Homesteading is all about self-sufficiency, so of course vegetable gardening is a core component of a successful homestead.
If you want to live off the land and avoid weekly supermarket trips, you need a thriving edible garden.
Homesteaders around the world are now trying chaos gardening, an experimental new gardening method with a hands-off, biodiversity-driven ethos.
Here’s why it works so well for homesteaders.
7 Reasons Homesteaders Are Embracing Chaos Gardening
Chaos gardening is a new approach that gives nature more control over your garden.
All you need is a handful of seeds, usually the seeds you have leftover from previous growing seasons, which you then scatter over a designated patch of soil on your property.
Chaos gardening prioritizes minimal intervention. Instead of monitoring your garden carefully and regularly fertilizing and spraying your plants with pesticides, you let these seeds grow freely while nature takes its course.
This process allows the plants that are best suited to your soil to germinate and thrive with ease, while the least-suited plants die off.
It offers many benefits for homesteaders who want to incorporate a more carefree approach to their gardening routine.
1. Great for Beginners
These days more traditional and self-sufficient lifestyles, like homesteading, are becoming increasingly popular.
Many people want to live on the land or “off-grid,” but not all of them have the skills, experience, or knowledge base when they begin.
Chaos gardening is a good method for beginner homesteaders because it’s such an easy way to get started.
It’s an excellent starting point from which to learn the basics of gardening, such as different stages of plant growth, how to check moisture levels before watering, and more.
If you have no experience, chaos gardening could be the beginning of your homestead garden.
Even if your first attempts aren’t very fruitful, you’ll have a much better idea of what plants to grow (and how to care for them) when you start a traditional garden.
2. It’s Low Maintenance
Homesteading can be an exhausting lifestyle because your time is entirely occupied by maintaining your home and land.
Anything that takes a little less time and maintenance will be a lifesaver for your homestead, which is why chaos gardening is such a good option.
All you need to do is scatter the seeds in your chosen location, and water them when needed. Constant weeding, mulching, fertilizing, etc is a choice, not a requirement.
While a conventional garden is relatively time-consuming, a chaos garden requires very little maintenance in the day-to-day, leaving plenty of time for you to focus on other tasks around your homestead.
Keep in mind that while this gardening philosophy is low maintenance, it isn’t no maintenance.
To give your chaos garden the best chance of success you may still want to amend your soil, weed occasionally, and thin your plants when necessary.
Certain plants have a tendency to dominate space, so removing them as they grow will help others to thrive.
3. It’s More Affordable
Running a homestead is a full-time job. Many homesteaders are living off the land and earning only a small income on the side, if at all.
The beauty of chaos gardening is that because it is so low maintenance, it has a much lower start-up cost.
You technically don’t need to spend any money to start your chaos garden. This gardening style doesn’t require extra tools like trowels and spades, or stakes, and you don’t need to buy fertilizer, herbicides, or pesticides.
All you need is a patch of dirt, a handful of seeds, and a watering can. If you want to do more to give your plants the best chance of survival, you can, but chaos gardening is truly flexible when it comes down to how much you want to spend.
4. It’s Flexible
It isn’t just the cost that is flexible when you’re preparing to plant a chaos garden. Most of the process can be quite flexible, depending on what you need and the kind of resources you have access to.
You can choose to add fertilizer to the soil before sowing your seeds (this is something I would recommend to give your plants the best chance to thrive), you can put mulch down to help your gardens, and you can weed as rarely or as often as you want.
The process isn’t rigid, it’s inherently adaptable, and how much you choose to do all depends on how you want to manage your chaos garden.
This is great for homesteaders who have extra gardening supplies or large compost bins that they still want to use in their garden.
5. Less Water Usage
If you are living in an off-grid setup, you may have an independent water supply, whether that’s via water tanks, wells, etc.
If you have to track your water usage carefully, you may find gardening a huge investment given how much water your plants typically need.
Another great benefit of chaos gardening for homesteaders is that it uses less water than traditional gardening.
Since you are combining different plants in a randomized order, you are going to end up with plants of different heights growing close together.
Taller plants will provide shade for smaller plants growing around them during the hottest parts of the day. Because of this shade, your smaller plants will need less water, leading to less water usage overall.
6. Understanding Your Environment
As a homesteader, you are probably planning to live off your land for a long time, if not for life. And if you’re just starting you will have a lot to learn about the climate, soil, and the overall ecosystems that your property exists in.
Chaos gardening is an amazing way to experiment with your environment and learn more about the land you’re working with.
Even if you don’t plan to garden this way in the long term, a few seasons of chaos gardening will teach you so much about your property’s agricultural potential, including the type of soil you have and how to amend it, what grows best in your soil and climate, what doesn’t, etc.
7. It Doesn’t Limit Your Gardening
Your first (or second, or third) attempt at chaos gardening doesn’t have to take up your entire garden – it’s not a full commitment!
Since you’re experimenting with a new gardening method there is no guarantee that it will yield plenty of successful crops.
This may be fine given how low-effort chaos gardening is, but it can be frustrating if you’ve given over all your available gardening space to this method and it isn’t yielding results.
Instead, you can designate a small patch of your garden, a specific garden bed, or a single planting container to this method.
The rest of your space can be relegated to a conventional gardening setup, 5-gallon bucket gardens, the Mittleider method, or any number of popular gardening methods.
This way you can experiment with chaos gardening while still ensuring you produce the crops you need from a “normal” garden.
