About
My vegetable garden used to be a car park.
I’m Olivier. I grow vegetables on a 25 m² plot in Ibaraki, Japan — no-dig beds, on land I actually own.
The question I’m trying to answer is simple: how close to self-sufficient can one person get on 25 m²? Not as an aesthetic, as an actual number. What does it take, what breaks, what has to be given up to get there.
This blog is the running log. Every harvest gets weighed. Failures get written up the same as the wins — the slug year, the bolted lettuce, the month I underestimated water. The numbers go up when the system works and down when it doesn’t, and both are the point.
I don’t know yet how far 25 m² actually goes. That’s why I’m writing it down.
01The method
The methods lean regenerative — no-till, building soil from kitchen and garden waste, plus bought-in compost while the system builds up — because it’s not worth building real soil richness on land you don’t own.
How close to self-sufficient can one person get on 25 m²?
the question
Start with Post #01 How the plot came to exist · what it’s actually for