Let’s talk plants per person…

We’re a family of 6, four kids (ages 1, 4, and two 6 year olds) and two adults and we moved from a subdivision to our 7 acre farm in May 2023. We hit the ground running with a flock of ducks for eggs and a hog for meat. Between that and deer, we met our goal of supplying 25% of our own meat consumption for the year.
My goal for 2024 is to grow 25% of our greens/veggies.

I don’t have any experience gardening to meet the demands of a whole family. When I was a kid, my dad and I gardened as a hobby but it was really only to supply some fresh snacks in the summer. Other than that, I’ve maintained a container garden on my back porch before we moved to the farm.

I’m trying to figure up the amount of plants I would need per person to supply fresh veggies throughout the summer and some of the fall, any extra would be canned/dehydrated/frozen for winter or used up in soups and broth.

Currently on the planting list is tomatoes, bell pepper, eggplant, yellow squash, butternut squash, cucumber, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, brussel sprouts, pole beans, peanuts, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, cabbage, collard greens, lettuce, and spinach.


Any one have any ideas on where to start or how to even begin calculating this?

I have rolled this same question in my head.

One thing that the online calculators/estimators can not do is understand the specific per plant consumption that each person in your family actually consumes. Some people might lean heavier into the potatoes and garlic while others really REALLY like their carrots.

With that said, this was a cool graphic I found that could help you get started estimating.



Source

In addition to what Timothy mentioned about what people will eat, also consider what grows well. In my area, collard greens are rock stars that grow well with practically no help from me. As a result, I eat more of them than other leafy greens.

I would just buy a 2024 calendar and use it to keep a tally of the numbers of different veggies your family consumes every day or every week. Using a calendar will help make sense of the seasonal consumption of different vegetables, and by the end of the year you'll have a pretty good roadmap for what to grow the next year. And you'll be able to track the one-off weird vegetables that you really enjoyed but might not think to buy seeds for when planning your garden for the year.

We just moved this fall and so am mostly starting from scratch here in terms of the garden. ( I moved 60+ pots) I will also be figuring out how many plants I'll need. One that I know I'll be putting in at least 20 of are kales.

We are 3 adults and after years of various trials, kale,  kohlrabi, radish and bok choy are always early winners for us. The kales are such a useful green. I can start taking some leaves very early and it barely slows them down. Once they get bigger, the lower leaves can be chopped for soups, casserole, chips or frying and the new ones are still tender enough for salads. They also keep going until hard frost when we cut a bag a bunch for the freezer. Considering your family size, 10-20 would be a good number to try this year, just to see if you like them and if they work with your meal styles.

The kohlrabi, radish and bok choy all are put in early around the tomatoes, squash and cucumbers. They are up and done before those get big. 1 kohlrabi should do your group for 1 meal as a fresh, raw veg so you can figure how many you would want. They are so much better when picked and eaten right away than any I've bought, no matter how fresh.  
Being able to get eating stuff very quickly in the growing season really increases the gardens value for us.

Bonus suggestion: I grow a perennial walking onion and it is one of the first veg we get every year. I've able to take greens and stems as early as April to replace green onions. They also stay useful most of the season so it's hard to have too many. I am planning on trying for at least a 4'x8' bed of just perennial onions.

One of our Permie people made a staple crop calculator. I use it to plan my garden.

Mathew Trotter wrote: The Annual Staple Crop Calculator exists to take some of the guess work out for those of us far removed from our subsistence farming past. If you've always wanted to grow 100% of your own food, if you want to attempt the Rob Greenfield challenge and go an entire year on only what you grow and forage, or if you've suddenly found that your food security isn't as robust as you'd hoped, this simple yet powerful tool can help you decide which crops to grow and how much you'll need to plant in order to feed yourself, your family, or your community.

You can purchase it here. Make sure you read the whole post, there is a budget option in there somewhere. Oh, I do not grow even a quarter of my family's food. Failures happen.

I am trying to do the same but with basic calories, using corn, potatoes, squash. Lots of other veggies intermixed and in beds but not measuring those.

Please keep us posted on how it goes!

Firstly, I might consider what the soil is like, along with whether you get reliable summer rainfall or have plentiful irrigation water. You’ll need more plants on poor soil and/or with limited water, as the plants you do grow won’t grow as big. How much time you have to weed and thin plants as they are growing will also make a difference. I think in general when learning it’s better to plant way more of everything than you think you need, and then if some things fail, then you still have plenty of other things growing.

Notes on some of the crops you’ve mentioned:
Tomatoes - yield per plant will depend greatly on whether you’re growing a bush (determinate) type or vine (indeterminate), and also on how warm and long your growing season is - longer growing seasons give more time for the vine types to grow and ripen more tomatoes. How much you’d want to grow of any tomato depends on whether you’re preserving them or just using them for fresh eating. This year I have around 20 plants for my family I think, half of them bush, half of them vine.

Butternut squash - this needs a fairly warm growing season, warmer than what we have where I live, but other kinds of winter squash do well here. If you have a mild growing season, then you might want to consider other kinds of squash instead. If you get plenty of heat, then it should be fine, maybe plant 5 to 10 plants, depending on how much you eat.

Zucchini - how much you would want to grow depends on whether you’ll be preserving them, or whether you like making zucchini muffins, zucchini chocolate cake, and so on. If you’re just eating them fresh in cooking then 2 would be enough for a family, but for preserving, cakes, etc, more is good.

Lettuce - I sneak it as a companion plant in between slower-growing plants, and all around the garden. Lettuce is best planted in several successional plantings - so plant some roughly every 2 weeks during the growing season for continuous supply, same for spinach, but spinach prefers cooler weather, so plant it only early and late in the season.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:One of our Permie people made a staple crop calculator. I use it to plan my garden.

Thanks for the hat tip, Joylynn! And I'm glad you've been successfully using it to plan your garden!

I have some insights after the last few years of using my calculator and practically growing all of my own food.

For starters, the calculator is designed around relatively shelf-stable, high-calorie, staple foods. It will help you make sure you have enough calories, but it's nutrition agnostic. If you grow enough of these foods, you will have enough, and most of them will last in the pantry for years if you have excess. But they still need to be augmented with greens, fruit, nuts, and all the other vegetables that one wants to eat. Since these other things are way more variable in their production, and generally way lower in calories, I treat them as having 0 calories for the purposes of planning my garden. They aren't 0 calories, and the reality is that when tomatoes were at their peak, I was eating about 10% of my calories from tomatoes alone this season. Ditto with zucchini. Because I can set aside that 10% of calories from my staple crops for a year that I get a bad yield, I don't change my math based on what I hope to produce from those low-calorie crops (or from foraging, fishing, hunting, etc.) I treat it as a bonus that I can put in savings for a rainy day. Part of this is because the more perishable things are a coin flip. It doesn't matter if you can grow 25% of your calories from tomatoes if you get them all at once and don't have the time and energy to actually preserve them. Expect that you won't. If you do, that's a bonus.

As Abe said, start tracking now. You can't know how much you need if you don't know how much you're actually eating. I think it's important to eat the way you plan to eat if you were growing your own food and keep track of how much you're eating. Growing and eating everything from scratch is a lot of labor, and it's often very different food than we eat if we're buying our food. Make sure you're actually capable of eating the way you plan to eat before you invest a bunch of time, energy, and money into growing the food. If you grow a bunch of food that you won't eat, either because it's too much work, or because you don't like it, then that's a net loss on all counts. Of course, dietary patterns are learned, and taste preferences depend on our eating patterns. It takes 1-3 months for the palate to adapt to dietary changes, so if this is a way you want to eat, you very well might have to force yourself to eat this way for a few months before you actually enjoy it. Continuing to eat processed food while trying to make this transition just keeps your tongue wired for intense, manufactured flavors that keep you from appreciated the subtle nuances of more natural foods.

You also need to know that what you're eating is nutritionally complete. Love it or hate it, the commercial food system at least enriches foods to make up for the generally poor diets that people eat. If you switch to a natural diet and aren't actively pursuing variety in your diet, you will likely develop nutrient deficiencies. Something like 80% of Americans are low in vitamin B12 in spite of all of the enriched food. You won't know that you're not getting enough of a nutrient until it causes you problems... pain, fatigue, confusion, lack of balance, insomnia, mood swings, brain fog, psychosis, and eventually death. Not saying this to scare you, just to underline how important tracking is as you switch to growing your own. Getting some of these nutrients requires eating things that are bitter, or otherwise unpalatable to so many humans these days. Tracking with something like Cronometer is great for getting an in depth nutritional analysis of your diet and figuring out what adjustments you need to make.

I use the calculator both ways. Both to plan my garden, and at the end of the season, when I update it with the weights of things I was actually able to harvest. This year, it tells me that the staple crops I was able to harvest are roughly 50% of my total calories. 50% is still a lot, though not the 100% I would prefer. But I'm confident that I will make up for the rest with the fruit that I forage and the other vegetables that I harvest. Like the aforementioned tomatoes. There's no telling what will do well in any given season. Corn and squash are reliable here. Potatoes and amaranth can do well, but they haven't for me yet with my poor soil and lack of water. I will keep planting them, and expect yields to improve, but I can't count on them yet like I can corn and squash, so I don't plant them in excess. Updating the calculator at the end of the season lets me know which things are worth actually putting time and energy into, and which are just for fun and enjoyment.

For everything else, it's a matter of tracking how much you eat in a given week and planting accordingly. If you eat 10 carrots a week, plant 10 carrots a week (or enough so that you can have 10 carrots a week for as long as you can grow and store them.) That doesn't mean you only plant 10 seeds. You have to account for imperfect germination, pests, disease, thinning (which is incredibly important if you're also saving your own seeds... which you should at some point), etc. Expect things to fail. How much "extra" you plant is entirely down to how much space you have and how much you can risk not having enough of something. And you have to factor is seasonality. As you start eating the way you plan to grow, keep in mind when things are actually in season where you are. Don't buy things out of season and track them with the expectation that you'll be able to grow them out of season. Practically, you won't have fresh tomatoes in winter, so don't buy them in winter and expect that that's what your diet will be like when you're growing your own. Most areas, especially with a lot of u-pick or farmers markets, will have a calendar of what's in season when. Shop accordingly. It's also usually cheaper, since then it's not being shipped halfway across the world.

But the most important thing is to not expect to grow everything in your first year. You might be able to if you have enough resources, but there's a learning curve. And it's hard to know what will actually perform well at your site, and with the methods you're willing to employ, until you actually spend time putting seeds in the ground, seeing what happens, and adjusting accordingly. I expected potatoes and amaranth to be much bigger parts of my diet, but they just haven't performed well enough yet. Which is the other good reason to save seeds. Yields improve exponentially from one season to the next when you're saving seeds from your best plants, the plants that are already happy with your conditions. The weight of my corn nearly doubled this generation compared to last generation simply because I was saving seed from my best cobs.

Take it slow, be realistic, avoid the temptation to do too much (if you juggle too many plates, you just end up breaking all of them.) Better to figure these things out while you have the time and space to explore than when you're actually depending on that food like I was. Best of luck!

Mathew Trotter wrote: Part of this is because the more perishable things are a coin flip. It doesn't matter if you can grow 25% of your calories from tomatoes if you get them all at once and don't have the time and energy to actually preserve them. Expect that you won't. If you do, that's a bonus.

I've found that I'm horrible at preserving food and so I've planned my perennials to be ready to eat throughout the year for as long as I can. In my climate the fruits go from about April to October and greens go almost all year, except for when we occasionally get snow in January or February.

I'd like to set up cold frames or low hoop houses and I think I'll be able to keep the greens going all year that way- I love kale for example and it doesn't die unless we have snow that lasts for more than a day.

I also prefer to plant things that I can continue to eat from over a longer period of time. People have mentioned indeterminate tomatoes. But if you don't pull up the whole plant, you can also continue to harvest from plants like cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, spinach, lettuce, chard...

All that affects my planning since I expect more than one harvest from a single plant.