Feeding a Family From a Garden

[digitS']

There are lots of things to consider when a person thinks about maximizing the food to be gained from a garden. We can simplify .

Here is a pdf file on Small Plot and Intensive Gardening from Purdue University, Department of Horticulture LINK I've posted this on TEG a good number of times. It provides ideas on spacing in a home garden and the yield a gardener might expect.

It is very ambitious to think to supply all of the food for an average 4 person family from a home garden. Most family gardens are 1,000 square feet or less. Gardeners seldom venture into growing grain crops altho', they may. Certainly something like potatoes can replace starchy grains in a diet but several 100 pounds/person would be required, along with the proper storage.

Let's say that the entire garden is potatoes and that potatoes alone are sufficient for human health and . . . all of the other things we would have to assume for this scenario . The gardening family has a good year and produce 1 pound per square foot of garden. That would be about 300+ calories per square foot. An adult needs about 2,000 calories each day or, 73,000 calories for the year. That is a 2400 square foot "potato garden" for each person and nearly 10,000 square feet of garden for the family.

That is about the minimum garden size for a complete garden calorie contribution to a family diet. I think . The family would have a garden 10 times the size of most family gardens and would be very sick by the end of the year!

Steve
just fiddling around with calories, square feet and potatoes

 

[baymule]

Steve, you are waaaaaay over thinking this gardening thing!!!

Haha, with my tiny space in the front yard, I still am able to raise a lot of our vegetables. Can I supply all our needs? No, but I sure knock a hole in the grocery bill.

 

[so lucky]

I've been on this kick lately trying to figure out what vegetables I can grow that are healthier or "better" in some way than I can buy in the grocery store. It is not my experience that just anything home grown is better tasting than just anything purchased. Some of the stuff I have grown tastes like cardboard or worse. Carrots, for one example.
Going by the "dirty dozen" of the veggies/fruits that are most likely to be loaded with pesticides, I need to grow peppers, greens, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries.
I can probably grow enough peppers and tomatoes to last the year. Maybe enough greens, of various kinds. Potatoes? I haven't had much success with potatoes--yet. I can grow enough cabbage, but not sure if I can keep it through the year without processing the kraut.
I have new determination to try to avoid pesticides and unhealthy chemicals, so will keep on plugging along in my little garden.

 

[thistlebloom]

Hold on.... are you sayin' I'll be sick by the end of the year?

I harvested probably 500 pounds of spuds. That's a rough estimate, fizzled out on weighing them, but I hope to not buy any store bought potatoes. There is a slight possibility that our diet may be a tad heavy on the potato side. (Where's the head scratching emoticon?) But, truly we are a healthy bunch. We very rarely get sick. All that vitamin P you know.

I think you should have picked on tomatoes Steve....

 

[digitS']

Well, now you see why I stay out of the SufficientSelf forum .

Sweet potatoes would be a better choice for maximum calories per square foot but, since I can't grow more than I can put in my shirt pocket on that much ground, I went for the "Irish" potato.

Calories. Bay' is talking $, So Lucky is talking health . . . Thistle', I've read that many Irish families of 150 years ago had very little other than their potatoes and a milk cow. They were growing generations of people with those before potato blight showed up.

I was trying to find that Howard Baker (Senator from Tennessee) quote about realizing that he was out of the South when he visited Washington DC as a kid and saw people eating potatoes for breakfast. It seemed kind of funny to me because when I've visited DC, I felt like I was in the South but it had to do with the weather not breakfast.

Steve

 

[897tgigvib]

Owww, that garden doesn't even have any vitamin blackberry in it. No wonder they'd be sick.

 

[digitS']

If it is okay with everyone, I like the idea of growing all the calories a family of 4 would need on 1/4 of an acre.

Now, how many calories does that milk cow need . . ?



Steve

 

[so lucky]

You know, if those Irish supplemented their diet with wild greens and a rabbit occasionally, I bet they could remain pretty healthy with potatoes and good old raw milk.

 

[digitS']

I once entered a recipe competition with a sour cream and potato casserole. I had just moved off on my own . . .

It was one of only 2 competitions that I have entered by sending something off in the mail. Yes, I once chose Johnson and Humphrey to win reelection in Gillette's Name the Candidates. Running against them would be Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford.

Boy, I sure got that all mixed up!!! No, I've never won anything since high school, except a few card games & at ping pong.

These days, people wouldn't even pay me to shovel snow. Good thing that So Lucky is up to doing that . I should make some potato casserole.

Steve

 

[so lucky]

When I was 12 I won $2.00 in a weekly contest for writing a little poem for some dairy; can't remember which one. It was published in the local paper. That may have been the last thing I won. My 15 seconds of fame came early and faded fast.