Tending to your own garden or farm is a great way to enjoy the best and freshest produce that you’ll ever have in your life, but there’s more to it than just good taste.
Growing your own food is the only way to truly, genuinely ensure that you and yours will have food on the table when times are tough. (This reasoning is why lots of folks start the practice in the first place.)
Still, there is a big difference between bringing in enough fruits and veggies to subsist on and to producing a bounty that will pad your pantry and pack your root cellar close to bursting.
If you want to grow enough food to feed your spouse and kids for a year, or even longer, you’ve got to get down to brass tacks and figure out exactly how much is enough. Guessing is not a strategy! Luckily I’m here to help you with this article. Grab your notepad and we’ll get started.
Establishing Your Yearly Planting Plan
The key to establishing a garden, or field of crops, that can sustain your family for a year is analysis. There are various factors that you’ll have to balance if you want to do a good job of it.
What you definitely shouldn’t do is just start planting your family’s favorite fruits and veggies willy-nilly: you can enjoy short-term gains that way, but you won’t have a sustainable supply of food that will last.
Consider all of the following:
Available Space
This, obviously, is the biggest consideration for most of us. Space on our homestead is always at a premium, and the amount of space we devote to growing food will always be a trade-off. Similarly, not all of our land is equally suited to producing healthy, nutritious produce.
This might be the least of your worries if you have a huge parcel, but if all you have is an average backyard to work with or, worse, a truly tiny property you’ll have your work cut out for you.
Now you’ll have to make the hard choices against which foods you want the most versus which ones are most productive and make the best use of space.
You’d be wise to remember alternative gardening methods like vertical planting, extensive use of containers, companion plantings and more to maximize yield per square foot.
Do You / Does Your Family Like It?
The most elementary consideration is, surprisingly enough, the most easily forgotten for some of us!
Long ago one of my neighbors was hell-bent on growing enough to sustain their family for a year, and they settled on beans of various kinds for the purpose. Sadly, their family didn’t like beans all that much! Last I heard, most of his crop went to waste…
You aren’t wrong for planning around what your family likes and doesn’t like. Yes, preferences might take a back seat to simple necessity in times of real trouble, but chances are we won’t be facing such dire circumstances…
Figure out what your family likes the most and among them what you can grow the most of the most easily to maximize efficiency.
How Often It is Eaten
Stop to assess how often you and yours eat any given fruit or vegetable throughout the week, month and year. Things like corn, potatoes and certain fruits might be on the menu weekend and week out. Seasonal offerings like pumpkins might be a one and done treat around the holidays.
If you are considering something that is only eaten a few times a year, is it even worth the space and effort to grow it?
Seasonal and Regional Viability
“Want” doesn’t always “get”; depending on where you live or the season, some options might simply be nonviable. Trying to raise tropical fruits like bananas or mangoes if you live in northern latitudes is going to be an exercise in futility unless you’re willing to go all in on a specialized greenhouse setup.
Likewise, winter squashes tell you everything you need to know about seasonal planting in the name; you don’t want to try and bring them in at the beginning of the warm season.
For seasoned gardeners thinking through this part of your planting plan is elementary, but it’s easy for beginners to forget.
Yield Per Plant
The total yield per plant is a major consideration for maintaining a garden capable of feeding your family for a year at a time. Some plants are highly productive, meaning highly efficient, while others are less so.
Berry bushes, for instance, might look highly bountiful but they take up a lot of room for relatively little production: most will produce anywhere from 2 to 7 lb of berries when mature, healthy, and given ideal care, and individual bushes will cover several square feet by themselves.
Compare those to veggies like tomatoes; they can produce upwards of a 20 lb of fruit in a much smaller space, and they grow vertically!
Losses
It’s a fact of life when it comes to growing your own food: no matter how careful and diligent you are, pests, diseases, rough weather and good, old-fashioned human mishap will result in losses.
A smart homesteader will plant extra plants to account for this if striving to hit a target production number.
Storing Fresh or Preserving?
You’d be smart to think through how you are going to store your harvest, too. Beets, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and the like can keep for a long time if properly cured and stashed in a root cellar or similar storage location.
But things like tomatoes, okra, berries and so forth will need to be frozen, canned or processed in some other way if you want them to last. A bumper crop won’t do you much good if it all rots away within a week!
Family Planting Guidelines
The following stats can help you plan your yearly garden. Each fruit or veggie lists the average serving size, expected yield per plant (assuming it is mature and healthy), and also the high-side yearly average consumption of said fruit or veggie in North America.
As discussed above, know thyself and know thy family: your house might eat a lot more or a lot less of any given food!
Using this info we can come up with an estimate of how many plants we’ll need to cover the expected consumption.
Strawberries
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 2-3 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 8 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 3-4 plants
Grapes
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 15-20 lbs per vine
Yearly Consumption: 12 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 1 vine
Watermelon
Average Serving Size: 2 cups
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 10-15 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 20 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 2 plants
Blueberries
Average Serving Size: 1 1/2 cups
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 5-7 lbs per bush
Yearly Consumption: 10 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 2 bushes
Peaches
Average Serving Size: 1 medium peach
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 30-50 lbs per tree
Yearly Consumption: 15 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: <1 tree
Cantaloupe
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 8-12 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 16 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 2 plants
Raspberries
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 2-3 lbs per bush
Yearly Consumption: 8 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 3-4 bushes
Apples
Average Serving Size: 1 medium/large apple
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 250-500 lbs per tree (depending on variety/maturity)
Yearly Consumption: 12 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: <1 tree
Blackberries
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 5-7 lbs per bush
Yearly Consumption: 6 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 1-2 bushes
Tomatoes
Average Serving Size: ¾ cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 20-30 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 80 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 3-4 plants
Onions
Average Serving Size: ¾ cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 2-3 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 40 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 15-20 plants
Carrots
Average Serving Size: 1 medium carrot (3/4 to 1 cup)
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 2-3 lbs per sq ft
Yearly Consumption: 35 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 12-15 sq ft
Lettuce
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 1-2 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 30 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 15-20 plants
Spinach
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 3-4 lbs per sq ft
Yearly Consumption: 25 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 6-8 sq ft
Broccoli
Average Serving Size: 1 cup, cooked
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 2-3 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 25 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 8-10 plants
Cauliflower
Average Serving Size: 1 cup, cooked
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 2-3 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 15 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 5-6 plants
Bell Peppers
Average Serving Size: 1 medium pepper
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 5-10 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 20 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 2-4 plants
Cucumbers
Average Serving Size: 1 medium cucumber
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 10-15 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 30 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 2-3 plants
Corn
Average Serving Size: 1 ear’s worth (about ¾ cup)
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 5-6 ears per plant
Yearly Consumption: 50 ears
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 8-10 plants
Celery
Average Serving Size: 1 stalk
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 2-3 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 20 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 7-8 plants
Green Beans
Average Serving Size: 1 cup
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 4-5 lbs per 10 ft row
Yearly Consumption: 30 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 60-75 ft of row
Potatoes
Average Serving Size: 1 medium potato
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 10-15 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 100 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 7-10 plants
Sweet Potatoes
Average Serving Size: 1 medium sweet potato
Total Edible Yield Per Plant: 3-5 lbs per plant
Yearly Consumption: 40 lbs
Plants Needed Per Year, Per Person: 8-10 plants
Tim is a farm boy with vast experience on homesteads, and with survival and prepping. He lives a self-reliant lifestyle along with his aging mother in a quiet and very conservative little town in Ohio. He teaches folks about security, prepping and self-sufficiency not just through his witty writing, but also in person.
Find out more about Tim and the rest of the crew here.