Someone was asking how much garden to plant to feed three people. Let's do some calculations.
In my most productive year, I grew ½ gallons of dry beans on a 10 ft long trellis. A half gallon of dry beans weighs roughly 3.5 lbs.
You need roughly 60 lbs of dry beans per person to live off of for a year. From my garden efficacy numbers, that 60 lbs could be produced on 171.43 ft of trellis. For three people, that comes to 514.29 feet of trellis.
A more realistic diet would include a range of other crops, but you'd need the same order of magnitude of garden area.
A home garden is not the solution to food not being available.
However, if you have the time, resources, and land to grow a garden, it can supplement the nutrition you have in your diet while relying on farmers to meet your basic caloric needs.
I'm at 45°N with a short growing season.
Those further south can potentially have multiple crops in rotation year-round, while I mostly can only have one crop a year for any given garden area.
The numbers will differ for different places, but this sort of calculation illustrates the difference between gardening and farming.
The other big difference between gardening and farming is that for gardening, you can have a lot of mature established plants that are pest-resistant.
Farming means having to protect vulnerable seedlings and/or fruit from pests. Which requires either a huge amount of work or undesirable chemicals
@quixoticgeek The numbers will differ for different places. I'm at 45°N, with a fairly short growing season.
At my latitude, I have to organize my gardens by height along the south-north axis to prevent the taller ones from shading out the shorter ones. Where I grew up in the south, this was not a realistic concern.
Those growing further south can have multiple crops in rotation throughout the year. I mostly only have one crop for any given area of the garden (though I aim to improve this).
@thebiologistisn these numbers are based on the UK, so ~51°N.
To throw another data point in the works. I've done several years where I've been entirely self sufficient in salad for a single person, from some ice-cream tubs on a 1m long south facing window sill.
The reality is many crops are so cheap, self sufficiency isn't worth it. Potatoes, onions, dry beans. But using the same area for expert crops like raspberries and the like can be very cost effective.
@quixoticgeek @thebiologistisn
7.2 sq meters with a cold frame is just about enough to make sure you've got a veg to go with most dinner for one or two in a mild climate.
250sqm should get you about a ton of potatoes, which comes out to about 2000 calories per day, or a quarter of what you need for a family of four. It should be more than enough to cover all the veg needs for a family of four, but you still will need carbs and protein.
We've got 5 acres (~2 ha) in central Arkansas that we're slowly converting into a specialty produce farm. I ran calculations once, speculating about sustainability. We could, with luck, support around 6 people, with enough spare to sell.
To do that, we'd still need to bring in about 1 ton of nitrogen, and about half a ton of other nutrients. We'd also be basically doing nothing but tending crops all year.
I've seen claims in books that you can fully feed a person on 300-400 square meters. I've never heard from a person who has actually lived that claim.
Same. We also had animals, so another 3 acres or so of pasture
One of the discrepancies in these kind of conversations is, what do people consider a day's worth of vegetables?
I was planting a garden for a friend, and discovered that what he considered veggies for a family of three at dinner was FAR less than what I considered a serving for one person
Someone else in this thread said they grew a winter's worth of salads in two buckets or something. My greenhouse has 15 tubs, each a bit bigger than a 5 gallon bucket. It is not anywhere near enough vegetables for one person over the winter, but it supplements what I grow outdoors
I'm a professional at this stuff. I've been doing it all my life, and teaching it for many years. I live in a climate where we garden 12 months of the year
@NilaJones @mxjaygrant @thebiologistisn Factor in growing nutrient dense vegetables from really healthy soil and that’s another calculation needed entirely from most people’s lived experience.
It’s wonderful to hear people’s farming life stories. Not enough of us know what it’s like to grow our own food, let alone grow it for others.
@Broadfork @mxjaygrant @thebiologistisn
Distribution is hard, too
My garden / orchard on my 1/8 acre city lot is to the point where I have annual surpluses of some stuff. And I cannot get rid of it!
We have a local gleaning group, but they are really only interested in gleaning farms, not backyard stuff
I post on local mailing lists and things and people say, yeah I want to come over and get some of your surplus asian pears. Then they take three pears. They don't have the concept of getting larger quantities to preserve. Or even to eat next week
I guess urban people just have a really different way of thinking about food, that is kind of alien to me, even though I have lived in this small city for a long time
@NilaJones @mxjaygrant @thebiologistisn I can see that’s an issue. It can be just from what I grow on my little plot. Whether to grow a wide variety of produce or successionally to avoid a glut. Or have preparations in place to deal with it.
CSA veg box schemes work well in places here but they do need a lot of managing. It means small producers have to juggle a multitude of roles.
We do have a disconnect between farm and fork that needs fixing. The supermarket age is much to blame.
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