Huw Richards’ New Book, The Self-Suffiency Garden: Feed Your Family and Save Money

Huw Richards has vegetables in his bones. Richards grew up on an 11-acre small farm, and he became well-known in the garden world when he started posting how-to videos on YouTube at 19. The author of three previous books on vegetable gardening, Richards’ latest is The Self-Sufficiency Garden: Feed Your Family and Save Money, a uniquely detailed plan for growing vegetables.

“I’ve always been growing my own food, but I’d never actually measured it,” says Richards of his motivation to publish another book on a topic he has explored deeply. “With the cost of living crisis and with more people more concerned about food security, I thought now’s the time to create a project that explores that.”

Richards hatched a plot to see how much food he could grow in the equivalent of a standard half allotment, approximately the size of half a doubles tennis court. (In England, an allotment is a small parcel of land that can be rented to grow food.) To make sure the food would not go to waste and last the whole year, Richards brought on his friend, chef Sam Cooper, to share recipes for preserving the harvest. The Self-Sufficiency Garden is the result: A book-length documentation of the one-year experiment that Richards ran in the 2023 growing season.

Read from start to finish, the book tells exactly how Richards grew a whopping 1,279 lbs. of vegetables in 1,300 square feet in a single year—which, somewhat remarkably, he did not share on social media while he was in the midst of the project, saving it for the book. Richards lays out what he did when. It is an impressive ballet of seed starting and crop rotation, but Richards doesn’t anticipate his readers will follow his plan to the letter. “I’m not telling people to just copy and paste the exact same layouts,” he says. “It’s a case study: This is what we did, and these are the results.”

Here are some ideas for how you can follow Richards’ lead.

Photography by Huw Richards, from The Self-Sufficiency Garden.

Rethink your definition of “self sufficiency.”

“People think that self-sufficiency means you have to have a homestead. I propose that you could just grow one or two herbs and be self-sufficient in those,” says Richards. “If every day during spring and summer you are eating something from your garden that is not the end goal of self-sufficiency but it’s on the starting steps.”