Check your garden’s nutrition
Tick the crops you grow (or plan to). The eight nutrient jobs below light up as you cover them — and the gaps stay dim, so you can see exactly what your garden is missing.
This maps the crops you grow against the eight nutritional jobs from the guide above — it’s a planning nudge, not dietary advice. Calories, protein, and fats are the hard ones; if those three are dim, that’s where a self-sufficient garden needs to grow first.
The uncomfortable truth about vegetable gardens
A backyard vegetable garden is wonderful, but it's mostly water and vitamins. Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers are almost all water by weight. They brighten a plate; they won't keep you alive. If self-sufficiency is the goal, the two hardest things to grow are the two things your body needs most: calories and protein. Everything else is comparatively easy.
The eight groups a complete garden covers
The app organizes food-growing around eight nutritional jobs. Think of them as a checklist: a garden that hits all eight is a garden that could actually carry you through a season.
| Nutrient job | Grow it with… |
|---|---|
| Calories / carbohydrates | Potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, corn, dry beans. The energy backbone. |
| Protein | Dry beans, peas, lentils, peanuts; amaranth and quinoa seeds. The hardest gap to close. |
| Healthy fats | Sunflower and pumpkin seeds, peanuts — genuinely difficult to grow in quantity. |
| Vitamin A / carotenoids | Carrots, sweet potatoes, winter squash, leafy greens. |
| Vitamin C | Peppers, broccoli, kale, berries — easy and abundant. |
| Leafy-green micronutrients | Kale, chard, spinach, lamb's quarters — iron, folate, vitamin K. |
| Minerals (calcium, potassium, iron) | Leafy greens, beans, potatoes, seeds. |
| Gut health / probiotics | Anything you can ferment — cabbage into kraut, cucumbers into pickles. |
Where gardens usually fall short
When you map a typical garden against those eight jobs, the same holes show up almost every time:
- Calories. Without a dedicated block of potatoes, squash, or grains, a garden simply can't produce enough energy to live on. This is the number-one gap.
- Protein. A few pole beans for fresh eating won't do it. Real protein means growing dry beans and letting them mature and cure — a different mindset and a bigger footprint.
- Fats. The toughest of all. Seeds and nuts are the only practical garden source, and they take space and time.
The staple-crop starting three
If you did nothing else, these three crops would move you further toward self-sufficiency than any amount of salad greens:
| Crop | Why it earns the space |
|---|---|
| Potatoes | Enormous calories per square foot, store for months, easy to grow. The homestead workhorse. |
| Winter squash | Calories plus vitamin A, and it keeps all winter in a cool room with zero processing. |
| Dry beans | Your realistic garden protein source — and they fix nitrogen for next year's soil. |