How much do I need to plant?
This is the question of the year, isn’t it? Growing your own food is a key component of any good preparedness plan. Even if you aren’t worried about food shortages or end of days prepping, there are still plenty of good reasons to grow as much of your food as you can.
Read: Ten Reasons to Garden (even if you aren’t prepping for anything.)
We’re serious about growing our food
We have a 40X40 garden plus an asparagus bed and an assortment of fruit trees and berry bushes. With all of that, we are able to produce about 80-90% of our family’s vegetable needs for an entire year (depending on how favorable the weather was that year.)
Most people probably don’t have a 40’X40’ space that they can devote to gardening. But that doesn’t mean you can’t grow most or even all of your own food. If you grow your food vertically, along fences or trellises and grow intensively using Square Foot Gardening techniques, you can produce up to twice
as much food as most people do in a regular vegetable garden.
So it’s quite likely that even with one-half the size of our garden you can grow enough to feed your family for a year.
So what should I grow and how much?
Obviously, a lot of these decisions will depend on several factors:
- The number and ages of family members
- What foods your family regularly eats
- Your tastes and dietary restrictions
- Your climate and growing conditions
- How much space and time you have
- How much you want to preserve
- What preservation methods you’ll use
Here’s what I grow in my garden:
Beans: Pole beans take up less space than bush beans and are much easier to pick. They are super easy to can.
Beets: I’m not crazy about beets but they pack a lot of nutrition in a small space and store a long time in the cold basement. The leaves of the beets are
really yummy, so it’s like you’re getting two vegetables from one seed. Chop, blanch and freeze the leaves like you would spinach or Swiss chard. My goal is 60-80 pounds, about 40-60 feet.
Broccoli: There’s no real good way to preserve broccoli or cauliflower long term. The taste and texture of frozen broccoli and cauliflower are so-so. So we eat most of it during the summer months, and freeze 2-3 gallons of florets.. I will also dry some of it to use in soups. I also like to ferment a giardiniera-type mix of vegetables that includes cauliflower, carrots, onions, radishes, turnips and peppers.
Cabbage: Cabbage will store several weeks in our cool basement. Of course, I always grow at least 12-15 heads to make a big batch of sauerkraut.
Carrots: These are an excellent long-storing vegetable, lasting well into April, so I want plenty. I try to get at least 100 pounds or more to put into the basement, about 120 feet.
Read: The Carrot Report
Corn: There’s nothing tastier than fresh corn on the cob. My favorite way to preserve it is to freeze it. You can also can it, but the high sugar content of the super-sweet varieties tends to caramelize and change the color and flavor of the corn. So if you want to can your corn, plant the regular sweet not super-sweet corn. Our diet is low-carb, so 20’ is enough for us. But before the low-carb days, we grew at least 60-100 feet.
Cucumbers: These are mostly a summer-eating crop but I always make at least one or two batches of pickles. I grow these on a trellis, usually 7-8 plants.
Eggplant: Another mostly summer-eating vegetable. It doesn’t freeze well, but it’s pretty good dehydrated. Use it in soups and casseroles or grind it into a powder for a nutrient-dense Veggie Powder. Three-four plants is enough for us.
Read: How to make and use veggie powder
Greens: Leafy greens like spinach fall into this category. Spinach is very particular. It only likes cool spring weather. Since our springs are so short, I grow Swiss chard, collards and mustard greens instead. Every 2-3 weeks I harvest all I can, wash and chop the leaves, blanch them for two minutes, drain and freeze in one-quart bags. If I grow 40 feet of greens, I usually go into winter with 50-70 quarts of frozen greens.
Herbs: You want herbs to add an extra layer of flavor to your meals. Every year I try to grow parsley, dill, basil, cilantro and rosemary. I also have annuals like sage, oregano and tarragon. I plant 2-4 plants of each variety except for basil. For basil, I grow at least eight plants so that I can have plenty of pesto all year long. The rest gets dried and stored in dark-colored jars.
Read: The Pleasure of Herbs
Kohlrabi: This is not a food I ever ate as a child. But it stores forever in the basement and is very versatile. A dozen kohlrabi is just about right for us.
Read: What I did with 40 pounds of kohlrabi
Lettuce: Lettuce is only good during the summer months, so I don’t grow a lot of it. Enough for a green salad every week or so.
Melon: This is another summer food. I only grow one or two plants a year.
Onion: This is a staple in my daily cooking, so I always try to get at least 40-50 lbs. They’ll store in the basement for 4-5 months before they start sprouting and showing signs of aging. When that happens, I dehydrate them.
Peas: About the only way we like peas is frozen but they are also easy to can if you like canned peas. I grow about 30-40 feet of peas.
Peppers: Next to tomatoes, this is our most beloved food in the garden. I grow several varieties: cayenne and paprika to dry and grind into powder, jalapeno and serrano for salsa and sri racha and at least one super hot variety to give the sri racha an extra kick. We don’t use sweet peppers very much, so one plant of sweet pepper is usually enough for us. A total of 15-18 plants.
Read: How I use up all my peppers
Potato: This is another long-storing food. When they start to sprout and show signs of aging in late winter, I will dehydrate them for making instant hash browns or for use in soups and casseroles. In the early spring I will also can two or three batches of soup made with potatoes and other veggies and whatever meat is on sale. We don’t eat a lot of carbohydrates, so 50-60 lbs is usually enough. Larger families will want 100-200 pounds. Save space in your garden by growing them in a trash can or potato tower.
Squash: There are two types of squash: the hard-shelled Winter Squash like butternut, acorn, pumpkin and spaghetti and the softer, quicker growing Summer squash like zucchini and pat-a-pan.
Properly cured, some winter squash will store a year or more. If it starts to spoil it’s time to start freezing it. Scoop out the seeds and roast in the oven till tender. Then freeze in 2-3 cup portions to use in bread, cookies and pies. I plant two, sometimes three varieties of winter squash. Pumpkin, Blue Hubbard and Butternut are my favorites.
Read: Try Fried Squash Blossoms
Summer squash is best eaten fresh but can be dried or frozen for winter eating. I use a spiralizer to make zucchini noodles and freeze that in 1-quart baggies. Grate and freeze zucchini for use in zucchini bread and cookies. Dried zucchini is also versatile but it’s especially tasty when it’s dried to make “fruit gummies.” Two hills of zucchini is usually enough for us.
Read: There’s no such thing as too much zucchini
Tomatoes: Now we come to the queen of the garden, the main reason we like to garden: fresh tomatoes. Of course, we eat as much as we can all summer long, but then we also make a few batches of salsa plus 30 or more pint jars of sauce and a dozen or more quart jars of whole tomatoes.
In the fall I harvest as much of the green tomatoes as possible. Some of those will ripen after harvest, so they’ll go on the table for fresh eating in late fall, early winter. The rest I will use for pickled green tomatoes, piccalilli and chow chow. I usually plant 20-25 tomato plants each year.
Read: My tomato report
It all starts with a seed
Many of the vegetables I grow start their life in the garden as a plant (as you’ll see in the chart below.) Starting in late February, I start these plants from seed. That means my total investment in my garden is around $50 for about $1500 worth of food.
If you don’t have the room or time to start your own seedlings at home, that’s OK. Just get the plants from the garden center. Gardening is such a money saver, even if you buy the plants instead of starting them all from seed, you’re still saving a lot of money and getting the best tasting vegetables possible.
The first step
Growing your fruits and vegetables is just the first step to year-round food. To ensure you have enough food for an entire year, you also need to preserve it. In fact, most of my growing choices are dictated by how much I can preserve. I especially like to focus on long-storing vegetables that don’t require much of me except for a cold storage space.
There are four major ways to preserve food: Root cellar or cold storage, canning, freezing and drying.
There are a couple other methods, sort of sub-sets of these. The first is fermentation or pickling. It sort of falls under canning, since it uses much of the same equipment. Homemade vinegar and sauerkraut fall under this category.
The second is freeze-drying. Over the last 10 years freeze-drying has become much more accessible to the home gardener. But it does still require a big investment in equipment and space. So even though it’s perfect for just about any food you can grow, it’s not for everyone. That’s why I’ve left it out of the equation for now.
Putting it all into a chart
Here’s a chart that condenses all this information into one infograph. It includes suggestions for how much to plant, whether to start with seeds, sets or plants and the best ways to preserve the foods. You can download it here for free to use as a reference guide.
The most important guide
This chart is just to help you get started. You’ll need to adjust it to your family’s personal tastes and needs as well as space or time limitations. But the most important thing you can do is to keep a garden journal. Write down what varieties you plant and when. As you bring things in from the garden, weigh what you picked and record it in your journal. As you preserve your food throughout the summer and fall, write that in the journal, as well. Then in January, before you start planning your garden for the coming summer, take an inventory of how much of your preserved food is still left.
This will be your guide for deciding how much you’re going to plant in the coming year. If you ran out of salsa mid-winter, then you know you’ll need to plant more tomatoes and peppers. Too many pickles left over? Plant fewer cucumbers.
Read: Keep a garden journal
The rewards of year-round goodness
Producing much of the food that your family eats is extremely rewarding. You are secure in the knowledge that your family is eating the best possible food: best tasting, highest nutrition and all of it free of chemicals
You are also able to keep better control of your family’s food budget without compromising your menu. You have created a cushion between yourself and the uncertainties of the world around you.
P.S. If you want to take your gardening to the next level, you may want to read more about year round gardening. To get a good understanding of how to do this, be sure to follow all the links in the post below.
Read: Gardening Year Round
