Someone on MeWe asked this question, and a conversation ensued:
(Original question): Can anyone answer a question for me?
Is 5,000 ft² - 6,000 ft² enough to grow veggies for a family of 6 for 1 year? (Assuming I'm canning them as well)
(One answer): Yes, imagine the size of a large 5000 sq foot house. Bio intensive gardening is done on 800 sq feet or less. Check you tube videos to learn more.
(Answer 2): Well, 5000 square feet is relative since you can grow things up in a vertical garden as well. I think it can be done. You would have to maximize your season and get green beans in right after your garlic and such. We grow a LOT of swiss chard and freeze it in foodsaver bags.
(Answer 3): absolutely yes! I did 700 sq ft raised bed under drip irrigation and i produced more in an year than 12 could eat...in zone 7b
(Answer 4 -- me):
On the question of how much land to produce all of your food, first, it's going to vary depending on how good your soil is, what climate you are in, and how much experience you have. I think John Jeavons estimated about 2000 s.f. per person for growing a full diet (not just vegetables, but everything one person needed to eat for a year). A guy on the
permies.com forum built a spreadsheet, which he's offering free or if you can pay a few dollars, that would help him out a lot:
The Annual Staple Crop Calculator - Pay What You Want/FREE (digital-market forum at permies) Actually, before getting that calculator, it would probably be a good idea to read his original thread:
How Many Of Each Plant To Grow As A Percentage Of Total Calories (gardening for beginners forum at permies)
(Answer 5 -- me, again): Using that calculator, I can grow enough food for my daughter and myself on about 1800 s.f. PLUS goat pasture and chicken range. No grains other than some corn, our calories would come from potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, and so on. I took some of his plant choices off the calculator (didn't even know what they were), and added a few things. Also changed the calories per day, as the creator is a young(er) male, and my daughter and I are short females and probably don't really need 2000 calories per day. He gives directions for altering things. Also, in order to edit it, you have to move it into Excel or something similar. [
Note that when I wrote this, I'd forgotten that there are a couple of other grains on my list -- amaranth, and sunflower seeds, not technically a grain, but a seed crop. Also soup peas.]
(Answer 6): Does it account for loss/waste and lower-than-expected yields?
(Answer 7 -- me): If you read his original thread, he used very low estimated yields for just this reason (getting his estimates from personal experience, his own and others), but you could certainly make some adjustments if you felt it was necessary.
(Answer 8 -- this lady popped in, and her comments are the reason why I'm adding this conversation to this thread): Why are you all looking at food from a calorie standpoint? The more important issue is vitamin and mineral content, ie. nutrition value not calories. You could eat your caloric base in potatoes but lack many key nutrients especially if you do not eat the skins. Calories are not a very good measure of nutrition, health or sustenance, unless you do not care about anything but existing. And even then if you have no healthy immune system you will not survive no matter how many calories you consume.
(Answer 9): Because you need enough calories to survive, and then can tweak what you plant after you figured out how much ground to break.
(Answer 10 -- the lady who popped in): I respectfully disagree. There are many ways to get calories without growing them in a field. If you really are homesteading there are other options like weeds, hunting, animal husbandry, fishing. Breaking ground is great but it is not the calories that it is providing it is the nutrition. Calorie push was instilled in our culture through marketing, not education. Just saying it is sort of a waste of time because it is not an accurate measure of what you need to survive, but if that is where you want to spend your efforts go right ahead.
(Answer 11): The original question was about if someone had enough garden to survive. There are many people doing urban homesteading these days, after all, who may not have access to hunting, fishing, or much if any livestock.
(Answer 12 -- me, again): Surprisingly, the diet on that calculator is a very well balanced one. If you will take the time to go read the (long) original thread, someone used a nutrition calculator and figured it out. I was surprised, and I think even the guy who started the thread was surprised. That said, his particular concern was getting enough to eat. As in, enough calories to sustain life, when he didn't have enough income to buy ANY food, and needed to grow his entire diet. His FIRST concern was calories. It doesn't take large amounts of green vegetables to provide the nutrients missing in a basic diet, and some of the calorie crops on his list have edible greens which can provide the necessary nutrients.
It also should be added that very few people are able to add sufficient food to their diets by hunting, fishing, and foraging. Most of us can probably raise some small livestock even in a back yard, but not everyone can. Hunting, fishing, and foraging should be looked at as supplements for most people.
(Answer 13 -- the lady who popped in again): Sorry you totally turned off trying to understand that my disagreement was not with counting the cost or planning your produce production. My point was that CALORIES are a totally inefficient way to count the cost and have nearly nothing to do with health. IT is nearly impossible to ingest proper amounts of vitamins and minerals without consuming enough calories but it IS quite often easy to consume the calories without getting the necessary nutrients to maintain health. By the way if you are counting calories the fat in meats and fish far outpaces any vegetable. And if it is from a free range source it also includes lots of vitimins. For example free range pork lard can supply the missing Vitimin D for the winter months where vegetable like corn and potatoes (high in calories only) cannot. Just saying it would be advantageous to focus on health not just calories.
(Answer 14): Anyone can shoot some Pidgens and Squirrels with a Daisy red ryder or trapping them. and you can catch fish most anywhere. Problem is in winter when its 30 below zero outside and your burning old palletts in the wod stove nd there is 4-6 feet of snow on the ground. thats when its hard to find food.
(Answer 15): The original question asker didn't specify anything about why they asked about garden size. They might be from a sect that doesn't eat animal products. They also didn't say anything about location, IIRC.
(Answer 16 -- me again): Ma'am, with all due respect, you are mistaken. It is true that most people in first world countries at the present time have no problem getting sufficient calories, and would do better to concentrate on nutritional value. However, just try to live, and WORK, on insufficient caloric intake for any length of time, and you will have a different view on the value of calories. Consider this: you would have to eat nine pounds of kale per day to get 2000 calories per day (possibly more than a small woman would need, but a lot less than most active, hard-working men would need). The stomach capacity of an adult human is about five pounds of food per day. Caloric content of your food does matter.
And yes, animal fat could add considerable calories to the diet -- if the person actually has access to them. Not everyone does. Or, as (another poster) suggested, they might be vegetarians or vegans.
(Answer 17 -- me again -- yes, I'm wordy, LOL!): On the 'calories vs. nutrition' argument, I don't think anyone here would suggest that nutrition is unimportant. But the people who have issues with nutrition are almost certainly buying most of their food from the grocery store (or eating at fast food places). They aren't growing all, or nearly all, of their food in their back yards. It would be pretty difficult to grow all of ones calorie requirements in the back yard and NOT have sufficient nutrition in the diet. [
Insert new comment: Unless, of course, the person is growing nothing but corn. Even a diet solely of potatoes would be better than that.] Conversely, it's very easy to have a garden that mostly produces salad ingredients which cannot possibly produce enough calories to sustain life. That is the difference between a hobby garden and a survival garden: a hobby garden (and there's nothing wrong with being a hobby gardener) supplements the diet, with most staple foods brought in from elsewhere. A survival garden is intended to provide complete nutrition, including calories. It is much harder (because of space requirements) to produce enough calories in a home garden than it is to produce enough nutrition other than calories.
Carol Deppe, in
The Resilient Gardener, talks about this, and about the calorie crops she raises (corn, squash, potatoes, beans, and duck eggs, if I recall correctly without opening my copy of the book). She raises these crops in rented fields, and keeps the ducks, and her vegetable garden, in her yard.
Also, John Jeavons, in
How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible, talks about growing calorie crops, and how much land per person is necessary. Keeping in mind that he's gardening in southern California, in a climate where you can garden almost year round, so his estimates of land required are probably low for most locations.
Also keep in mind that tree fruits and nuts can add a significant amount of both calories and nutrition to the diet; they aren't on the spreadsheet I talked about above because it takes several years for them to bear, and the guy who developed the spreadsheet was worried about getting enough to eat this year, not in five years time. (He's broke. So this wasn't a theoretical exercise for him, it was a plan for how he was going to survive through this next year.)
(Answer 18): I loved the above conversation. The sad thing about America is that the majority of Americans are extremely nutritionally deficient while getting about 300% of the calories that they need. Of course, we all need balance. For anyone who is trying to grow the most food possible I wanted to quick share one thing that we do every year. We compost our horse manure. Hubby gets the tractor and makes piles in the pasture (about 3 tractor buckets full for each) generally picking a spot with poor growth. I walk out and plant a pack of seeds in each pile. Usually we do butternut squash because they store so well, sweet potato squash because we love them, melons and this year we will try a pile for sweet potatoes. At the end of the year, we take the piles and spread them on the lawn and seed that spot in the pasture.
My final comment: when I finally went back and re-read the original comment, I'm not sure if the person want to know how much land to grow their entire diet or if they were only concerned about vegetables. But the conversation was useful anyway.
Kathleen
