The Symbiotic Garden
There's no place like 
$LOAM. 🌱
Where every plant has a neighbour that protects it
A bird's-eye glance at the dream — every zone above, sketched on one piece of earth, the two of us and the whole guard at work.
At first, I just wanted a piece of land. To grow food the way the earth does it on her own — organic, generous, alive. I imagined bats eating mosquitoes at dusk, bees brushing the flowers at noon, dogs keeping watch at night.
I didn't have the money to buy that land alone. Sanctum Elysium and the LAND Fund were born so that anyone holding $LOAM could share the same dream and act on it together.
— The origin of the LAND Fund
Getting started. Start with household size, growing space and available time.
How Much to Be Independent?
Tick and adjust to match your life — the results separate the estimated budget and annual expenses.
Assumptions: mid-range values from the table below; the intensive switch packs the annual beds 1.5× tighter (same plants, same water, less soil to weed); the paths switch applies the +25% rule; beds and compost count only the annual vegetable areas — trees and perennials feed themselves once mulched. The thirst line uses the same July mid-range as the Water page — drip cuts it in half, and the cistern that carries it is sized over there. “Plants and equipment” totals the plants and infrastructure (the greenhouse dominates) plus a $250 base for tools, compost bays and drip — the fence is not in it (see Who Eats First, below); “Seeds and amendments / year” is seeds and amendments — the perennials and trees stop asking after a few seasons. A starting sketch, not a plan — the first year of observation (rule one, below) redraws it better than any calculator.
How Much Garden?
Compare models · How Much Garden?
| Element | Area it asks | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Fresh summer vegetables | 15–25 m² / person | Salads, tomatoes, beans — the companion grid below |
| Year-round pantry | +50–80 m² / person | Storage crops and the August preserves |
| Potatoes as the staple | 20–30 m² / person | ~3 kg per m² in decent soil |
| The Three Sisters block | 20–30 m² | One complete agricultural cell — corn, beans, squash |
| Unheated greenhouse | 5–10 m² / person | Steals 4–8 weeks at each end of the season |
| Cold frame | 1–2 m² | Salads in April, mâche in December |
| Hardy fruit tree | 20–30 m² each | 2–3 per person — and apples refuse to fruit alone |
| Berry row | 10–15 m² / person | Haskap, saskatoon, currants — June before the strawberries |
| Perennial bed | 10–20 m² / household | Three springs of patience, thirty years of asparagus |
| Herb corner | 2–4 m² / household | One lovage plant seasons every soup in the house |
| Pollinator strip | ~10% of the plot | The bees set the fruit — leave them a wild margin |
| Compost bays | 2–4 m² | ~1 m³ a year per 25 m² of beds — the loop closes |
| Peak-July thirst | ~5 L / m² of beds / day | The arithmetic continues on the Water page |
| Paths & edges rule | +25% on everything | A garden you can't walk through is a garden you don't weed |
Two people, a year-round pantry, a Three Sisters block, four fruit trees, a 10 m² greenhouse, berries and perennials: ≈ 320 m² of growing space. That's a 16 × 20 m corner of a plot — self-reliance is not a farm, it's a serious backyard.
What 320 m² Really Gives
Area is the question you ask in spring. Kilos are the answer you weigh in October. Mid-range yields from decent, mulched soil — halve them the first year, then watch them climb.
Compare models · What 320 m² Really Gives
| Crop | Yield | Keeps | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Potatoes | 3–4 kg / m² | 6–8 months, cold & humid | The staple — 25 m² per person is a winter of potatoes |
| Winter squash | 2–3 kg / m² | 4–6 months, warm & dry | Ten days of sun to harden the skin before they come inside |
| Carrots & beets | 3–4 kg / m² | 5–6 months, in damp sand | Sow the storage crop in July, not May |
| Cabbage | ~3 kg / m² | 3–5 months cold — or a year as sauerkraut | The late varieties keep; the early ones are for August |
| Onions | 2–3 kg / m² | 6–8 months, cool & dry | Braided and hung, they ask for nothing |
| Garlic | 0.5–1 kg / m² | 8–10 months | Planted in October — its own card below |
| Dry beans | 0.2–0.3 kg / m² | Years, in a jar | Light on the scale, heavy in protein — 10 m² is a winter of soup |
| Tomatoes | 3–5 kg / m² | A year, canned as sauce | Fresh in August, then jars — never the cellar |
| Salads & greens | 2–3 kg / m² per sowing | Days — eat them | Sown every two weeks from April to August |
An adult eats roughly 200–250 kg of vegetables a year. The calculator's 80 m² per person, at these yields, comes to about 200 kg — the arithmetic holds, barely. That is the point: self-reliance is not a farm, but it is not a hobby either.
What the Garden Doesn't Grow
Three things no backyard of 320 m² will ever put on the table — and the northern answer to each.
Bread is the farm's job, not the garden's: 100 m² of wheat or rye yields 30–40 kg — a few months of flour for a lot of threshing. Grow a small patch once to know how it's done; buy or trade the rest, and keep your square metres for what stores value: potatoes, squash, beans.
No olive tree in zone 4, and a sunflower press is a lot of machine for a little oil. The answer is the hybrid hazelnut (hardy crosses for zone 3): two or three bushes give nuts in 4–5 years, oil and protein in a shell that keeps all winter. The rest of the fat comes from the Bestiary — eggs, lard, milk.
The maple. Forty litres of sap for one litre of syrup; eight to ten mature trees, tapped in March when nights freeze and days don't, sweeten a family's year. The boiling burns real wood — count it on the Energy page. The beehives on the map above do the rest.
The Logic of a Living System
A site is not a blank page. It has a wind direction, a slope, a sun trajectory, ancestral soils. Sit in it for a full year before drawing a single bed. Permaculture starts with watching.
Properly composted manure and suitable plant residues can return to the soil. Check what is appropriate for compost and animals; adjust inputs to soil tests and harvested nutrients.
A monoculture is a buffet for one pest. A polyculture confuses pests, attracts predators, and keeps producing even when one species fails. The more species per square metre, the less you have to defend.
The Three Sisters
Indigenous nations of eastern North America — Haudenosaunee, Wabanaki, Cherokee — were planting this trio long before colonisation. None of the three sisters thrives alone. Together they form a complete agricultural cell: vertical structure, soil fertility, ground cover. The first companion planting documented in the Americas — still the most elegant.
Plant Associations to Explore
Allow space for each variety and compare growth and harvest. Basil guarantees neither protection nor better flavour.
Adapt to varieties and locationMonitor pests on both crops; retain suitable protection if flies are present.
Adapt to varieties and locationObserve insect visitors when dill flowers and damage on the cabbage.
Adapt to varieties and locationObserve where aphids occur and intervene when needed: a neighbouring plant alone does not protect cucumber.
Adapt to varieties and locationAllow space and light for both crops; do not count on immediate nitrogen transfer to carrots.
Adapt to varieties and locationCompare variety timings to harvest radish before lettuce occupies the space. Keep the seed supplier’s spacing.
Adapt to varieties and locationObserve flowering and visitors, then record yield without automatically attributing changes to the pairing.
Adapt to varieties and locationMonitor rose aphids and disease; garlic does not replace that observation.
Adapt to varieties and locationPreserve light and air circulation around pepper. Check pests even when herbs are present.
Adapt to varieties and locationKeep horseradish in a managed location and monitor potato beetles directly.
Adapt to varieties and locationLeave enough space for both plants; inspect below leaves instead of assuming a repellent effect.
Adapt to varieties and locationCompare watering needs and mature size. Continue inspecting broccoli leaves.
Adapt to varieties and locationBefore Pairing These Plants
The combinations below are planting ideas. Observe light, space, water and disease first; do not treat a good or bad neighbour reputation as an established rule. UMN.
Observe fennel’s shade and space requirements. No universal exclusion radius is proposed here.
Adapt to varieties and locationProvide suitable spacing; record results before concluding incompatibility.
Adapt to varieties and locationCheck rotation and shared disease risks with local horticultural advice.
Adapt to varieties and locationIdentify the walnut species and seek local advice on soil, roots and suitable crops.
Adapt to varieties and locationCompare water, light and available space; a reputation for incompatibility alone is insufficient.
Adapt to varieties and locationObserve shade from mature dill and place it according to the chosen varieties.
Adapt to varieties and locationLiving Defences — No Pesticide
A blanket of straw, leaves, or living rye over bare soil. Keeps moisture, kills weeds, feeds the worms. Bare soil is a wound — covered soil heals itself.
The most studied repellent of the plant kingdom. Tagetes patula roots release thiophenes that kill nematodes in the soil. Plant rows along carrots and tomatoes.
Ferment 1 kg of fresh nettle in 10 L of water for 10 days. Diluted 1:10 it stimulates growth; pure, it repels aphids. Horsetail prevents downy mildew.
A single ladybug eats 50 aphids a day. Plant dill, fennel, yarrow, sweet alyssum — they attract the predators that work for free.
A bramble-and-hawthorn hedge shelters birds, hedgehogs, bats. Each of these animals is worth ten pesticide sprays. The hedge is the garden's perimeter immune system.
Never plant the same family twice in the same spot two years in a row. Soil pathogens specific to nightshades or brassicas accumulate and crash the harvest. Four-year rotation minimum.
The Four-Year Rotation
Four beds, four families, one step forward each spring. Every family visits every bed once in four years — and the pests that wait in the soil for their favourite find an empty table.
Potato is a nightshade, like tomato — the same blight. It rides with the roots here so the two are always two years apart in any one bed. Sketch it on paper in February; the map is the garden's memory.
Who Eats First — The Fence
Everything on this page that grows, something else wants. The fence is the one cost the calculator above leaves out — put it in yours.
A deer clears 2 m without thinking. Either a 2.4 m fence, or the cheaper trick: two 1.2 m fences a metre apart — a deer won't jump what it can't land in. One night in June without it and the beans are gone.
They go under, not over. Hardware cloth 1 m high, the bottom 30 cm bent outward and buried — the digger hits mesh and gives up. A tall fence with an open foot is a fence for show.
The raccoon reads the corn's calendar better than you do. One electric strand at 15 cm around the block the week it ripens; a net over the haskap and saskatoon the week before the birds' turn.
Water in the morning so the soil is dry by dusk, and let the runner ducks on the map above patrol the rows — they eat the slugs and (mostly) leave the lettuce. Boards laid on the paths make a trap you empty at breakfast.
The night shift — the dogs, the geese that raise the alarm — is on the Bestiary. The bill: the 16 × 20 m corner is ~72 m of perimeter — roughly $600–1,500 USD of deer fence, posts and mesh, depending on the mesh. Fence the vegetables first; the orchard can wait a year behind tree guards.
Water, Caught and Kept
The sky delivers for free what the tap sells: one millimetre of rain on one square metre is one litre of water. A modest 100 m² roof, in a single 25 mm storm, fills 2,500 litres of barrels. Catch it high, store it in the shade, spend it slowly.
Under the mulch, bury ollas — unglazed clay pots filled with water, an irrigation trick more than two thousand years old. The clay sweats only when the soil around it runs dry: the roots drink exactly what they need, and nothing is lost to the sun.
When you do water, water like the rain the garden remembers: deeply, rarely, in the morning. Shallow daily sips teach roots to linger at the surface and burn in the first heat wave. A deep soak once or twice a week sends them down where drought can't follow.
And the pond is not a decoration — it is the garden's oldest ally. Frogs and toads patrol the slug lines at night, dragonflies hunt mosquitoes over the water, birds come to drink and stay to eat caterpillars. Dig it once; it defends you every year after.
The Pollinator Meadow — What to Sow
The table above keeps a tenth of the plot wild, and the map paints it gold. Here is what actually goes in it: natives, not the "wildflower mix" from the hardware store — those bags are mostly annuals from somewhere else, gone in a season. A native perennial meadow is sown once and gets thicker every year.
For zone 3–4, a bloom that never breaks from May to October: wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) and purple coneflower for the bees, common milkweed for the monarchs, black-eyed Susan and yarrow for the hoverflies whose larvae eat aphids, then goldenrod and New England aster to feed the hives right up to the frost. White clover in the paths does the same job under your feet.
Two rules, both about doing less: mow once, in late spring, never in summer; and leave the stems standing all winter — a third of the wild bees nest inside them, and the goldfinches live off the seed heads while the snow is deep.
The Hardy Orchard — Zone 3–4
An orchard is the slowest promise made to a piece of land — and the northern cold keeps it honest. These fruits shrug at −35 °C.
'Honeycrisp', 'Liberty', 'Norkent' on a hardy rootstock like Antonovka. 'Liberty' shrugs off scab without a single spray. Plant two varieties — an apple tree refuses to fruit alone.
The 'Romance' series ('Carmine Jewel', 'Juliet'), bred on the Canadian prairies: zone 2 sour cherries on a bush you pick without a ladder. Self-fertile — one plant is enough.
The first fruit of the year — ripe in June, before the strawberries. Laughs at zone 2 winters and late frosts. Plant two unrelated varieties so they can pollinate each other.
A native of the continent, hardy to zone 2, asking for nothing once established. Blueberry-like fruit for the family — and the birds will insist on their share. Net a few branches, gift the rest.
Zone 3, and it fixes nitrogen — a fruit tree that feeds its neighbours. Berries loaded with vitamin C. Plant one male for up to six females, and wear gloves at harvest.
'Pembina' and the prairie hybrids take zone 3 in stride. They need a wild American plum nearby as pollinator — plant the wild cousin at the hedge and let them talk.
The orchard's guardians — the hens that break the apple-maggot cycle under the trees, the bees that set the fruit — keep their own page: the Symbiotic Bestiary.
The Perennial Bed
Annuals ask for everything again every spring. Perennials ask once — then keep their promise for decades. The patient gardener's corner.
Three springs of patience before the first real harvest — then twenty to thirty years of spears. The garden's finest lesson in waiting. Zone 3.
Indestructible in zone 3. The leaves are poison on your plate and a feast in your compost. Divide the crown every 8–10 years and give the halves away.
A native sunflower with edible tubers, so vigorous the only real problem is stopping it. Give it a corner it may conquer; dig after the first frosts, when the tubers turn sweet.
The onion that replants itself — the stalks bow down and set the next generation one step away. Plant it once, and never buy green onions again.
One plant of this perennial celery seasons every soup in the house, for years. The bees adore its flowers as much as the cook adores its leaves.
The first green of spring, up before the snow has finished leaving the fence line. Lemony leaves for soup while everything else is still a seed packet.
The Quiet Crops
Three crops the calendar below barely mentions — each planted in an afternoon, each paying for years.
A hardneck like 'Music' for zone 3. Plant the cloves in October after the first frost, 10 cm deep, under 15 cm of mulch. Eat the scapes in June, harvest in late July when the three lower leaves have browned, cure three weeks in the shade, in moving air. Keep the biggest cloves as seed — you buy garlic once in your life.
The wine-cap mushroom (Stropharia rugosoannulata) lives in wood chips. Spread spawn under the chips of your paths in spring, keep them damp: mushrooms by autumn, for two or three years — and the chips they digest become soil for the beds beside them. The path feeds the garden.
Fresh oak or maple logs, a metre long, cut in winter and drilled in spring for shiitake plugs, sealed with wax, stacked in the shade of the hedgerow. First flush after 12–18 months, then four to six years of mushrooms from wood that was pruning waste.
Seasonal Cycle — Temperate Climate
Indoors: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, leeks. Hardwood pruning of fruit trees. Sharpen tools.
Cold-hardy seedlings outdoors: peas, spinach, lettuce, onion sets, radishes. Spread spring compost. Plant berry bushes.
After the last frost (zone 4: ~May 25): transplant tomatoes, peppers, squash. Direct-sow beans, corn, cucumbers. Mulch the beds.
Strawberries, peas, garlic scapes, salads. Water deeply in the morning. Watch for aphids on roses and beans.
The harvest begins. Tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, beans. Successive sowing of lettuces and radishes every 2 weeks. Sow fall carrots.
Heart of the harvest. Preserves, lacto-fermentation, sauces. Sow spinach, kale, mâche for fall. Save tomato and bean seeds.
Squash, potatoes, last tomatoes. Plant fall garlic — the most expensive bulb of the spring market is one you can grow easily. Sow rye / vetch as winter cover.
Heavy mulch. Move tender herbs indoors. Empty the rain barrels. Spread leaf compost. The garden goes to sleep — but the soil keeps working.
Plan next year. Order seeds. Rotation map. Sharpen, oil, repair. Walk in the snow and look at the bones of your land.
Stretching the Season
Zone 4 grants about 120 frost-free days. Every layer of protection you add moves the garden one climate south — without moving an inch.
An old window laid on a wooden box facing south. Four to six weeks stolen at each end of the season — salads in April, mâche in December.
A few grams of fabric per square metre: 2–4 °C of frost protection, and a wall the carrot fly and the flea beetle cannot cross. Blanket and defence in one.
Sun comes in, wind stays out. Tomatoes weeks after the field ones have blackened, greens all winter under a second veil inside. Each layer is another climate.
Spinach, kale and mâche don't fear the frost — they sweeten in it. Sown in August, tucked under two layers, they hand you salads in January.
Keeping the Harvest
The pantry in the arithmetic above is grown in eighty square metres — and lost in one warm closet. Every crop wants one of four climates. Give it the right one and October feeds May.
Compare models · Keeping the Harvest
| Climate | Conditions | Who sleeps there | Where, without a watt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold & humid | 0–4 °C · 85–95 % humidity | Potatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage, leeks, apples | The root cellar — or a barrel buried on the north side, a straw-lined trench, an unheated corner of the basement with a vent |
| Cool & dry | 0–10 °C · 60–70 % | Onions, garlic, shallots, dry beans | A cold porch, an attic stair — braided and hung where the air moves |
| Warm & dry | 10–15 °C · 50–60 % | Winter squash, pumpkins, sweet potatoes | The squash sleep in the house — a bedroom closet, under the guest bed, never the cellar |
| Frozen | −18 °C | Berries, green beans, pesto, stock | The one climate that costs watts: a chest freezer is ~1 kWh a day — the Energy page counts it |
Nothing goes to sleep wet. Squash: ten days warm and dry to harden the skin. Onions and garlic: two to three weeks in the shade until the necks are paper. Potatoes: two weeks in the dark at 15 °C to heal their scrapes. Skip this, and the cellar rots from one bad neighbour.
A boiling-water bath is enough for the acid foods — tomatoes with a squeeze of lemon, pickles, jams. Everything else — beans, soups, corn, meat — needs a pressure canner; botulism does not negotiate. An August evening of jars is a February month of dinners.
To ferment vegetables, use a tested recipe for the chosen vegetable: salt proportions, temperature, time and storage belong together. A single percentage and a week on the counter are not a universal method. NCHFP.
Herbs in bunches from a rafter; apple rings and tomato halves on a screen over the wood stove or in a dehydrator (300–600 W for an afternoon per batch). Dried, a harvest weighs a tenth and keeps a year in a jar — the lightest pantry on the shelf.
The root cellar is the only appliance on this page that runs on zero watts: dug into the north side of a slope, two metres down where the earth stays near 4 °C, a vent low for cold air in and one high for warm air out. Dig it once; it works every winter after.
One teaspoon of healthy forest soil contains over a billion bacteria, several kilometres of fungal hyphae, hundreds of nematodes, dozens of arthropods. It is the densest ecosystem on Earth — denser than the Amazon canopy.
The mycorrhizal fungi attach to plant roots and extend their reach a hundredfold. In exchange for a little sugar, they bring back water, phosphorus, nitrogen — and even chemical signals from neighbouring plants. A garden is a network of trades, mostly underground.
Two simple rules to keep the soil alive: never till deeply (you break the fungal network), and never leave the soil bare (UV kills the microbes). The rest, the soil handles on its own.
The First Season
You just got the land. Rule one says watch it for a year — these three things you can do while you watch.
A Mason jar half full of soil, topped with water, shaken, left a day: sand settles first, silt next, clay last — the three layers tell you what you have. A 30 cm hole filled with water should empty in 2–12 hours; slower is clay, faster is sand. A pH kit costs a coffee (6–7 suits most vegetables). And near an old building or a road, test for lead before you eat a root crop — a lab test is $30–60; raised beds of brought-in soil are the way around a bad result.
Don't fight the sod — bury it. Plain cardboard over the grass, 10–15 cm of compost on top, plant straight into it. The grass dies in the dark and feeds the worms; the cardboard is gone by autumn. No tiller, no herbicide, no broken fungal network — a bed ready in an afternoon, and better the second year than the first.
A windowsill grows leggy ghosts. A cheap LED shop light 5 cm above the trays, 14–16 hours a day (20 W — the smallest load on the Energy page) grows plants. A heat mat under the tomatoes and peppers. Then the step everyone skips and pays for: harden them off — a week outside in the shade, a little more sun each day, before they meet the real wind.
Compost & Seed
The recipe is older than agriculture: two to three parts "browns" for one part "greens" — dry leaves and straw for the carbon, kitchen scraps and fresh cuttings for the nitrogen — kept as moist as a wrung-out sponge.
Build it a cubic metre at a time and the pile lights from within: 55–65 °C at the heart, hot enough to kill weed seeds and pathogens. Turn it every week or two and it is black gold in two or three months. Leave it alone, and the worms do the same work in a year. Meat, dairy and oils stay out — they invite guests you don't want.
This is the principle from the top of this page made real: the hens' manure, the tomato leaves, the leaf-fall of October — nothing leaves the land, everything returns to it.
A seed is a memory — everything a plant learned about your soil, your winds, your winters, folded into something the size of a comma. Choose open-pollinated varieties: they come back true, year after year. F1 hybrids are brilliant once; their children remember nothing.
Start with the easy ones — beans, peas, lettuce, tomatoes — they pollinate themselves and rarely stray. For tomatoes, ferment the seeds in their own juice for two or three days to dissolve the gel that blocks germination, then rinse and dry. The squash family is the cautionary tale: they cross with everything, and your zucchini and your pumpkin will make strange children together.
Kept cool, dark and dry, most vegetable seeds live three to five years. Save them every August and something quiet happens: your varieties adapt to your land, a little more each generation. Your seeds, like your memory, belong to you — on your own shelf, not in someone else's vault.
💡 Know a plant pairing, companion trick, or variety that works on your terrain? Share it on the Ideas page or mention @LOAM_token on X.
Questions to sit with
The garden asks for your dawns and your dusks — but is tending the same thing as being free?
If a presence kept watch over every seedling — never tiring, never forgetting which plant grows beside which friend — would the garden be less yours, or more?
And everything it learned of your earth: to whom should it answer — a distant cloud, or you alone?
The conversation with the land was never meant to be a cage — and that hand, somewhere on this site, has already been imagined.
Notes and sources
Notes reviewed September 12, 2026. Links open the reference documents.
- During very hot weather: check moisture daily and adapt watering. Seedlings and containers may need more frequent visits. UMN · heat.
- Sowing: soil temperature and local last frost matter more than a fixed month. UMN · planting.
- Companions: some combinations have experimental support; friend/foe lists are not universal rules. UMN · companions.
- During growth: check moisture, pests and maturity during visits. After harvest: record yields and hours for next season. Visit frequency depends on weather and crops. UMN · planning.
A garden is a slow conversation with a piece of earth. You don't impose — you listen, you offer, you wait. The plants that thrive are the ones you placed next to a friend.
The land is patience. The land is freedom.
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The Memory