How Much You Need to Plant to Feed a Family

Are you planting a garden this year and you want to make sure that you plant enough to feed your family? Here’s my detailed plan and how to come up with your own!

How Much You Need to Plant to Feed a Family

I’ve been wanting to write a blog post like this for quite some time but I wasn’t really sure how to put it together. Yes, I’ve seen lists going around of exactly what plants to buy and how many you need to feed a family but I always wonder when I see those…how big of a family? What if a family doesn’t eat a certain way?

I’ve never seen a list that fits our family’s needs or likes so I’ve never been able to use something standard to come up with our garden plan to feed our family. In other words, if you came to this blog post looking for a list that you can just “plug and play” to your gardening plans, you aren’t going to find it.

What you will find is how to make your own list so that you can buy the right amount of seeds and plants and make sure that you will have enough space in your garden to plant the things that you need.

Some Guidelines of What Plants Produce

Let’s start with understanding better what a plant can produce. Each plant can produce a certain amount of pounds of food. Some plants just produce one of the things that you need. All plants are different. Here is a general list of what the most common types of garden plants can produce.

Lettuce – 1 Head per plant
Tomatoes – 5 to 10 pounds per plant
Cucumbers – 10 per plant
Radishes – 1 per seed (with 100% germination)
Beets – 1 per seed (with 100% germination)
Carrots – 1 per seed (with 100% germination)
Bell Peppers – 5 to 10 per plant
Hot Peppers – 20 to 50 per plant
Green Beans – 3 to 5 pounds per 10 foot row
Potatoes – 5 to 10 potatoes per plant
Onions – 1 bulb per seed or bulb sown
Zucchini – 6 to 10 pounds per plant
Acorn Squash – 4 per plant (same for other winter squash)

If you are looking for the yield of other varieties of plants, check out this list. The only thing to keep in mind is that some varieties will produce more than the average. You should be able to find out this information from the seed catalog that you are ordering from.

How to Estimate What You Need

This part can get a little tricky and you might not get it right the first time. However, as long as you are preserving your foods in some way, it’s better to overplant when you aren’t sure than to underplant and not have enough to feed your family. Here’s how to figure out how much you need to plant.

1. Make a full list of the foods that your family eats and that you can grow in your garden. This likely won’t be a full list of all the foods your family eats (unless you also grow your own meats and spices), but do your best to make this a full list of the types of vegetables (and possibly fruits if you can grow them) that your family already eats on a regular basis.
2. Use the list above to begin estimating how many plants you will need of each kind to feed your family until next summer. To do this you will also need to know which of the foods you are going to preserve and how. More on this shortly. Remember, that the list above is the AVERAGE of what each plant will produce. To be more certain, add a few extras of each plant to make sure that you will have enough.

Estimating can be tricky if you don’t know very well what your family eats on a regular basis and how much. This is the key to figuring out how much to plant though! If you don’t know about how many meals your family will eat of one item, this will be very difficult to do.

If you are really stuck on this part, here’s some examples to help you out.

Our family loves beets, if we have enough, we will probably eat them once a week as a part of a meal. We need at least 4 decent sized beets to make a side or to add to a meal. If I want us to eat beets (which I can stop in my root cellar or can) each week through the entire year, I will need to plant at least 208 beets to feed my family for the next year until the next crop will be ready. I will actually plant a few more than this just in case some do not come up.

Another example would be winter squash, something else we store in the root cellar. We eat 1 or 2 winter squash per week, however, they only last from the fall through early spring. If I need 2 squash a week to last me a total of 26 weeks, I’ll need to harvest a total of 52 squash. If each winter squash plant on average produces 4 squash, I will need to plant 13 winter squash plants to get the harvest that my family needs.

This sounds complicated but you can figure it out with a little time and effort!

 

My Garden Plants and Plans

Last year, I did not have a big enough garden to feed our family and that was totally fine with me. We were building our house and I simply didn’t have the time to put into a garden like that.

Reminder…if you want your garden to feed your entire family for a year, it IS going to take more effort than your standard kitchen garden. There will be many more plants to care for. Decide in advance what you will have time for and if this coming gardening season is too busy for you, don’t feel bad about also having to buy some from the farmer’s market or in bulk. Those are all viable options as well and many of us will have to do a mixture of options anyway since we can’t all grow everything we eat in our zone.

Our family loves fruit but we mostly have to grow berries and have just a few fruit trees. Since this is the case, I still will happily buy peaches, bananas, or other fruits I can’t grow in bulk to be able to preserve them for our family.

Getting back to the subject of this section, I’m now going to share with you my own garden plans for the coming summer. I apologize if they are a little complicated or don’t make much sense…I just wrote them up for myself to understand and to follow when the time comes for me to plant. Also, these of course, are based off my growing area and conditions (zone 4).

This is an overview of my garden for the summer. Each section represents a raised bed area. We are adding in several more this year to be able to produce a larger quantity and we are also adding wicking beds to try in our very dry climate.

Yes, I realize I’m not the best drawer ever. I don’t really care. This gets the job done and I can read it! 🙂

Here’s an up close image of my plans for some of the raised beds. I’ve mapped out exactly how much I can fit in each space according to the instructions on the seed packets. You will also notice that we are moving to poly cropping this year instead of monocropping to help with beneficial insects and to help keep the issues away.

Creating a garden to feed your family for the year is not a one-size-fits-all type of plan. It will take some careful planning and figuring out the details and honestly just really knowing your plants and your family’s needs.

That being said, it CAN be done! I hope that this helps give you a little clarity if this is your plan for your garden for the coming year.

Have you ever planted enough to feed your family for a full year? What are some factors that went into your decision? What tips can you share with others?