How to Do A Fridge and Pantry Survey

When you first start to plan a garden, one question that always rears it’s ugly head is “What should we grow?”

There are an almost infinite number of plants and different varieties that you could potentially grow in your garden. But unless you have unlimited space, time, and budget, it’s not practical for most folks to grow a little of everything. The choices can quickly get overwhelming.

So, one of the best places to start is with what you are already eating – or more specifically, what you’re already buying at the grocery store.

You could spend months tracking your grocery receipts, but a quicker way to the answer is to do a simple survey of what you have on hand. It’s usually a pretty good indication of what foods you and your family eat on a regular basis.

The procedure is very simple:

1. Set a timer for 10-15 minutes and write down on a piece of paper every produce-related food item in your pantry, fridge, and freezer. You can limit yourself to things you would reasonably be able to grow in your climate (i.e. no bananas in northern climates, etc).
2. Make sure you are surveying your pantry when you’ve recently been to the store, not when you are running on empty, or add things to the list that you usually have on hand if they are temporarily out of stock.
3. Estimate rough quantities of how much of each produce item you currently use on a weekly or monthly basis.

Once you have your list, you can group the items into categories if you want, like tomato products, or fresh, canned, or frozen. Whatever makes sense for you.

Then decide which plants might make sense for you to start out with in your garden. The criteria you use will be unique to your situation. It might be what you have space to grow (small containers on a balcony vs. a full backyard garden, etc.). Or, it might be what your favorite foods are – like tomatoes, onions, and garlic for pizza sauce rather than beans and rice. Or maybe you spend a lot of your grocery budget on a few items like fresh herbs or salad greens and you’d love to replace them with your own produce.

If this is your first time trying to grow a garden, I recommend you start small with 3-5 different kinds of plants and focus on successfully growing those before you take on trying to grow all the things you might eat in a year.

It’s also important to think about what varieties of a certain plant might work best depending on how you plan to use the food. For example, if you love cherry tomatoes in salad you would choose different seeds than if you wanted to make BLT’s.

This phase can be one of the most exciting parts of garden planning. You can start to really picture what it would be like to grow your own food and replace some of those weekly or monthly pantry staples with home-grown versions.

So, grab your timer and something to write on and start your surveys. Good luck and happy planning!