I've always been a bit confused about these estimates. Do these numbers assume that you're going to plant every single vegetable on the list? (Or how else would they get an estimate?) If you only plant half or a quarter of these types, do you need to double or quadruple the number of each plant per person? That would make sense, but it's never said.

With that particular guide it is number of plants per person for a years supply of that particular food for that person. You pick which plants you want to do.

EX: bush beans 10-20 plants per person. So 20 plants if only feeding one person for a year. If feeding 2 you double the number of plants.

But any list like this is always based on the eating habits of the author. If you don't eat green beans but love broccoli then double the recommended number of broccoli plants so you have it to sub for the meals where beans would have been served.

It is just a guide, not cast in stone.

Dave

I understand the general idea. I'm just not sure how they take the measure of "a year's supply." That is, how many of what particular vegetable you need depends on how many types of vegetables you eat and how often you eat them, doesn't it? So, I'm wondering, is "a year's supply" a side serving on the table every night? once a week? etc. It seems like, in order to come up with a number, you already have to have an idea of what percent of your overall diet the vegetable is taking up, and it's not clear what that is.

Yes, 'a years' supply' is an abstract concept. How often do I want to eat green beans? Once a week throughout the year? Twice? What you really want to know is how many servings you'll get per plant. From that number, you could decide how often you want to serve them during the year. And even that's just a ballpark figure.

I had tomatoes, green beans and zucchini in my freezer this winter, and put them together in a vegetable soups 4-5 times. Then I just ate some one meal every day till it was gone. And I used tomatoes, onions and peppers for chili and did the same. I have no idea how that would work out in servings of the individual veggies.

If you're really thinking about how much to grow for the year, you need to think about how you'll preserve it all. Then, just by doing it, you'll figure it out for yourself. If you can up 10 quarts of beets, and you run out in February, then you know how much you need to last until the next season's beet harvest.

I can eat everything I can grow, so it's not a problem for me. I just tore up more of my back yard lawn, and I'm on a waiting list for a plot in the community garden, and I'd still run out if I ate veggies like i should.

When I first started I grew to much for us to use. With the higher grocery prices we consume all our veggies we grow.
If I end up with to much of something we make up some way to use it.
Soup can be made from just about any thing.
I need to try to grow as much of every thing as I can to make up for crop failures. Which every one has from time to time.

More to the point: do you also eat grains? How much meat and dairy do you eat? How much fat do you buy? How much of all this by percentage of calories? What about winter? Anything she wrote that goes in the root cellar or under hoop houses looks puny, and needs to be multiplied by 5-10. Winter squash and kale for example.

Also, where you live comes in to play! People back east in the hot humid areas can grow cuke houses, where I can get maybe half a dozen per plant here in CA!
Do you can? do you freeze? It all makes a difference! Nancy

I'm not saying this author did this but there are standard nutritional guidelines available for X number of calories per person per day for all the various age groups. That when combined with the 5 daily food groups (vegetables 2 1/2 cups per day) and the recommended ounces per serving of each gives you a good basic meal plan for x number of days.

It is the same way they compute special diets such as diabetic diets and the emergency preparedness MRE provisions for 3 day, 7 day, 30 day etc. In fact it is the same way they compute provisions for military ships at sea.

This doesn't mean you will always like the vegetable-of-the-day or that toward the end of the time frame you won't have broccoli 4 days in a row but it can give you a good basic plan for how much of each to plant to insure sufficient food for a specific period of time. Then how you use it is up to you.

Dave

My yard stick I plant enough for the family and some for the rabbits and some for the birds and some for the squirrels. I learned not to fight them any more lost every battle so I feed them. If I fell the wild creature feeding pen they leave my trees alone.

The recommendations in the article may be useful when it comes to planning the garden, but they greatly oversimplify what is a very complex question. I agree with Dave that a more accurate method is to use nutritional guidelines to estimate each family member's caloric intake and then plant according to that. Perhaps an even better metric (when the issue is examined through the lens of comparing home-grown with store-bought) is to use US RDA vitamin requirements instead of calories. This would account for the fact that fresh home-grown fruits and vegetables are generally more nutritious that those which are bought from the supermarket. For example, pick vitamin C... As an adult male, my RDA of vitamin C is 90mg, or 32,850mg/year. Now estimate and add up the vitamin C present in all the fruits and veggies which I ate from my garden this year. Divide it by 32,850 and multiply by 100 and you will get a reasonable estimate of the percentage of nutrition I got from my garden.

This also doesn't account for changes in taste BECAUSE OF planting a garden. For instance, there are those of us who don't like the flavor of store-bought tomatoes, but will happily mow down home grown 'maters like candy. Similarly, you may have never even seen kohlrabi on a store shelf, but plant it on a lark one year and discover that you love it. Gardening changes how we eat.

I would also point out the obvious - that the article ignores meat, oils, condiments, etc.

I'm not criticizing the article - it is actually a good starting point for those wishing to become more self-sufficient. I would just make the point that it's an iterative process, whereby you make the decisions about what to plant based on your own family's eating habits.

(For those who may be interested, I grappled with this issue quite a bit in my book Garden Imperative. Link below.)

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Imperative

I'm not saying this author did this but there are standard nutritional guidelines available for X number of calories per person per day for all the various age groups. That when combined with the 5 daily food groups (vegetables 2 1/2 cups per day) and the recommended ounces per serving of each gives you a good basic meal plan for x number of days.

Dave, I agree that would certainly be more precise, but I don't think it answers my particular question of how the number of types of veggies you grow and eat affects the calculations. Let me frame it a different way. Let's say I grow thirty kinds of vegetables in my garden. "A year's supply" of one veg would be different from a situation where I only grow ten kinds of vegetables, because in the latter situation I depend more heavily on each one. I'm curious about the assumptions about garden size and variety specifically.

Sorry to hijack your thread, wertach. Thanks for the link--it certainly got us talking!