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From the ground up

Garden Salad with Berries

From the Sowcial team

Toss the lettuce and spinach with sliced strawberries and blueberries, then top with crumbled goat cheese.

Your grow, raise, make checklist

Check off what you already have, then follow the guidance or find it from a nearby grower.

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Scale recipe:

Household production plan

How much infrastructure would this recipe take?

These are rough annual estimates based on the grow guide's typical yields, and only cover ingredients you're growing. Anything set to buy is on your grow plan's shopping list instead. Use them for planning, then adjust for your climate, losses, preservation, and actual harvests. Toggle any crop to Hydro to plan it as a hydroponic setup instead of a soil bed.

Blueberries

1 shrub

Based on 6 cup per year

8 lb per shrub per year · 25 sq ft each

Goat cheese

1 goat

Based on 3 cup per year

50 lb of cheese per goat per year · 200 sq ft each

Lettuce

1 garden bed

Based on 48 cups per year

24 heads per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Spinach

1 garden bed

Based on 24 cups per year

20 lb per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Strawberries

1 garden bed

Based on 12 cup per year

10 lb per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Black pepper

1 vine

Based on 3 teaspoon per year

2 lb dried peppercorns per vine per year · 25 sq ft each

Olive oil

3 lb of olives

Based on 24 tablespoons per year

0.15 quarts of oil per lb of olives

Salt

1 gallon of seawater

Based on 3 teaspoon per year

0.25 lb of salt per gallon of seawater

Garden layout

What planting these beds could look like

Each square is roughly one square foot of a standard 4×8 ft bed. Planted squares are shaded; the rest is open soil in that bed. Known companion plants share the leftover space in a bed instead of each getting their own. Where a bed grows a single crop, we flag good companions to interplant (shown as dashed squares), and a small border planting of trap crops is tucked in wherever it can lure pests away from your real crops. Both are how you hold pests down without reaching for a pesticide.

Switch any crop above to Hydro and it moves down here into its own system recommendation instead of a soil bed — tailor it crop by crop to what you can actually grow, whether that's a yard full of beds or a porch with a couple of buckets.

Other growing setups

Grown outside a shared bed — logs, grow bags, and other specialty setups rather than garden-bed square footage.

🌱 Blueberry

1 shrub

Based on ~1.9 lb a year

≈ 8 lb per shrub per year

🌱 Black Pepper

1 vine

Based on ~0.02 lb dried peppercorns a year

≈ 2 lb dried peppercorns per vine per year

🫒 Olive

1 tree

Based on ~2.5 lb of olives a year

≈ 40 lb of olives per mature tree per year

Bed 1 of 2

🥬 Lettuce · 49%🍓 Strawberry · 38%🏵️ Marigold · 13%🌼 Nasturtium · 1%

🤝 Companion planted — Lettuce acts as a living mulch, shading the soil around strawberry roots.

🐛 Trap crop — French marigold roots suppress root-knot nematodes, and the scent helps mask nearby crops from aphids and beetles. Aphids swarm nasturtium ahead of its neighbors, and its trailing habit keeps it tucked along the bed edge.

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100% of this 4×8 ft bed planted

Bed 2 of 2

🍃 Spinach · 16%🔴 Radish · 13%

🐛 Trap crop — Flea beetles chew radish leaves first, sparing brassica seedlings and young squash. Fast enough to resow every few weeks.

🤝 Interplant tomato and pepper — Spinach uses the shade beneath young tomatoes, then bolts out as the heat comes on. Spinach fills the ground around peppers early in the season, then clears out as it warms.

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28% of this 4×8 ft bed planted · dashed squares are companions to slip in along the edges

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