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
Dr. Darren Abbey
Andrew Abernathy
Hilary