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From the ground up

Summer Squash Sauté

From the Sowcial team

Sauté the onion and garlic until fragrant, add the zucchini and tomatoes, and cook until just tender. Finish with torn basil.

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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Alternatives:
Cayenne pepper — Use about half as much cayenne, since it is a finer, more concentrated powder.

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.

Basil

1 garden bed

Based on 3 cup per year

12 cups per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Garlic

1 garden bed

Based on 24 cloves per year

40 bulbs per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Onion

1 garden bed

Based on 12 each per year

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

Tomatoes

1 garden bed

Based on 24 each per year

40 tomatoes per 32 sq ft bed · 32 sq ft each

Zucchini

1 garden bed

Based on 36 each per year

50 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

Crushed red pepper flakes

1 lb of dried chili peppers

Based on 1.56 teaspoon per year

0.85 lb of flakes per lb of dried peppers

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 6 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.

🌱 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 3

🌿 Basil · 25%🍅 Tomato · 60%🏵️ Marigold · 13%🌼 Nasturtium · 3%

🤝 Companion planted — Basil is the classic tomato companion, said to repel aphids, whiteflies, and hornworms.

🐛 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 3

🧄 Garlic · 5%🌶️ Chili Pepper · 0%🏵️ Marigold · 13%🌼 Nasturtium · 13%

🤝 Companion planted — Garlic is said to deter aphids and spider mites from peppers and eggplant.

🐛 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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30% of this 4×8 ft bed planted

Bed 3 of 3

🧅 Onion · 24%🟩 Zucchini · 72%🎃 Blue Hubbard Squash · 4%

🤝 Companion planted — Onions are said to help repel squash bugs and vine borers.

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

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100% of this 4×8 ft bed planted

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Summer Squash Sauté | Sowcial