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.
@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.
Dr. Darren Abbey
Quixoticgeek
John Timaeus