Notes & Queries response: How big a garden would you need to be self-sufficient for a family of four?

How big a garden would you need to be self-sufficient for a family of four?

image generated by Craiyon

Behind a wooden garden fence, on the east side of the house where my parents used to live, there was a screen of mature trees. It was actually more of a small, well-organised wood, modelled on the layout of a commercial forest, but on a greatly reduced scale. The trees were planted in an orderly, four-by-four grid, well-spaced from one another, but with their leaf canopies merging together to form a single mass. I remember them always being there when I was growing up. They were still there when my parents sold the house.

My father did not like the trees. He said that they cast an unfavourable shadow over our home and garden. They cut off the morning light entirely during the gloomy winter months, when the sun remained low in the sky. During the Summer, the treetops delayed the arrival of the sunshine through our east-facing windows, and in our garden, by several hours. My father wanted to pay to have the wood cut down, but he could never identify the owner and so it remained as it was. On one occasion he was told, by a kindly city official, that the woodland was a seasonal anchor. The local farmers took note of which trees were in blossom and used this as a reference for the planting or harvesting of their crops. The wood could never be removed. No amount of bribery would change that.

The trees were all evergreens, though their bushy profile was similar to those deciduous varieties that lose their leaves during the Autumn, and are barren throughout the Winter. They were of four separate species.

In the Spring, the boughs of the four trees, that were lined up in a row nearest to the fence, were flushed with clusters of deep-pink blossom. My two brothers and I would gather it up off the ground and use it as confetti whenever we married one of the two girls who lived across the street, which for a time, we did at least once a week. When I was seven years old, the family of the girls suddenly moved away. We did not see them again, nor do I know what became of them. I stuffed the unscattered fistfuls of blossom confetti into the side pockets of an old pair of trousers and did not reach for them again until the Autumn.

My father had cultivated a wild mee mee hedge, that had been growing out of control along the bottom of the garden when he purchased the property. On the opposite side there was a lane. The sheep that got out of their paddocks, on the nearby small holdings, would sometimes end up snagged in the hedge, sometimes several feet off the ground with their legs feebly kicking, bleating plaintively, unable to escape. Under the terms of the law, any animal trapped in a boundary hedge became the property of the landowner. In the Spring we dined well on mutton and lamb. We sold the wool to a nearby textile factory. Eventually the law was changed in favour of the farmers. Any captive sheep had to be reported and returned to their former owners.

At the beginning of the Summer, the second line of trees were dappled with heads of pale pink blossom. My father returned from the bank where he had been attempting to secure a loan. On his way home he had seen the first of the ladle-lipped salmon, surging against the ocean-bound white-water, to their breeding grounds in the quiet upper reaches of the river. He unsealed the underground pipe in our backyard. For a short while, a dry streambed that we had disguised as a Zen garden was filled with a torrent of flopping fish – the polished silver of their scales seasoned with metallic greens and pinks. When my father judged that we had enough to last us, he re-stoppered our artificial tributary and concealed it underneath a pile of stones. We ate the cured fish over the rest of the season.

During the Spring and Summer, we were avid meat-eaters. Throughout the Autumn and Winter, we were vegetarians by necessity. By September, our supply of smoked fish began to run short. We had all grown sick of eating it anyway. The third line of trees were sown with a scattering of pale-yellow blossom.

As a family, we dragged the wreck of a dhow from the tideline of the third of the eight lakes. It was March,1986. At the beginning of the century, the lakes occupied the lands that surrounded the city. They have now all been absorbed into the sprawl of the buildings. In three instances, they have been greatly reduced in size and some of the land they occupied has been reclaimed for development.

The dhow was made from layers of cinnamon bark. We did not steal it. My father passed a bribe at the city hall and thereafter took possession of the wreck legally.

It was too cold to wear shorts. I was instead wearing my long trousers. I placed my wet hands inside the pockets to wipe them dry on the lining. They emerged coated in slimy brown petals. They clung to my flesh like a mottled skin graft. I scattered as many as I could onto the water. Those that did not wrap themselves around the shoreline pebbles were carried off as a decaying armada.

We laid the wrecked dhow in our garden, in the path of the prevailing wind. My mother and a grandmother pinned-up sheets around it to catch the cinnamon dust. A third grandmother, who could no longer walk, supervised from a kitchen chair that had been brought outside. We sold the salted cinnamon dust to restaurants and perfumeries. We exchanged it at the market for vegetables.

In December, there were pinpoints of snow in the air. They would not settle. The line of trees farthest from our house were spotted with white blossom. From a distance it resembled pools of dried candle wax. We dug a long trench in the dank shadow, next to the garden fence, unearthing several big heads in the process. My father made a careful note of where each of the enormous fungi were located, then we reburied all but one. We ate them as steaks, seasoned with our supply of cinnamon, and in winter stews. My father would never admit that the reason the fungi grew so large in our garden was on account of the permanent shade, cast by the neighbouring trees, that shrouded that area of the ground year round.

There was always a period of about a month – from the middle of December to the middle of January – when there was no blossom on any of the trees. The forces that had driven the seasons through the leaf canopies, like a flock of sheep, had descended the core of the trunk and plunged themselves deep into the root system. We held a family job at a warehouse, that we used to support ourselves and pay for food and other essential bills. It didn't matter who turned up for a shift as long as one of us did.

My mother finally managed to locate and retrieve my filthy pair of long trousers from the room that I shared with my brothers. I walked in on her, holding them upside down, out the window, with the pockets turned out and the last of the muddied Spring blossoms raining down.

I hope this is of help.

image generated by Craiyon

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This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 12th March, 2023.

The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.