Food Storage Friday: Five Ways to Get More From Your Garden

Today's Food Storage Friday focuses on a unique source of food storage: our gardens! I'm no expert gardener {you can see my garden updates here} but Brandy from The Prudent Homemaker is, and she graciously agreed to share some tips with those of us still learning!

Five Ways to Get More From Your Garden
A small backyard can’t possibly give you all the produce you need for the year—or can it? Here are five ways to get more from your garden, and keep you away from the produce department!

Make better soil

There is a saying in gardening that says that if you only have $1.00 to spend on a garden, you should spend .90 on dirt and .10 on seeds. Fertile soil is really important! What you already have in your garden may be great. Likewise, it may also be clay, be salty or sandy, or even caliche (which is like concrete; it’s what I have in Las Vegas). Amending your soil with composted manure (you can get sterile manure in bags; “sterile,” meaning it has been heated to kill all of the weed seeds) is an inexpensive way to add nutrients to your soil.

Also, worms are important! You can get more earthworms in your garden by picking up a container of earthworms from the fishing section of Walmart (hint: they’re in the fridge!) for about $5. Earthworm castings are great fertilizer.

Grow Up
You can get a lot out of a small garden if you grow vertically. Use walls and fences to your advantage by planting grapes and espaliered fruit trees on them. You can grow grapes and other fruiting vines over patios and arbors, providing shade to your yard and fruit for your table. Likewise, don’t be afraid to remove trees from your yard that don’t produce fruit. Those trees may be overshadowing your yard, making it difficult to grow food, or taking up space that could be used to produce food for your family.

Plant more fruits
So often, people till the earth or build a raised bed in a corner for their garden, yet they ignore the possibilities in the rest of the yard. Why not plant fruit trees, berry bushes, and vines? I have just under a quarter-acre lot, and yet I have 33 fruit trees (semi-dwarf and dwarf) in my backyard. My walls are covered in grapes, blackberries, and espaliered (growing flat on the walls) apple and pear trees. We have a constant supply of fresh fruit right in our backyard, which really rounds out our food storage . So far this year, we’ve harvested cherries, peaches, figs, apricots, plums, apples and blackberries; before the year is done we’ll have grapes, pears, pomegranates, lemons, grapefruit, and tangerines.

Plant among the flowers

Edible landscaping means you can have a beautiful garden that also provides food. Flowers and fruit trees grow together. With a first glance at my backyard, you wouldn’t think that most everything you see is edible. In just the small picture below, I have pomegranates, plums, artichokes, grapes, asparagus, pears, and lavender. The johnny jump-ups and roses are also edible (the foxglove, lilies, and ranunculus are not).

Don’t be afraid to plant some lettuce, swiss chard, or herbs in your front and backyard flower beds! Your neighbors probably won’t even notice, and you’ll get more to eat, using the space you already have.

Plant a Fall Garden
Just because the temperatures are getting cooler doesn’t mean the garden has to be done growing. Think of fall as a second spring. In late summer, plant more lettuce, spinach, radishes, turnips, and other cool-season vegetables that can grow quickly before your first frost comes. Turnips and parsnips don’t mind a light frost, and are even sweeter after one. If you live in a warmer climate, fall is your “spring.” You can plant in fall and harvest January-March.

Lastly, don’t forget to grow a variety of food! I grow quite a few things in the space that I have. Even though we’re living on our food storage, we’ve been eating artichokes and asparagus, blackberries and salad!

An almost forgotten means of economic self-reliance is the home production of food. We are too accustomed to going to stores and purchasing what we need. By producing some of our food we reduce, to a great extent, the impact of inflation on our money. More importantly, we learn how to produce our own food and involve all family members in a beneficial project.


We encourage you to grow all the food that you feasibly can on your own property. Berry bushes, grapevines, fruit trees—plant them if your climate is right for their growth. Grow vegetables and eat them from your own yard. ~Ezra Taft Benson, “Prepare for the Days of Tribulation,” Ensign, Nov 1980, 32

Brandy Simper gardens in the heat of the Las Vegas desert. Because of an unsteady (and sometimes non-existent) income, her family frequently goes months without going to the grocery store, so she keeps a well-stocked pantry and a garden. She writes about the food her family eats, sewing, gardening, frugality and homeschooling at The Prudent Homemaker.