How Much Should I Plant to Feed A Family?

So you want to grow some food to feed your family, cut down on your grocery bills, and maybe have some fun playing in the dirt with your kids? I fully support that plan! But how much should you plant to reach your goals?

To answer that question you need figure out how much space, time, and budget you have to spend on your family garden, decide on some goals, and start to understand plant yields. Let’s look at each of these three steps.

Setting Space, Time, and Budget Parameters

Let’s be honest, the amount of space you have to garden is somewhat determined by where you live and what kind of access you have to growing space outdoors or indoors. If you live in the suburbs, you may have a big backyard with plenty of space and you have to decide how much you can realistically garden in given time and budget. If you live in a tiny studio apartment, your space decision may be mostly made for you. However, even with limited space, there are still options. Check out my blog post 5 Ways to Grow Food in Small Spaces for more.

Deciding how much time you can spend in the garden could be a little more tricky. We are all busy, with work, school, kids’ activities, playdates, church, sports, and other events. Also, the time it takes to garden can vary from week to week and season to season. If your climate has well defined growing seasons, you can expect to spend more time on your garden in the spring, summer, and fall than you do in the winter. But, prioritizing a minimum amount of time each day or week to work on, plan for, or process from your garden is key to your garden being a success. You can use my free Custom Garden Plan to figure out the perfect plan to fit the time and space your family has available.

Setting your budget is something that you might not think of right off the bat. In fact, you might be starting a garden to help you save money on groceries. You absolutely can save money by growing your own food. But if you’re just starting out, there are things you will need to get. You can find free or cheap things, or you can invest more in things that might get you going faster on your garden journey. If you decide up front how much you’re able to spend, and stick to it, you won’t be surprised later on.

Setting Your Garden Goals

Once you know your general parameters for space, time, and budget, you can set some garden goals. Your goals will be personal to your garden for this year and based on the parameters you set for your space, time, and budget. Don’t get seduced by what others are posting on social media about their garden plans for the year, or their perfect looking garden plans. Decide what success means for you in your family garden and stick to it. That way you can celebrate your wins in ways that are most meaningful for you.

How Much Do I Need to Plant?

But what are reasonable goals with the space, time and budget you have available for your garden this year? And what does it mean to actually figure out how much you need to grow to meet those goals? To figure that out, you need to understand plant yields.That might sound complicated, but it’s really not. Let’s look at an example.

If you wanted to grow all the tomatoes your family would use for a year, you need to know:

1. How many servings or quarts you use in a year – you could do a pantry survey, or check out what you bought at the grocery store for the last week or month and multiply it out for a year.
2. How many tomato plants you need to produce that many tomatoes – this is the YIELD of the plant and you can sometimes find it on the seed packet or online (see example below). It can vary a lot between different varieties, so figure out what it is for your plants.
3. How much space you need to grow that number of tomato plants – this will depend on the spacing you choose to use and if you are growing in containers or in the ground.

How About an Example!

To see how this works, I’ll use a quick example from my household. Looking at diced tomatoes, we go through 1-2 quarts of diced tomatoes per week. So maybe 6 quarts per month, or 72 quarts for a year. One quart is 4 cups or 32 ounces, which is roughly the same as 2 pounds. So, doing the multiplication, 72 quarts is about 144 pounds of tomatoes. If I Google average yield per tomato plant, I get answers between 10-15 pounds per plant. Assuming the lower number to be safe, I divide 144 pounds by 10 pounds per plant which gives me 14.4. So I need about 15 tomato plants to grow all my diced tomatoes for the year.

Of course, we eat other kinds of tomatoes, like cherry tomatoes in salads, and big slicers for sandwiches, which might not be the best varieties for diced tomatoes that we need to freeze or can for long term storage. So, I may plant more than 15 tomato plants total. Also, I might want to plant a few extra seeds to make sure I get enough healthy seedlings.

I like to plant my tomatoes about 12 to 18 inches apart in rows outside. So I need at least 15 feet of row space for my tomato plants for my diced tomatoes for the year. If I planted my tomatoes in containers, I would need 15 tomatoes and space to set them out in full sun.

I can do the same calculation using my goals for each plant for the year, an estimate of how much we need to grow to reach the goal, a measure of yield per plant, and then an estimate of how many plants I need and how much space that would take to grow. When I make my garden plan, I can use that information to decide how much space to give to each plant family.

Where Do I Find Yield Info?

Some county extension services in the U.S. provide yield charts for different vegetables. One that I found recently from the University of Michigan even estimates how much a person or a family of four would eat, but I find it better to start with what you and your family actually eat to, rather than a general estimate.

So, get out your paper and pencil, or your spreadsheet and start plugging in some numbers and figuring out how much you need to plant to reach your garden goals for the year.

If some of your garden goals include saving money on groceries, check out my 10 Best Plants to Grow for Your Budget.

Once you’ve got your plan together, you need to figure out when to start planting your seeds. Check out How Do You Know When to Plant for more.