How much space do you need to grow a regenerative garden? Not much. Any little bit of land will do. And you don’t even need to “own” it. You can become a steward of land in many ways. 

  Many people have all the space they need already in their suburban yard. A regular lot usually has plenty of space to grow a ton of vegetables, keep small livestock such as chickens, ducks, quail, or rabbits for eggs or meat, herbs for tea and medicine, flowers for beauty, and calorie-rich crops such as beans, squash, and potatoes. 

In our experimental year of eating all local food, we grew as much as we could on our own 9,000 square foot lot. With relatively little existing gardens, we ramped up production in one year to harvest over 1,600 pounds of food between us and our tenants downstairs. 

While this was not enough to supply all our food needs, it was a huge percentage of what we ate through the year. And our gardens were not maxed out. The apple trees and other fruit trees hadn’t even started producing yet. Our berry bushes were young and not yielding much. 

The limiting factor in being able to produce more land was not space, it was time to build it out, manage it, and let it mature. 

After our year of eating local food we continued to grow and eat much of our food from our garden. We harvested more fruit and berries. And everything was much easier because we knew how to do it. 

You don’t need to own property in order to garden and develop a relationship with land. I have been re...