My Journey to Self-Sufficiency on 720sqm 🌿 (What Actually Reduces Our Grocery Bill)

I've been asked a lot recently if I'm going to be doing anything different in the garden, to build on my self-sufficiency with what is going on in the world right now. And it's a really good question, and it's made me stop and take a really hard look at my garden. Because although I'm growing a lot of food here, it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm reducing my grocery bill, because in order to reduce my grocery bill, one of two things need to happen. I either have to grow the food that I'm eating, or I need to change what I eat based on what I'm growing. And I'm definitely changing what I eat based on what's ripe and ready and available in the food forest. But there's also two of us in our household, so the groceries aren't just based on what I'm eating, it's also based on what my partner's eating. So I decided to do a bit of an audit on what we eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and if I'm growing those things in the garden, or if there are any gaps in what I can plant next. If you're new here, hi, I'm Holly, and over the past 10 years I've been converting my Starting with a hot, dry sandpit, I've been tackling one project, one plant at a time. For reference, Perth in Western Australia is about a zone 10b, and we have long, hot, dry summers and short winters, meaning we can grow fresh food all year round if we can master the challenging heat of summer. My goal isn't to be completely self-sufficient, but I do want to maximise the space that I have, and be able to pick fresh fruit and veggies 365 days a year. I lean heavily on perennial plants to survive our summers, and grow over 200 types of edible plants to have a diverse system that provides year-round harvests. Hey young guy, what are you doing? Just like finding passion fruits. These guys are definitely part of the plan, because as much as I love to add random new exciting things to my garden, it's also important to take a look back and see what we're eating, and if there are any gaps. So for breakfast, there were two very distinct options. For me, I'm a toast girl, I love to have pretty much anything on toast, but some of my go-tos are avocado, tomato, cottage cheese, eggs, and lots of herbs from the garden. And for my partner, he is a smoothie guy, he loves a smoothie in the morning, and he has a whole bunch of different fruits in there, things like berries, bananas, papaya. He also really loves passion fruit in his smoothie, which I find a little bit weird, but anyway, each to their own. And also yogurt, milk, nuts and seeds, and some protein. So those are sort of the main two breakfasts that we sort of gravitate towards. So out of that, what am I growing, and what gaps do I have? So for me, I already have a bunch of avocados planted in the garden, and I'm trying to get varieties that extend my harvest, so I have early season, mid season, and late season avocados, so I can try and get avocados for the most amount of time I can during the year, and that's going to be great to be used on my toast. I can also use avocado as a butter substitute in a lot of different ways. Tomatoes, obviously, that's seasonal. All the herbs, the society garlic flowers are delicious on toast with some avocado. And then smoothie-wise, I have actually only recently added bananas to my garden, so I now have a whole bunch of different varieties I'm testing out to see which ones I like best, and which ones grow the best in my garden. So I have the dwarf cavendish, behind me I have the plantains, which have the first bananas on it, and then I have blue java, and out the front we have dwarf ducas and red daca. So I have a lot of different bananas, I feel like that one has ticked off. Although I don't have a lot of banana production at the moment, I feel like I've done what I can in terms of having bananas. And so far, I feel like I've been waiting a very long time for these dwarf cavendish to fruit, so fingers crossed, we'll get to try them soon, and avocados. The next thing is other fruits that can go in smoothies. So I have a whole bunch of fruits that can definitely go in smoothies. Things like the passion fruits, my priorities will be to get a whole bunch of these when they are ripe and ready, and put them into ice cube trays and freeze them, so that he can have basically a full smoothie shelf in the freezer of all the fruits that can go in a smoothie. So during summer I'm going to have all the stone fruit, things like apricots, peaches, nectarines, any of those excess fruits, I'm going to now really think about prioritising, chopping them up and putting them in the freezer for part of the smoothie selection. And in terms of berries, I feel like that's a little bit of a gap, I do have blueberries, and I have a blackberry in a pot. Things like strawberries and dragon fruit when I get around to building a trellis, and of course mangoes. And so I'm already growing passion fruits, and I have quite a few different vines. This one is definitely going to be my main producing vine, and in terms of smoothies, this plant is definitely going to be up there with one of the top contenders for being very productive. I'm going to be able to freeze all the excess ripe papayas and put that in the smoothie shelf. Other things we've got in here are the nectarine, apple, we've got two apricots, and again I think those will be really delicious, but I do have another plan for the apricots that we're going to talk about further along in the video. Other things that I have in this garden are my kiwi berries and my kiwi fruit. So again, we're not short on fruit in this garden, that's definitely something I think I have pretty well sorted. Another thing that he likes to add in his smoothies is some sort of sweetener, and at the moment he's using dates or maple syrup to sweeten his smoothies, and I think part of that is probably the fruits that he's using aren't as sweet because they're store-bought, so if I can start utilising a lot more of the fruits that I'm growing for smoothies, I feel like that's going to add a huge amount of natural sweetness, but I also am thinking of other ways that I can add that, is sugarcane, which is where most of the world's sugar comes from, and so I've got some sugarcane plants that I'm planning on putting in the garden and then I can sort of make sugar syrups or even sugar to have some natural sweetness. Another option for natural sweetener is these here, so these are sapodilla, which apparently taste like brown sugar and pear, so they're very slow growing, but this is going to be one of my options for a sweetener. I've also got a few other passion fruits like this one here which is in a container, a seed-grown red Panama, that I'm going to graft onto my one in the ground so I can get more varieties which can also mean that I can extend my growing season of passion fruit and have them available for as much of the year as I can. Another option that I also have is yellow figs, now if you've ever tried a yellow fig, they are so sweet, like exactly like honey, which is going to be perfect, so I've actually got nearly 15 different varieties of figs that I managed to purchase at an auction for about $40, and my plan with those is because I don't want to have 15 fig trees, is to multi-graft them all onto one, so I have this one fig tree with all the different flavours which will hopefully work out a treat. Next up we have lunch, and for lunches we tend to eat leftovers or salads. Salads and greens are probably one of the easiest things and definitely something that I feel pretty well prepared for, because not only do I have all my annuals for salad greens, I've also got a lot of perennials that grow all year round to produce spinaches that I can use in soups and stews and stir fries and curries, just even as a side dish with some sauces or some dressings, but I have been adding a few more to the garden. So throughout my garden I do have a lot of edible ground covers, and one of the edible ground covers I use is New Zealand spinach, and as you can see it's very lush and very productive, I'm never short of spinach, so between the New Zealand spinach, also sweet potato leaves, you can use those like a spinach, I've now also added longevity spinach to the to just add another option. So I now have longevity spinach popped in throughout different parts, because I'm hoping this is going to start taking up a little bit more of the gaps and I can fill them with greens. Another thing we love to use for lunches is wraps, so any of the leftovers from the night before, you can pretty much put anything in a wrap and it's easy, it's delicious and it's super quick, so that doesn't necessarily mean that I need anything extra to grow in the garden, but it is something that I'd love to experiment with. I have made wraps and like seaweed wraps out of spinach that were amazing, but there's so many other things that I'm growing in the garden that I could utilize and turn into wraps, as well as using basic flour and also making my own flour from the garden, which is something that has been on my list for a long time, to utilize the Queensland arrowroots and the sweet potatoes to make my own flour and therefore make my own wraps. But wraps don't even need to be something that I make, they can just be utilizing some of my larger leafy greens in the garden to use as wraps. Now for dinners we like to have a mix of either fresh salad greens, so things like lettuces, radishes, carrots, cucumbers when they're in season, tomato when they're in season, although this tomato that I didn't plant, self-seeded, is absolutely cranking in the middle of winter, so healthy, just letting it do its thing. A lot of annuals and then I mix in a few different perennials and herbs, so things like parsley and thyme, I use a lot of those in dressings, as well as mint, mint for the salad dressing. And then other greens that we've got during winter, we've got our spinaches, then we also have got things like cabbages, a lot of these are annuals, so I would love to be able to incorporate more perennial greens. Papayas are going to be able to be used as that, like I can use papayas in the salad as a carrot or I can use them cooked in stir fries and curries and soups, but I would like to add a few more perennials to the mix in terms of veggies. And another part of our dinners is some sort of carbohydrate, so we eat sweet potato a lot, also potatoes, roast veggies, and if not we'll add like rice or pasta. So I'm growing sweet potatoes but definitely not on a large enough scale to be self-sufficient at all, it's definitely a minor thing, so potentially creating some garden beds that are more for production in sweet potato rather than ground covers could be an option. I also want to ramp up my pumpkin growing again because I used to have a dedicated pumpkin patch, but we sort of took that over and turned that into the driveway food for us, which now has the papaya, the apricots, the kiwi berries, apples, all those things. I don't have a dedicated pumpkin patch anymore, so that is something that I'm going to be focusing on this season, is where can I grow a really good crop of pumpkins, because pumpkins are something that have their own natural storage, you can save them to use throughout the year, and you can use pumpkins in a whole lot of different ways in the kitchen. Other root veggies that I love to cook and use are things like beetroots, radishes, carrots obviously. One thing I'm definitely lacking is more sources of protein from the garden, so we've got our pigeon peas, but I think I need a few more spots of those because I'd love to be able to save them as a dried seed pod to be able to use more as a lentil, and experiment with that, and utilizing these to grow more beans and peas. So at the moment I do have some, I had some beans but they pretty much all got eaten, I've got a few left, but over here we've got the purple potted peas, so these are ones that I'm going to be able to save the peas from. I'm looking forward to trialing more of those out, so yeah, more protein types. Now snacks is another big one, we love a snack, and some of the things that we naturally tend to gravitate towards in terms of snacks are fresh fruit or dehydrated fruits. Now I like all the weird different fruits and that's why I have so many different varieties of fruit here in my suburban gardens. I now have, gosh, I have 120 fruit trees, but I have a lot more varieties because some of my fruit trees are multi-grafted. Look, I really like variety, so I'm definitely not stopping there. So I plan on doing a lot of dehydrated fruits and things like apricots are going to be one of those, maybe even turning my grapes when I get them into like sultanas, but the other half of this is my partner and he likes boring fruit, even feijoas. He's one of those weird kiwis that doesn't like feijoas, so he's not really that interested in all my weird fruits, things that I've got growing like longans and custard apples and the star fruits. He likes an apple or a pear, so that's something that I've started to sort of incorporate more into my garden design, because as much as it's great having all these weird and wonderful fruits, I do also need to think about the things that he's actually going to eat. I mean, an apple is always useful. And behind the scenes, he's put in a lot of work getting my projects off the ground in a way that I never could, so it's only fair he gets to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. But of course, you didn't think I was just going to get any boring apple, did you? I've got three apples. This one here is the red fleshed apple, so it's got, so it's red inside. Now I mean, these aren't very inspiring to look at right now, because they just look like dead sticks, but this apple is a variety that doesn't need any pollination. So this is going to be one that's really good if something happens to the bees, it's still going to be able to produce fruit. And for pears, I've gone with nashi pears, and I've got two different varieties of those at the moment, and the goal isn't to be completely self-sufficient. There are so many things that I'm either not able to grow here, or I just don't really want to. Like for example, I don't really want chickens, at least not here on this property, so eggs are something that I'm going to have to outsource. But really, my gardens have become so much more than self-sufficiency. I feel so honored and have extreme joy to see the wildlife frolicking and feeding on my garden, and people like you who are watching and have become part of the journey, taking inspiration from my garden to grow your own food in all different parts over the world. So if you've been wanting to reduce your grocery bill and grow more of the food that you actually eat, it could be a really good time to stop, take a bit of an audit of the meals that you're going to regularly, and what ingredients can you actually add to your garden.