Read on to calculate vegetable yields per plant and what to consider for your family’s needs.
A common question asked by many people whose goal is self-sufficiency is, “What size garden to feed a family of 4 for a year?” This is difficult to answer because so many variables must be considered. I grow nearly all of my family’s vegetables – with the exception of a small amount of lettuce or peppers here and there – so I’m going to walk you through the way I determine how much to plant in our garden.
Make the Most of What You Have
The phrase “results may vary” is certainly true when it comes to planning a garden to feed your family. Here are some things that can drastically affect your personal results.
- Soil. Your garden soil will make a huge impact on how much food you can successfully grow. If I plant veggies directly into my native heavy-clay soil, my yields are quite modest. But yields explode when I plant the same vegetables in rich, organic soil I purchase and continue to feed with new organic matter.
- Gardening methods. The way you choose to garden can make your plot more or less abundant. In the free online movie My Urban Garden (watch it on YouTube), Canadian gardener Carol Bowlby plants her entire backyard so there are only extremely skinny pathways to walk on. This allows her to grow extra food for her family.
- Cultivars. The plants you select will make a difference. Not all bean plants produce the same amount of food, even when grown under the same conditions. ‘Provider’ bush beans produce far more abundantly for me than ‘Dragon Tongue,’ and while long beans (also known as “yardlong”) may produce abundantly in hot climates, they produce poorly in my cooler region.
- Your palate. Personal taste should also come into play. If you hate eating kale, there’s little point in planting it in your garden, although it’s quick to grow and highly prolific. But if you adore Brussels sprouts, you’ll want to plant more than the average person – even though they take up a fair amount of room and have a long growing period, thereby producing less food than kale.
Calculating How Many Vegetables to Plant
You’ll need to use math to calculate how many vegetables to plant, but the math isn’t difficult.
Start by keeping track of how much of each type of vegetable you eat in any given month. Just keep a notebook in the kitchen, and whenever anyone in your family eats a veggie, note the type and how many ounces or pounds were consumed. (Use a kitchen scale for accuracy.) At the end of the month, add up how many pounds of each vegetable your household consumed.
Then, multiply that figure by the number of months or weeks in a year. For instance, if Jane Doe ate 2 pounds of broccoli in a month’s time, she’d multiply 2 (pounds of broccoli) by 12 (months in a year). The result is how many pounds of broccoli she eats, on average, in one year – in this case, 24 pounds.
Next, you’ll need to consider how many pounds of food each plant is likely to produce. This figure is sometimes printed on seed packets or in seed catalogs. If it’s been provided for your specific plant cultivar, by all means use it for your calculations. Local extension office websites sometimes share this type of information, too. However, most sources list “how many to plant per person” (not helpful, because they don’t know how much you like to eat of any given vegetable), or they list “how many pounds of food per square foot,” which varies depending on the gardening method you use.
Over the years, I’ve found general guidelines on various seed company websites, as well as a realistic chart in Melissa K. Norris’ book The Family Garden Plan. Using these multiple sources, I’ve created an approximate vegetable yield per plant in pounds to make your calculations easier. Remember, these numbers are just a guideline. Only you can develop an accurate figure of the yields of plant cultivars grown in your specific conditions.
Approximate Vegetable Yields Per Plant Chart in Pounds
- Asparagus 2-3
- Beans, green 0.5-1
- Beans, lima 2
- Beets 0.25
- Broccoli 1
- Brussels sprouts 1-2
- Cabbage 2-4
- Carrots 0.25
- Cauliflower 1-2
- Celery 0.5
- Corn, sweet 1-1.5
- Cucumbers 3-5
- Eggplants 8-11
- Kale 1-5
- Leeks 0.25
- Lettuce 1
- Okra 1-5
- Onions 0.5
- Parsnips 0.33-0.75
- Peas, shelled 3
- Pea pods 6
- Peppers 1-5
- Potatoes, Irish 3-10
- Potatoes, sweet 2-3
- Pumpkins 2-10
- Rutabagas 1-3
- Spinach 0.25-1
- Squash, summer 5-20
- Squash, winter 10-20
- Swiss chard 8-12
- Tomatoes 5-15
- Turnips 0.5
Continuing to use broccoli as an example, we figured Jane Doe wants to eat 24 pounds of broccoli in a year. Looking at the list (above), we can see the average broccoli plant produces about 1 pound of broccoli head. (The leaves and stalks are edible too, but we’ll just consider those a bonus crop.) Therefore, Jane will need to grow about 24 broccoli plants in her garden. I consider this the minimum number, because diseases and pests can affect the average yield.
Some plants have just one product; for example, each carrot seed yields one carrot. Other such plants include onions, leeks, turnips, beets, and parsnips. This makes your calculations easier. If I use two onions a week and want to grow enough to last a year, the math is 2 (onions per week) x 52 (weeks in a year) = 104 onion plants. (In this case, I figured with weeks rather than months to make the calculation easier to understand, because the monthly figure is a fraction – about 8.66.)
If you preserve food at home, you can also figure out how much to plant. Let’s say John Smith eats 30 pint jars of dill pickles every year. The average cucumber seed produces 3 to 5 pounds, so we’ll calculate using the average of 4. John’s favorite canning book says he needs about 8 pounds of pickling cucumbers to preserve 8 pints of pickles. He’d do the math this way:
- 0 (jars) x 8 (pounds per jar) = 240 total pounds.
- 240 (pounds needed) ÷ 4 (approximate pounds produced by each plant) = 60 individual plants needed.
Learn to Preserve Food
You’ll also need to think about how to store all this food. While you may want to grow 30 pounds of cauliflower for the year, fresh cauliflower doesn’t store well for long, even under optimal conditions. Therefore, you’ll need to preserve some of the cauliflower through freezing, freeze-drying, dehydrating, or canning as pickles. Another option is to succession plant so you can harvest fresh cauliflower throughout the growing season, planting one or two cauliflower plants the first week, and then one or two more plants every subsequent week. Consider how long it takes your chosen cultivar to come to maturity (look on the seed packet) and be sure to allow the plants enough time to reach the harvest stage, factoring in the length of your growing season.
After doing the math, you may find you can’t possibly grow all of your desired veggies in the space you have. If you really want your household to be as self-sufficient as possible, you’ll need to prioritize what you grow by focusing on a few of the vegetables you eat the most, while planning to buy the rest from the grocery store or a local farmers market. Or, you can learn to eat what’s in season, or do without by purchasing certain veggies only as a treat.
Start With a Small Garden
If you’re new to gardening, trying in the first year to grow all the vegetables your household consumes likely isn’t manageable. You’ll inevitably make mistakes, and it’s better to make them in a small plot into which you’ve put a modest amount of time and money. Large gardens can be overwhelming for anyone, let alone someone who doesn’t have a lot of gardening experience. You don’t want to plan a large garden only to fall behind on weeding, harvesting, and preserving.
Again, focus on the vegetables most important to you or most preferred by your family. As you gain confidence and experience, expand your garden a little bit every year.
Finally, don’t think all of your food crops have to grow in a single plot on your property. Spread the love around if space is limited. When I first started growing food in earnest, I planted vegetables in a small backyard plot, a front window planter, along our house’s foundation, in pots on the porch, and even in our mow strip.
Kristina Seleshanko began growing vegetables by helping her father in their country plot. She now gardens with her husband and two children while blogging about their farmstead.
