Knowing how many plants to put in your garden each year can feel like a wild guess. It’s not that you don’t know how much you want, but instead that there are a variety of factors that go into how well a crop performs and how much you can actually use at any given time. Because of this a lot of people tend to over do it on their first couple of years with a new homestead garden.
There is hope though, you can get this right, you just have to keep a few things in mind and make estimates around a simple garden plan.
Before You Plant: Know How Much You Need
We’ve talked about this before with figuring out how many laying hens you need and the principle here is the same. Before you can figure out how many plants you need for any given crop you need to know what your diet looks like. This can be especially tough for people who are just getting started with homestead life or making big changes in their eating habits, but it’s still doable.
Take a Guess at What You Eat
The easiest way to gauge your consumption is to start with a rough guess of how much you eat a certain thing in a given week. You might eat a few potatoes a week, a couple of onions, more than a few carrots, a lot of lettuce, etc. For each thing you’d like to grow in your garden list out what you think your weekly consumption is and write it down.
Keep a Log of What you Actually Eat
Once you have your guess, spend a week writing down what you actually eat. We keep detailed food journals year round, but you don’t need to do this for more than a week or two to get a pretty accurate picture of your weekly diet.
Compare And Extrapolate
After you have your guess and your actual food log you can look at the two side by side and see a few things right away. The guess is typically closer to what you “want” to be eating like while the log is a snap shot of your actual diet, so comparing them tells you how close you are to your eating goals. The further these differ the more conservative you’ll want to be on your estimates in planting!
The other thing you’re going to be looking at is extrapolation. With the log in hand you can multiply out what you ate per week by 52 to get a rough estimate of what you are likely to eat in a year. Remember you need to get these numbers in terms of whole potatoes, whole carrots, etc. If you don’t have that you’ll have to do some more math to figure out those numbers too.
Once you have your yearly consumption in hand compare it to your desired consumption. If the numbers in what you actually ate are higher, use those numbers, if the numbers are lower adjust them up to be the average of the two (Add the two numbers together and divide by 2). This way you will find yourself producing enough food to meet where you want to be without being at a shortage.
Finally you need to ask yourself if any of your estimates were just wrong due to being a bad guess, which is possible. For any guesses like that just drop those rather than taking the average. A perfect example of this is how I always use a potato more than I’m going to need in every recipe, it’s just a bad estimate sometimes!
Creating a Plant List with Average Yields
Before you plant you should make a spreadsheet of what you’re going to grow. I know a lot of people who do gardening are resistant to spreadsheets and exact numbers. It can take a lot of fun out of the experience, but the rewards for being more calculating are worth it!
In the spreadsheet you can store a lot of information about each plant. For our purposes of estimation though you’re going to need the average yield for a given plant. With that in hand you can then calculate how many plants you need to have just enough to meet your goals you calculated above.
With your plant numbers in hand you might think you’re ready to start planting, but there are a few more things to think about.
Crop Loss Adjustments
For any crop you can easily store or giveaway excess, plan a 10-20% increase in plants to account for unexpected loss. In reality you never get 100% return on your plants and you should expect some of them to fail to produce for you. In the event that you do miraculously get a full 100% return, extra crops can be preserved, pickled, processed, or given away.
For crops that you wont be able to preserve in someway or can’t give away easily we recommend an additional plant over what you think you’ll need (or 5% if you planting for a large family). While it is a bit of a waste if you have a over abundant season, you can always compost excess, use it for seed crop, or feed it to animals as a nice extra treat. If you’re homesteading properly, you really can’t “waste” food unless you’re throwing it into a landfill.
An Extra Crop
In addition to preparing to lose some of a crop we generally also grow what we like to call our backup crop. This is usually something that stores really easily like a dry bean. We grow at least one of these that we are not fully including in our estimates each year in case we have something fully fail or we get a blight of some sort.
By Setting aside an extra crop that can be stored long term you can ensure you’re still getting all your calories off of land without as much worry if something catastrophic happens.
Plant What You Will Use
This may sound obvious, but if you don’t like a food, don’t plant it. In the beginning of the year a lot of people get this idea in their mind that they’re going to start eating healthy and turn their life around and often people imagine a version of themselves that doesn’t mind eating kale even though they can’t stand the stuff now. Be realistic with yourself and make changes to your diet gradually rather than growing a ton of stuff you hate.
A Little Planning for a Lot of Efficiency
There you have it. Simple steps to planning what you need to plant. Know what you, know your yields, and plan for losses. With these three simple rules in mind you can setup a wonderful garden that will keep you fed for the whole without having too much leftover or not enough to eat. Happy homesteading!