gemini://ur.gs/blog/2-per-cent/

Well, I'm rounding up a bit. My 2023 allotment plan was to grow around 10% of the family's calories; we're pretty much done harvesting for the year, and I have amassed ~43,000kcal over the year. That's about 22 person-days of calories - or 2% of the year's calorie requirement for the whole family. Pretty short of what I imagined was possible.

The aubergines massively under-performed compared to expectations, as did the sweetcorn, and that's the bulk of it. I had a bunch of unexpected additions - like the onions - and the fruit did very well - but it's hard to recover from your main crops producing just 20% of their potential.

The aubergines were badly affected by being planted out while it was still really too cold, fertiliser shortages, possibly being overwatered, and then being afflicted by spider mites. The sweetcorn were also planted too early, and germination was poor - I tried to recover from that by getting more in later, but come the final harvest there were a whole bunch of plants that hadn't managed to produce any ears. Around the middle of October, rats or mice found the plot and did some serious damage to the ears that were close to being ripe, as well. Lots of lessons for next year. I don't think I'll grow either of them next year.

The beans were *also* planted too early and failed to germinate (bit of a pattern forming, here), but I did manage to successfully recover from that by planting runner beans later, and we've got a whole load of them sat in the freezer. I'll definitely be planting again next year.

The tomatoes also did rather well, although they suffered a bit from being squashed all together in a single greenhouse - we'd benefit from having the same number of plants spread out over a larger area, I think. We didn't buy any tomatoes all summer, but we also didn't manage to preserve any for winter, so I'm back to buying them again now. It was a good 4 months though.

The squash was a little disappointing - we planted 9 seeds and got 8 of them - but it was no trouble all year long, and it stores easily. Absolutely delicious as oven-roasted wedges; we'll definitely be growing those again, but perhaps a better-yielding variety, and over a larger area.

The big surprise for me was just how much vegetable matter makes up this 2% - I harvested 125kg of stuff, and much of it came in waves. The freezer has loads of sweetcorn, raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb, currants, etc, sat alongside the beans. We didn't buy soft fruit or tomatoes all summer, and we've got enough stuff frozen that we're likely to still be eating some of it come spring. At one stage I actually got tired of eating raspberries! Very much a nice problem to have, of course, but it does point to the solution not being "just grow more of the same stuff". We need to grow more different things, instead.

There's some stuff still to come up in the allotment - I've got a good bed of leeks, some rather sad-looking broccoli, and carrots that may be ready for xmas. None of it will contribute substantial calories, though.

I've also got some crops going in for next year now - things that can overwinter. Around 100x garlic and 500x onions are being planted right now; I'm also considering an overwinter crop of broad beans. These are all going on land that sat idle last year, but there's risk in overwintering them - they might rot if it's too wet, or fail to grow much if it's too cold. If it goes well, though, I'll have freed up the space I used to grow onions and broad beans this year, for something else next year. There's kohl rabi for an early spring vegetable, for instance.

One big thing we could do to improve calories out would be to get a few chickens for eggs and meat, but we're still on the fence about that for now; you can skip the odd day with plants, but you can't really do that with animals. Overall thoug, I do feel like this year was successful, and I'm definitely motivated to get more going in 2024. There's something very wonderful about feeding yourself like this.