still hoping to squeeze in one or two small ones and a grapevine this fall.

t-bird; I would say 40-50% not from any great work of putting up stores but from growing all year long. In the fall I move my gardening into the kitchen and grow under florescent shop lights and cfl's.(compact florescent lamp's) I have seedlings started for the winter garden and have grown lettuce all summer long inside on a 1x4 foot shelf with a twin bulb 32 watt fixture with t-8 tubes. as it cools I will be ramp up the power and increase the size of the garden. Last year I harvested 2 buttercrunch heads two Swiss chard servings and two servings of pock choi per week on 258 watts of power and 8 square foot of space this year I plan to double that. oh and the choi grew all winter, transplanted into the garden this spring and produced some nice meals until it went to seed in late June

Curt

Wow, Dennis, I had no idea you were such a food-producer! I don't produce nearly as much, but I also don't go out to eat ever. Regarding the fresh out-of-season stuff - like tomatoes - I simply don't have them unless mine or at least local.

In winter my fresh veg is mostly storage crops and some frozen, all either my own or grown down the road. raw cabbage for salad; potatoes, parsnip, carrot, winter squash and etc. This year my foray into sweet potatoes is looking good, which will be a very welcome addition. I am self-sufficient on fresh greens for 8-9 months of the year and then switch to the cabbages stored outside which I get from my local CSA grower. I eat a lot of stuff made from grain maize which I grow and store, and I freeze quite a bit fresh on the cob (starting on that task tomorrow). I make a lot of applesauce from apples I pick. I should get the seconds tomatoes from the local farm and put them up, but I have been lazy on that. In fact I don't eat much tomato sauce anymore.

I'll say 2/3's...

My sweet peppers didn't produce...and I still go to the market for onions, celery, garlic, shallots and leeks. I grew fingerling potatoes, so I needed to fill in with Yukons and bakers. Also...I still buy green onions.

I only eat vegetables from my garden, all months except March, with the help of hoop houses and root cellar. but I am not self-sufficient with potatoes, tomato sauce, and carrots.

I am debugging new beds, so it is possible that next year it will be 100%/12. I am somewhat strict in eliminating crops that do not grow without much attention, or that do not preserve easily.

If you garden a lot in the Midwest, (I also get all my grass fed meat from two local farmers, as well as local venison in exchange for wine and veggies), keep in mind that this used to be the Goiter Belt. Vegetables are an important iodine source most everywhere in the world, but here the soil has none. Use iodized salt, not the fancier sea salts which have some iodine but not enough.

I still buy some fruits, root vegetables, corn, and some winter veggies/melons since my garden is not large enough. The last time I bought any veggies other than these were... over two months ago?

But other than those, I have more than enough for own consumption during spring/summer/fall. I also giveaway to neighbors and friends, but they don't consume half as much vegetables. I think my diet became healthier since I started growing my own vegetables.

Probably about half.

Not very impressive since i have the advantage of a 12 month growing season but i'm chipping away at it. I'll be planting more onions and shallots this year but not garlic which won't bulb. I'd also like to get some strawberries in as well as some ginger. My breadfruit tree should start producing in a few years and will be a huge source of carbohydrates. I'm hoping the avos and clementines will come on line in another year or two. i meant to try corn this year but ran out of time and space.

Now that i have a producing vegetable garden i really dislike buying vegetables from the grocery store. As a result i see a shift in the way i cook. Used to be that i selected a dish and shopped for the ingredients. Now i cook from the garden. I wish i had better words to describe this because it has been incredibly satisfying to me.

So impressed with the zone 5/6 gardeners who are able to produce so much of their own food! Curt, it sounds like you have come up with a particularly unique solution.

Well, what can I say. It's either a really involved hobby or OCD!

Seriously, I only do this because I really enjoy doing it and the lifestyle, and first and foremost because I love to cook, so I really enjoy having my own produce.

I've grown pretty much every edible thing that will grow here outdoors or indoors in a container. Last year, my lemon tree had 19 large lemons that kept me in fresh lemons from about Christmas to about mid-March.

A lot of things are fun to grow but are NOT practical in terms of the work, such as most grains and dried beans.

I loved the comment about pioneer women dying at 30 from hard labor. Actually, with all due respect to the OP on that one, I think that hard work actually keeps you young, it's the folks that lay on the couch watching movies all day while snacking that are going to die young.

Dennis, I find that beans are pretty easy to harvest and thresh compared to the small grains - those are quite labor-intensive. Maize is also very easy in comparison. Cooking in hardwood-ash makes the nutrients fully available.

Not enuf in my book. But I am not as great grower. Maybe 60- 75% of my salad stuff and 50% of the rest.

"I am debugging new beds, so it is possible that next year it will be 100%/12"

You're my hero Glib! How much gardening footage are you using for this? How much sq ftage under your hoop house?

I'll be doing a semi A frame this year for the first time-if I can get myself together in time.

"If you garden a lot in the Midwest, (I also get all my grass fed meat from two local farmers, as well as local venison in exchange for wine and veggies), keep in mind that this used to be the Goiter Belt. Vegetables are an important iodine source most everywhere in the world, but here the soil has none. Use iodized salt, not the fancier sea salts which have some iodine but not enough"

Excellent point! Do you think adding seaweed emulsion to the soil changes this?

"I loved the comment about pioneer women dying at 30 from hard labor. Actually, with all due respect to the OP on that one, I think that hard work actually keeps you young, it's the folks that lay on the couch watching movies all day while snacking that are going to die young."

I so agree on that one. I do genealogical research and actually people lived just as long back then as they do now.........only not as many of them. LOL. IOW life expectancy really hasn't increased, it's just that a larger proportion of the population reaches it. I have numerous ancestors who were born in the early 1800s who lived to be nearly a hundred. What cut them down were risks associated to childbirth, lack of antibiotics, no vaccines to prevent epidemics, high accident rates and early infant mortality. Hard work didn't do it.

Agreeing with dennimi too in that it's all about lifestyle. What I am obliged to buy in a store are things like tea, coffee, rice and salt. What I choose to buy in a store are the commodities I don't want to produce like grain products and milk. I could produce those too, but grains are a pain in the butt, and my husband has resisted me for years over getting into diary products. I also buy most of my own oils, but wouldn't need to. Much of our own sweeteners, but again wouldn't need to. On my ex in-laws farm we used our own sorghum or honey, and there are also maple trees everywhere for sugaring. That's a choice. And smoked meats are also a choice because you can even do that yourself too, if you are bent in that direction.

I have my own nut trees. I have my own fruit trees. I have my own bramble patches. I have my own vegetable garden. I have my own chickens. My family has its own hogs and beef. We butcher.

As for salads off season..........until I was nearly an adult we didn't eat salads off season. Winter meant switching fresh salads to slaws. Cabbage keeps fine in a cool environment and you could incorporate things like apple sauces into winter menus.

It's all a matter of choices and lifestyles and preferences for most of us and I produce most of our vegetables myself and also put them up. I find that many people have very different eating styles now than when I was a youngster. Cooking from basic ingredients is a necessary part of being able to supply a large percentage of your own food. And I also like to cook. It goes hand in hand.

The actual percent... I'm not sure. During the summer 100% with the exception of dried beans and rice. I have a surplus of fruits in the summer. I do eat at least something from the garden all year long with stored winter squashes and pressure-canned beans and tomatoes, and canned peaches some years. Stored apples are gone before Spring. I'm figuring my total produce consumption is 50% home-grown.

For veggies, probably 90%. The only things I really buy are onions. I mostly buy fruit (melons, berries, peaches) at the farmer's market. I don't generally eat fruit that's not in season, so I just don't eat much fruit in the winter. I laughed at the person who said they have to buy bananas, pineapple, mango, etc. You don't "have" to buy those things really.

If I had more space (I have an apartment in Chicago) I'd have fruit trees and a melon patch.

This thread is exposing the reality that it is more practical to eat what grows rather than attempt to grow exotic or semi-exotic produce items to eat. For example, it's a lot more feasible to produce and store wheat in a temperate climate than to produce hot-house toms in the off season, even though there are easier grains than wheat.

That is the key rule, we can probably all agree (if we've tried it): eat those crops that are well-adapted to your climate. If you love a typical 'tossed' salad, and you find you can only produce 50% of the stuff that goes in it, the problem is the salad, not the climate or even one's gardening skills most likely.

No need to get scurvy because you can't produce big perfect bell peppers any season nor tomatoes in january. Walking onions really do grow on trees, as it turns out (aka the 'tree' onion), and they grow themselves. There is a naturalizing loose-leaf brassica cultivar for any situation; if carrots don't thrive try parsnip; too far south for irish potatoes means sweet potatoes or in some climates they overlap; skip summer lettuce for most parts of north america - in my case means I don't eat lettuce salads other than spring/early summer.

The point is there are always a few crops that do well with little effort in any climate and season.

pnbrown right on. What a good thread. One thing I would like to point out is the real cost of growing under lights in cold weather. Where I live we are heating our houses by October so all the energy produced by lights is used by the plants or is used up as heat. so the cost of lights is the difference between the cost of btu's for house heat minus the cost of btu's for 110 volt electricity. Not the cost of electricity in kilowatts as some might assume. Just wanted to let you know how frugal I am.

Curt

t-bird, I do not know if seaweed will make much of a difference unless it is in industrial amounts. After all we put in the garden maybe 3 to 10 times the nutrients that are in the food we grow. So to get iodine in your veggies would be a big expensive job. salt, or canned sardines, are a lot cheaper.

I have 2100 sqft all told, but that includes the paths, so maybe 1500 sqft. I am going to have 7 4X12 beds under tunnels (you have to crawl in, or open the side), with radicchio, two varieties of kale, lots of collard, lacinato, arugula, to be closed during the Thanksgiving weekend and eaten starting on Thanksgiving.

plus another tunnel on a bed excavated to be a root cellar for fennel, cardoon, rutabaga, and cabbage (squash, potatoes, garlic and onions come inside right away).
I harvest herbs in July and September, and either dry them or grind them fresh with 1/3 salt and keep them in the freezer. So I am fully herb-sufficient (and also herbal tea sufficient).

The functional garden will have a lot of greens and root crops. They are, as a group, nutritious, not troublesome, and easy to store, so I am agreeing with pnbrown and others here. People find it slightly unpalatable that I have 40 chard plants, but I eat it a few times a week for five months, and do really no work for it. Same for lettuce, I spend April-July patiently chewing on huge bowls of lettuce. That, too, requires no work.

I just wish I could find a way to produce, say, 100 lbs of paste tomatoes from one bed, and 1lb of potatoes per square foot from some shady beds.

Wow - sounds great Glib!

I have only 3 larger beds, 5x10, 4x10, 4x10, plus an herb garden and mint patch and a few smaller beds.

I want to build a new 2x10 bed, with posts and do a quick one sided A frame with plastic and have the 2x10 bed with a row cover and then in the low parts have various containers....but it may have to wait until next year.

"patiently chewing on huge bowls of lettuce". That evokes such a familiar memory, Glib! My daughters sometimes(?) think I've lost my mind with the massive amounts of stuff I will eat when it is in perfect bursting fresh condition. lettuce is a big one.

Which brings us to another aspect of growing your own, or eating local: binge eating, or put more accurately, glutting. I think humans evolved to glut - it is the most convenient way to store high-quality perishable food, after all. I think of it as storing through the rest of the year. Once the peak spring lettuce is turning bitter, I will pretty much not have lettuce again til ten and a half months later. Nor do I crave it. Same for the perfectly ripe toms, melons, pod peas, snap beans, shelly beans, and other treats that have a fairly short season and are not worth eating unless local and super-fresh. I absolutely will not waste my valuable stomach-space on crap produce.

Today and yesterday each I glutted a whole medium size melon (I gave everyone fair warning, but people just don't move fast enough!), unusually good this year. I might have one or two more and that will be it for a year.

Yes, PN, I always ate a lot of veggies, but once I started my first garden, it went beyond that. Surely I eat over 300 lbs of veggies in the course of the year (and much more fruits).

As I have posted elsewhere, I now share the garden with another family, and it was a very good idea for a number of reasons. The interesting part was seeing how they evolved from a typical american family to true herbivores in about a month this spring, as three beds of bountiful lettuce became ready. Huge bowls for them too, every day, and they were quite taken by it. The wonder of truly prime veggies.

Still, my family (good veggie eaters both) picks on me often. A week ago I ate two pounds of mixed string beans in a sitting. That showed me my limit is at one pound, but no ill effects really. Like you, in a month I will be off beans until next June. I will eat anything in season and be thankful for it.

This is a fascinating thread. I only cook for my husband, my 81 year old mother in law and me. I have 250 square feet of raised bed space and for the past two years, I have harvested fresh vegetables from them every single week of the year. I do virtually no canning (tomatoes being the exception) and only freeze fruit. We have adjusted our diet to eat whatever is in the garden at the time. We love it. You don't get so tired of the same old thing year round. Anything is a treat when it only comes to the table for part of the year. All that being said, I probably produce only about half of our fresh food, but I can report that my grocery bills have fallen $20 to $30 a week since I started doing this. I don't think that we have to produce ALL our food to help, though I certainly do admire those of you who do. Oh, and this summer, I have sent home food every single week with my housekeeper who feeds three children solely cleaning houses. I think I'm happier about that than anything else.

P.S. I know it's weird to work so hard in the garden and pay someone to do housework. But as was stated above, there are only so many hours in the day, and I would WAY rather garden! :)

Donna,

Not weird at all... if I had the choice, I'd make the same one you did!

I agree with many of the statements made here.
We also eat from the garden and when in season. Lucky for us, the seasons here are long! We simply plan our meals around what the garden produces! I think this really simplifies life. Lettuces grace our table from December to June, tomatoes from July to December, cole crops are good from November until June. In the winter we eat peas and favas, in the spring runner beans, in the summer common beans, in the fall sometimes cow peas, sometimes limas. Carrots produce every month (but they are less tasty in the summer), beets most of the year, chard all the time. We grow all the herbs we use, but only have basil in the summer and cilantro in the winter.

Fruit is great, and even better now that we started growing strawberries. Our fruit production goes like this: December to May too much citrus! strawberries are producing most of the time, peaches in mid summer if the squirrels let us have some, figs in August and September, then some of the neighbor's grapes. We do buy some tropical fruit from time to time, bananas, mangos, papaya, we can't grow those too well. I also eat a lot of my preserved (dried) figs troughout the year.

So I think we produce 90% of the fruit and veggies we eat. We produce some potatoes, but need to buy some for part of the year. Same with onions. Garlic was a bust, must do something about it.

We grew corn a couple of years, no more. We are using the space to grow artichokes, better return on the investment! So we buy corn a couple of times a year. As far as other grains, I have tried growing amaranth for grain. No fun to harvest, but I like it as greens in the summer!

I grow way more than I need in season, and buy most of my produce during the winter. So what I really need to do is preserve more. Freezing would be easy, and was on my list for this year, but it's hard to get excited about freezing bags of kale and chard ... I'll probably put up 20 or 30 pounds of veggies before frost, and see if I use them this winter.

I like freezing prepared dishes; when I make a big moussaka, or beef stew, or Indian vegetable dish, it's fun to pull out a portion and pop it in the oven a few months later. I'm still trying to find a balance that will have me using frozen produce during the winter.

NYG, the way to freeze greens is to cook them down first, and also to mix them to improve the flavor. Of course, greens last in the garden until Christmas in Zone 6, at least the hardiest ones.