How Much Produce Should I Plant?

This has been a common question that I have gotten this week, so I thought I would post my answer for everyone.

Basically the amount will vary for for each family. You will need to decide what your goals are. Are you trying to raised all of the produce for your family for the year to completely eliminate the need to buy from others? What does your family enjoy eating? Here is how we come up with what to plant each year . . . AND it took time to come up with what works for us.

We do try to grow all of the produce that our families need for the year. Our large garden is shared with four other families. Each of these families has different tastes and are different sizes. So how do we know what to plant?

1. Keep track of what your family eats the most. (For instance, I use bell peppers at least 10 times a week. I also use a quart of greenbeans 3 times a week. Three of our families make homemade pizza about once a week, and so we need about 150 jars of pizza sauce.)

2. Figure out about how much produce you can expect to get from your plants. This will vary per area. So, we started tracking the amount of food that we got and the number of plants planted or number of feet planted. For instance, we need about 200 feet of green beans to feed all four families for the year. So, count the number of plants that you have, and as you bring in your produce, use tally marks to show how much produce you produce.

3. Figure out how many pounds of food you will need for your recipes. We need LOTS of tomatoes. We make homemade pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce, manwich, Rotel, tomato paste, tomato sauce, V8, seasoned tomato juice for soups, whole tomatoes, salsa and more from our tomatoes. So, we decide how many jars of each that we want to make, and them figure out how many pounds of tomatoes and other ingredients are needed so that we make sure that we have enough.

4. Learn from trial and error. I would personally rather have too much, than too little. I can cut back the next year if we have a huge bumper crop of something, so we can give the extras to the chickens, ducks and guineas.

Basically, the only way to figure out how much to grow is to keep track of what you want, and how much you get for a year or two until you come up with the right amount.

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