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From the ground up

Greek-Style Garden Salad

From the Sowcial team

Toss the cucumber, tomatoes, and onion together, crumble the goat cheese over the top, and finish with fresh oregano, olive oil, and a squeeze of lemon.

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.

Cucumber

1 garden bed

Based on 12 each per year

30 cucumbers per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Goat cheese

1 goat

Based on 6 cup per year

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

Onion

1 garden bed

Based on 6 each per year

50 onions per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Oregano

1 pot

Based on 12 tablespoon per year

6 cups per pot · 4 sq ft each

Tomatoes

1 garden bed

Based on 24 each per year

40 tomatoes 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

Lemon

1 tree

Based on 6 each per year

100 lb per mature tree per year · 100 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.

Container plantings

These spread too aggressively to share a bed. Grow each in its own pot instead.

🪴 Oregano

1 pot

🪴 Oregano spreads readily by rhizomes and can take over a shared bed — grow it in its own pot.

Other growing setups

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

🌱 Black Pepper

1 vine

Based on ~0.02 lb dried peppercorns a year

≈ 2 lb dried peppercorns per vine per year

🌱 Lemon

1 tree

Based on ~1.3 lb a year

≈ 100 lb per mature tree 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

🥒 Cucumber · 40%🎃 Blue Hubbard Squash · 25%

🐛 Trap crop — Squash bugs and vine borers lay on blue hubbard in preference to thin-skinned summer squash and cucumbers nearby.

🤝 Interplant lettuce and corn — Lettuce uses the cool soil beneath a cucumber trellis before summer heat. Cucumbers can climb the cornstalks, and the corn shelters them from wind.

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65% of this 4×8 ft bed planted · dashed squares are companions to slip in along the edges

Bed 2 of 2

🧅 Onion · 12%🍅 Tomato · 60%🏵️ Marigold · 13%🌼 Nasturtium · 13%

🤝 Companion planted — Onions help repel aphids and other pests that trouble tomatoes.

🐛 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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97% of this 4×8 ft bed planted

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