What Is Self-Sufficient Gardening And How To Get Started

With grocery prices rising, more and more gardeners are interested in growing their own produce. Sometimes referred to as self-sufficient gardening, the rising trend of planting a veggie garden that meets all or most of your household's produce needs for the year can help you save at the grocery story while enjoying the unbeatable taste of homegrown fruits and veggies.

When done right, growing a healthy garden can yield hundreds of dollars' worth of produce every year, with minimal annual expenses to maintain it. Potential cost savings aside, a self-sufficient garden can also improve the nutritional content of your food and lower your carbon footprint as you buy less imported produce. It also gives you more control over how your food is grown, washed, and stored, including which pesticides you use, if any, and how they're applied.

But getting it right takes a lot of planning and preparation. From calculating how much to plant of each species to figuring out the best way to harvest and store produce once its ripe, there's a lot to consider before you start scattering seeds on the ground. If saving money is one of your goals, it'll take even more planning and creativity to make sure your homegrown veggies don't end up costing more than store-bought produce. For gardeners who also have jobs, it's important to factor in how much time and effort you can realistically devote to gardening so you don't waste money planting more than you can manage during the growing season.

Self-sufficient — or self-reliant — gardening usually refers to the practice of growing as much food as a household consumes in a year as possible. It can also refer to a garden that uses minimal resources to grow that food. By planting the right mix of edible plants, you can grow all or most of the fruit, nuts, and veggies your family eats all year right in your backyard. And, by saving seeds, composting the inedible parts of the plant after harvest, and relying on non-chemical methods of pest control, you can do it without spending money on fertilizer, pesticides, or new seeds.

That homegrown food will be fresher and more nutritious than the produce you get at a grocery store. If you incorporate sustainable methods like composting and rainwater harvesting, you can also potentially save some money on your groceries each month. Aside from the benefits to your diet and wallet, self-sufficient gardening is also great for the environment.

According to one study, homegrown veggies generate about 2 kilograms (ca. 4 pounds) less emissions per kilogram (ca. 2 pounds) of produce compared to store-bought veggies. A diverse, sustainably-managed garden filled with edible trees, shrubs, and plants can also improve soil health and air quality, while providing habitats for beneficial insects and wildlife. It can also decrease storm water runoff.

The key to a self-sufficient garden is growing food that you will actually eat, so make a list of the fruits, veggies, nuts, and seeds you like. Then, estimate how many pounds of each your family eats in a year, including processed forms like tomato sauce, peanut butter, or jam. It'll be hard to come up with a precise number, but you just need a ballpark figure to use when deciding how many plants of each species to include.

Even with the right numbers, it's going to be hard to grow 100% of your produce in the first year. So, first focus on planting any trees or shrubs that will take a few years to get established. By planting typically high-priced items like hazelnuts, walnuts, cherries, and blueberries, you can enjoy a fresh harvest every year without the work or resources that often go into an annual veggie bed that needs to be replanted every season.

Aside from edible trees and shrubs, some of the easiest foods to grow in your garden include potatoes, lettuce, and tomatoes. If these are on your list, they're good crops to start with while you're still getting the hang of vegetable gardening. You might also include plants like strawberries, beans, or culinary herbs that are both ornamental and edible so that you can transform your grass into an edible lawn while still maintaining a traditional aesthetic.

With the right layout and techniques, you can grow a surprising amount of fruits and veggies no matter how much space you have. The key is to practice vertical gardening and succession planting. Vertical gardening can include planting trees or shrubs that produce food themselves while also serving as support for vining plants like melons, squash, and beans. It can also include trellises and other supports that allow you to grow those vining plants without taking up much ground space.

Another way to use vertical space is to create your own patio garden or balcony garden by stacking multiple containers onto a tiered stand or even mount them to a wall or fence. You could even transform a sunny wall in your apartment into a green wall filled with strawberries, salad greens, miniature tomatoes, peppers, and herbs.

Meanwhile, succession planting refers to planting crops in the same garden at different times. Most annual veggies can be classified as cool-season or warm-season crops. While exact planting and harvesting dates depend on your climate, you generally plant cool-season crops in the fall or late winter to harvest in spring. Right after harvesting those, plant your warm-season crops that will be ready to harvest in fall. A similar technique works for fast-growing crops, like arugula or radishes. These can be ready to harvest in as little as 20 days, so you can reserve a smaller plot in the garden where you plant multiple batches in a single growing season.

To maximize savings potential, you want a garden that produces as much as possible while costing as little as possible in terms of time and money. One of the most cost-effective designs to accomplish that is a food forest. Forest gardens, one of the biggest backyard trends of 2025, are a great way to fill your yard with an abundance of fruits, veggies, and nuts while minimizing or even eliminating the amount of time and money spent on watering, fertilizing, or caring for each crop.

The multi-layer design includes trees, shrubs, and ground cover plants arranged in a way that everything works together to form a self-sustaining ecosystem. You can incorporate edible species in every layer, including fruit or nut-producing trees and shrubs, edible ground cover plants, and root vegetables to pack as much produce into every square foot as possible. Once established, all you have to do is go out and harvest your food when it's ripe.

Another trick for keeping yields high and costs down is composting all of the plant material in your garden. After harvesting those tomatoes, put the leaves and stalks in the compost. After plucking all those melons off their vine, compost the vine. Not only are you generating free compost, but you're also reducing nutrient loss by returning valuable nutrients to the soil to be used by next year's crops. Finally, buy or DIY your own rain barrels so that you can irrigate your garden with free rainwater.

One of the most common mistakes gardeners make is planting more than they can manage. It's easy to stick a bunch of seedlings in the ground, but you need to factor in the time spent watering, weeding, and inspecting your plants as well as the time it will take to harvest, store, and preserve them. A related mistake is not having a plan for using or storing your harvest.

If you grow a year's supply of produce, you need to have a plan to make sure your harvest can last through the year without spoiling. That might mean spending a weekend processing most of those tomatoes into big batches of marinara, pizza sauce, and tomato paste. Alternatively, you might plan to spend a day washing and dicing up fruits and veggies so they're ready to freeze, pickle, or turn into jam.

Finally, don't make the mistake of waiting too long to protect your crops from critters with fencing, nets, or cages. Over the long term, however, it's important to share your space with wildlife. Birds might try to feast on your berries, but they also eat the pests that can decimate your crops. Tricks for coexisting include leaving some of your crops unprotected, planting other things that local wildlife find more appealing, or even just regularly supplying bird seed in another part of your garden. By providing easier-to-access alternatives to your protected crops, they won't have as much reason to find ways around your cages or nets.