How I'd Start Growing My Own Food If I Were Starting Over

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Want to know when I really found out I was a homesteader?

My then-fiancé and I were living in an apartment at the time, and I had no outdoor space for growing my own food.

But the apartment complex was surrounded by grass, and one of our neighbors had claimed a piece. There were tomato cages and some kind of squash sprawling out over the edge of the pavement.

I remember feeling this weird pang of jealousy every time I walked past it.

I’d been reading about homesteading for a while by then… permaculture blogs, seed catalogs, all of it. But that little scrappy garden is what made it click. If she can grow food in an apartment, what’s stopping me?

I didn’t actually start a garden at that apartment (life got in the way, as it does). But every single place I’ve lived since then has had one, including containers, a single raised bed I wasn’t sure got enough sun, four raised beds, in-ground beds, and now a whole permaculture design taking shape on our land here in Zone 4/5 New Hampshire.

So this is the post I wish I could hand my parking-lot-jealousy self. Ready to dive in?

Summary

If you’re standing where I was with no land, no experience, and a desire that wouldn’t leave you alone — here’s the short version: you don’t need much to start. You need to start where you are. I’ve gardened for free with cardboard and borrowed seeds, and I’ve built raised beds that cost more than the vegetables they’ll ever produce. Both were worth it, for different reasons. Below, I’ll walk through real costs, real timelines, the tools that actually earn their keep, and the full range of ways to grow your own food — gardens, livestock, bees, and beyond — plus where to start if all you’ve got is an apartment and a windowsill.

1. Take Stock of Where You Actually Are

Before you buy a single seed packet, figure out two things: where you are physically here and where you are in the process.

Are you renting or do you own? Do you have a yard, a balcony, or neither? None of these rule you out — I gardened in an apartment (well, sort of) and I’ve gardened at two different rental houses before coming back to my family home (on an acre).

Learn more about how I have homesteaded while renting and why it’s awesome!

If you ask me, you’re actually in a better place to succeed when you learn homesteading skills as you go, from wherever you already are.

Most of the people I’ve seen quit homesteading are the ones who had the money to buy the farm and equipment before they really knew anything. I can’t say for certain why, but my guess is they never got the chance to experiment on a small scale and figure out what they actually wanted (and what they didn’t) before going all-in on an expensive homestead.

So if you don’t have the perfect land yet, don’t feel behind. You’ll step onto your own land with real skills already in hand — and just as importantly, you’ll actually know what you want from that land.

And that brings us to the next thing to consider: be honest about where you are in the learning curve, too. Have you grown anything before, or is this the first season? What do you actually want out of this — some fresh herbs and salad greens, or eventually eggs, meat, and a full food forest?

You don’t have to answer that fully right now. I certainly didn’t, and you’ll uncover some new perspectives as you go. But it helps to know roughly which direction you’re walking.

2. What It Actually Costs (and ROI)

Nobody talks about this part enough, so let’s just be direct about it.

If you have no money but you have time, you can start a garden for close to free. A no-till garden — where you cover grass with cardboard and layer mulch on top until the grass underneath dies off — will get you a growing bed in about a season.

Cardboard is usually free (ask any store for their flattened boxes). Mulch is sometimes free too, depending on what you can find locally — wood chip drop-offs, leaf piles, that kind of thing.

Learn about how you can grow your own garden mulch

Add seeds from a seed library if your local public library has one, and you can genuinely start growing without spending real money.

But a faster way of getting started with a garden is to invest some cash up front.

If you’re building raised beds with all new materials — lumber, bagged soil, compost, the works — you should just know going in: you will likely spend more than the vegetables will ever be worth, at least for the first few seasons.

That’s okay. I’ve done both. Sometimes you want the tidy, defined raised bed ready for planting and you’re willing to pay for it.

Sometimes you just want food, and you’re willing to get scrappy. Neither is wrong, but decide which one you’re actually optimizing for before you start buying anything.

Cost of chickens

And we can’t forget about chickens. In most cases, if you’re buying feed for your chickens, you’re not likely to get a financial ROI on your chicken eggs. The reality is that even if you reduce your feed costs, you will still likely spend more in caring for your chickens than the eggs are worth at market.

However, if you include chickens in a gardening system, they pay for themselves in labor (more on that in another post).

So which foods actually pay you back?

If you’re thinking about this in strict return-on-investment terms, vegetables aren’t necessarily where the biggest payoff is.

Fruit trees and berry bushes have the best long-term return of anything you can grow — though it takes a few years before you get fruit from your trees and bushes.
Meat cuts your grocery bill more than vegetables ever will, if reducing that bill is the actual goal.
Herbs are a surprisingly high-ticket item at the store, which makes them one of the better small-scale returns for the space they take up. I highly recommend digging into apothecary garden design if you’d like to grow your own medicine.

Even so, my vegetable garden is what actually moves the needle on my day-to-day grocery experience — my bill is a little lower, and I’m not spending time picking through produce at the store (aside from the few things I don’t grow myself). That’s a real, if smaller, return.

In the end, the real ROI on growing your own food rarely shows up in a strict cost-per-tomato calculation anyway.

It shows up in knowing what’s actually in your food, in the kids who’ll eat a green bean straight off the vine when they’d never touch them before, and in not being 100% dependent on the grocery store supply chain.

That’s harder to put a number on, but it’s the actual return.

3. How Much Space You Actually Need

For gardening? Less than you think. Here’s the progression of what I’ve actually gardened in:

A single raised bed at a rental house, in a spot I genuinely wasn’t sure got enough sun. Turns out dappled light isn’t nearly as limiting as I’d assumed — plenty grew there just fine (including a giant eggplant!)
Four raised beds at our next place, once I had a bit more space and confidence.
In-ground beds, so I could integrate my chickens into a rotational system.
Containers – I’ve always used containers when I run out of garden space. I don’t love them because they dry out fast and I forget to water.

The lesson in all of that: you don’t need a homestead to start. You need some usable light and a willingness to start smaller than you’d like. A single raised bed taught me more than any amount of reading did.

When you’re just starting, as much as I know you want to go big, please don’t. It’s important to be able to care for a small space before you go bigger.

For beginners, I’d recommend no more than 100 sq ft of garden space to care for. If you find that you’re chasing pests and weeds in that size space, cut back to 50 sq ft. Once you have a good system for caring for your small space, then you can expand without it overwhelming you.

4. Growing Food Without a Yard: Apartments & Indoor Space

If you’re in an apartment right now reading this and thinking “sure, but what about me” — I see you, because I was you.

A container gardening on a balcony or patio depends almost entirely on light. If you’ve got a south-facing balcony with real direct sun, you can grow a surprising amount in containers.

If you’ve got a shaded balcony (like mine was), you’re going to be limited to what tolerates lower light, and it’s going to be a smaller harvest than you’re picturing.

That doesn’t mean apartment living rules out homesteading, but it does change things.

I’ve written a full post on homesteading in an apartment that goes into what’s actually realistic to grow and produce with little to no outdoor space, so if that’s where you’re starting, that’s the place to go next:

Discover 7 Ways to Embrace Apartment Homesteading

5. Building Healthy Soil (the short version)

I could write pages on soil, but here’s what you need to know before you plant anything: healthy soil needs air, living organisms, and organic matter. The shortcut that covers almost all of it is compost. Whether your soil is too dense, too sandy, too acidic, or just tired, adding organic compost tends to balance it out over time.

If you want to go deeper on any one piece of that, I’ve got a few posts that cover it:

How to Compost for Beginners — the actual how-to, if you’re starting from scratch
Composting Worms: How to Do It (And Why You’d Want To) — for anyone curious about vermicomposting specifically
Manure Tea or Compost Tea Recipe — a quick liquid feed once your beds are already established

And if soil is the piece you want to actually understand (because it’s the single most important part of gardening), that’s exactly what I built my Effortless Soil Building workshop around. It walks through the whole picture, including how to garden so your plants build the soil for you.

6. Garden Strategy 101: Companion Planting & Beyond

Once you’ve got a bed going, how you plant matters almost as much as what you plant.

Companion planting is just growing plants together that help each other out — think tomatoes with basil, or the classic “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash. Some pairings repel pests, some fix nitrogen for their neighbors, some just make better use of vertical space.

Succession planting means staggering your plantings so you’re not harvesting everything at once (or worse, harvesting nothing because it all bolted the same week). A few radish seeds every couple of weeks instead of all at once, for example. Succession planting also means planting something after your first plant is spent. For example, planting carrots after the lettuce harvest.

No-till methods — which I mentioned back in the cost section — aren’t just a budget move. Undisturbed soil holds onto its structure and its microbial life better than soil that gets turned over every season. I lean no-till wherever I can, both for the cost and for the soil health.

You don’t need to master all of this before you plant your first seed. But knowing these exist gives you somewhere to grow into. I cover all of this and more in my Effortless Soil Building workshop.

7. Tools & Equipment You Actually Need to Start

There’s no need for the 40-item gardening tool list. Here’s what I actually use:

A broadfork — this is genuinely one of the best investments I’ve made for no-till gardening. It loosens soil without inverting it or disturbing the layers, and it’s a fraction of the cost of a rototiller.
A shovel — for the obvious reasons, but also for moving compost and mulch.
A metal rake — for leveling beds and spreading mulch.
A hand rake (the small three-pronged kind) — this is what actually gets used the most, honestly. Weeding, loosening soil around seedlings, working compost into a bed without disturbing roots.

That’s pretty much all you need. You can always add specialty tools later, but these four will get a beginner through a full season.

8. What to Grow First

The thing that will keep you moving forward, above all else, is something in the permaculture world we call “obtaining a yield”. This simply means getting something out of your efforts like food, fiber, enjoyment, etc. (learn more about obtaining a yield and other permaculture principles here).

So I always recommend starting with what grows fast and is easy to grow.

I’ve put together a full breakdown of exactly that here: Fastest Growing Vegetables.

Starting there means you’ll be eating something you grew within weeks (not months!), which matters more than people expect for staying motivated through that first season.

9. How Long Until You’re Actually Eating Something?

This is the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

As I mentioned above, there are some fast-growing vegetables that you’ll get to harvest in just a few weeks. After that, most other vegetables will take until later in the growing season for a harvest.

Knowing this ahead of time changes how you plan your first season. Mix in fast growers with your longer-term crops so you’re not staring at an empty garden for two months wondering if anything is happening. (For the specific timelines by crop, that fastest-growing vegetables post above is the place to look.)

If you’re thinking about raising chickens for eggs, it will be about 5 months from the time you get chicks until your first egg.

Meat animals will vary by animal. Small animals like chickens and rabbits can be ready for harvest in 8-12 weeks. Larger animals may need an entire season to mature.

10. Beyond the Garden: Eggs, Meat, Bees, and Community

A garden is the natural starting point, but it’s rarely where homesteading ends. I’ve mentioned chickens and other animals a couple of times, but let’s dig in a little deeper.

Eggs. We keep chickens and ducks and really enjoy them. As I mentioned above, don’t go in expecting eggs to pay for themselves financially; the return is in the food itself and, if you fold them into your garden system, the labor they do for you (more on that in a future post).

Meat and bees. Both of these are still aspirational for us. Sometimes it feels like everyone doing this is already fully self-sufficient, and that’s just not true — or not the point. No one is doing everything. Even those folks who have huge farms and are doing a LOT are still not doing everything.

Community gardens. If you don’t have land of your own — rented, apartment, or otherwise — a community garden is one of the most overlooked stepping stones into all of this. It gives you real soil, real space, and often a community of people who’ll answer the questions a blog post can’t. Worth checking whether your town or county has one before you assume you need your own land to start.

The point of laying all this out isn’t to overwhelm you with everything you could eventually be doing. It’s to show you that this grows in stages — garden, then eggs, then whatever’s next for your specific life (or reverse the order entirely!) — and there’s no requirement to do it all at once, or ever.

Where to Go From Here

However you’re starting — garden envy, a rental with one questionable raised bed, or five acres you’re just beginning to design — the truth is you learn this by doing it, not by reading one more post about it (including this one).

Start with whatever’s actually in front of you. If that’s a windowsill or a balcony, start there. If that’s a yard with iffy sun, plant it anyway (dappled light isn’t the dealbreaker you think it is).

If you’re ready for the next step, grab my free seed starting starter kit — it’ll walk you through exactly what to plant and when, so you’re not guessing your way through that first season.