Modern Victory Gardens: Victory Garden Plans
Since I posted it back in February, my article on Survival Gardening has received a lot of attention. I’ve noticed many beginning gardeners are looking for more ideas on victory gardens and victory garden plans. This article will help you out if you don’t know where to start or which crops are most important to grow.
This is a sample victory garden plan emphasizing the survival crops I talked about in my previous article. Beyond just a vegetable garden, these crops will give you lots of calories for your space, helping you to grow a larger percentage of your family’s food. In these uncertain times, it’s a great way to become less dependent on the grocery store and supply chain. It will also help you save money on your grocery bill.
This is what our family does to affordably feed a family of six a healthy diet!
Victory Garden Plans
Top Plants for Victory Gardens
Our family grows a lot of these plants for our winter storage. You’ll notice many of the vegetables included can be stored in a cool room or garage, without the need for any special preservation. The most important thing is to grow what you will actually eat, so feel free to change up this plan to suit your family!
How Much Space Do You Need for Victory Gardens?
Honestly it’s really hard to set a certain amount of space for victory gardens. That’s because the quantity of food you’ll be able to grow in a certain garden spot varies so much.
Are you a beginning gardener? Do you have poor soil? How long is your growing season? All these factors will drastically affect your victory garden yields.
To get the best idea of how much space you need, you really need to just start growing and keep notes.
But to get you started, I’ll share the stats for one of the gardens we’ve had.
Last year we had two separate gardens we shared with four families. The total garden space was about 1/4 acre and fed 12 people. This included a wide variety of all the vegetables we could eat and preserve, 1200lbs of winter squash, 500lbs of potatoes, sweet corn and popcorn, enough root vegetables for winter and berry bushes. It didn’t include our space for fruit/nut trees and we only grew fresh green beans, not dried that year (since we had a dairy animal, chickens and animals for meat, the protein from beans wasn’t a priority). We had 97 days between frosts that summer and most of the garden was established garden space with good soil.
Section 1: Fruit and Nut Trees/Berry Bushes
Unless you live in a short-term rental, productive trees and berry bushes are an excellent way to grow food on autopilot. Even if you just have a small yard, these can easily be incorporated into your landscape as edible ornamentals.
Most trees take at least a few years to bear fruit, but full size trees can yield hundreds of pounds of fruit once established. Berry bushes on the other hand, such as strawberries and raspberries, can give a good harvest the same year or following year after being planted.
Fruit is a great choice for picky eaters and a fun treat for victory gardens!
Section 2: Squash and Pumpkins
While summer squash and zucchini are a prolific addition to your garden if you like them, we really emphasize winter squash in our own garden. Winter squash are easy to grow, not requiring a lot of weeding or care.
Hundreds, or thousands of pounds can be grown in a backyard, and they can store all through the winter in a cool spare room or garage. This makes them an excellent choice for victory gardens!
We also grow a lot of winter squash for our livestock, and hulless pumpkins for pumpkin seeds.
Some good choices that produce and store well include Hubbard, Banana Squash, Jarrahdale Pumpkin, Cinderella Pumpkin, Marina di Chiogga, Long Pie Pumpkin and Buttercup.
We suggest allowing 1/4 of your vegetable area for winter squash in victory garden plans.
Section 3: Your Favorite Vegetables
This section is whatever summer veggies your family enjoys, or vegetables you want to can. We suggest allowing 1/4 of your vegetable area for these vegetables in victory garden plans
Some ideas include:
- Sweet corn
- Tomatoes
- Peppers
- Lettuce
- Spinach, Kale, or other salad greens
- Radishes
- Shelling or Snow Peas
- Broccoli
- Cauliflower
- Cabbage or Kohlrabi
- Herbs
Be sure to grow food your family likes!
Section 4: Root Vegetables
Root vegetables are an important part of victory garden plans, providing fresh food even in the dead of winter.
Our favorites include carrots, parsnips, beets, onions and garlic.
Garlic is usually planted in the fall and harvested in early summer. Depending on the variety, it will keep up to a year at room temperature in your home. Onions will keep anywhere from a month to most of the winter at room temperature, depending on the variety. Look for storage types when selecting seeds or sets.
Carrots, parsnips and beets can be left in the ground all winter in much of the world. Parsnips are the most cold hardy, surviving temps of -20 Fahrenheit in our Montana gardens. We’ve also found that these three root veggies will store all winter in an extra refrigerator loosely packed in recycled plastic produce bags. A root cellar or crawl space is also a viable option for storing root crops.
More root vegetables you might grow if your family likes them include turnips, rutabagas, winter radish and celeriac. These are an important part of victory gardens that supply fresh food in the off season when nothing will grow outside.
Section 5: Potatoes
Potatoes are a huge part of our winter diet (especially for my husband who gets tired of vegetables, and would argue that this is the most important crop we grow!). Like winter squash, they are low-maintenance and will last many months in a cool part of your home, as long as they are covered so they don’t get any light.
While it varies with the actual variety, we’ve found that reds are the shortest lived and are best used within a couple months. Yellows last around three months, blue/purples 4 months, and russets 6 months. This is at room temperature stored in closed boxes in the coolest part of our house.
Potatoes provide a lot of calories, including some protein. This makes them a vital part of victory gardens! For the most flavorful and nutritious potatoes, grow them in an area that gets just a little water.
Section 6: Beans
Unless you have backyard chickens or other livestock, beans are an important protein source. These are probably the most work for the smallest yield of all the crops I’ve talked about. If you do have livestock, you might want to skip beans altogether in your victory garden plans, like we did last year. Another option is to stock up on dried beans in bulk (I’ve found the best prices for organic beans with free delivery from Azure).
If you do decide to grow dried beans as a protein source, you can actually plant dried beans from your cupboard to get started! There are also some great dual-purpose beans out there, such as Black Valentine, Dragon Tongue or Jacob’s Cattle. When growing dual-purpose beans, you can harvest the first pods as green beans, and let the rest of the pods mature and dry out.
Your Victory Garden
Above all, be sure that you grow foods your family will actually eat! Hopefully this article has given you some helpful ideas for what to grow this year, and your own victory garden plans!
You can read more about these plants, as well as the history of victory gardens here: Survival Gardening.
You can find excellent quality seeds with the best customer service and free shipping here: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I am not sponsored by Baker Creek and get my seeds from many different sources, but they are still my favorite!
And if you are new to gardening, I highly recommend you get one of these reference books to have on hand:
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