How big a veggie garden to feed a family of 5

I am trying to plan my veggie garden for next year and am having trouble trying to figure out how big I should make it. We want to supply most of our veggies from our own garden and we like to grow things for fun as well like popcorn and wheat etc. Is their a resource out there that will give me an idea of how large the area should be to accommodate my needs?

Thanks,
Crystal

Look into "The Sustainable Vegetable Garden" By John Jeavons and Carol Cox and "Square Foot Gardening" by Mel Bartholomew. I pretty sure there are many more books out there about growing your own food on a small space. Biointensive and Square Foot Gardening are the standards. Both books have calculators for how much space needed for your garden.

Hope this is helpful.

Thank you. That helps a lot!

you can also go to your cooperative institute and ask them.

One way I have done this for myself was to choose the things I like to eat, figure out how much I eat a week, times that by 50 and then add 10-30% for failure ("one for the crow," etc.). Then you just figure out the amount of land based on the spacing for the required number of plants. Also, Johnny's catalog has in the past had a chart with the amount of pounds of food produced by 100 ft of a variety of veggies.

John Jeavons' more recent book "How to Grow More Vegetables", 7th ed. has charts and tables with a lot of info on yields and crop rotation. He has a sample garden plan for a 4-person family food garden with a 6-month growing season and the suggested size is 1,302 sq. ft. (including paths). This garden includes space for fruit trees and compost piles, though.

Wow great stuff!

WE have a family of 4 and our garden isn't big enough ever and it's a huge garden, we plant enough to can and to have veggies all season, and we plant in incraments. planting tomatoes 2 months apart, so we can have some when the first tomatoes aren't producing any more, same as squash.

WE still have to buy at the produce store.

It's hard to say what's enough, we always over plant and give away things that we don't put up here's ours this spring

another view.

Our corn took up our extra space this year, as we always try to grow a few special things too like you do. WE do include sunflowers in the garden, usually alot of volunteers of sunflowers.
and we cut out all the cold crop veggies this year as we didn't have time to plant any.

WE just plant enough to make up for what mother nature kills out or the squash bugs kill out, we over plant squash because sometimes we loose a few.

I hope that you get it figured out . WE haven't yet.

Depends upon if you want your diet to be 100% zucchini or not. If you plant three zucchini plants that should be able to feed your family and most of the neighbors for the year. Maybe throw in a couple of winter squashes and you living off the fat of the land. :-)

Rick

Wow...great garden! I don't have that much space so I will be doing a lot of inter-planting and stagger planting to maximize my space. I am sure it will take a few seasons to figure things out and I will enjoy the venture.

I haven't been able to apply all of her practices yet, but Georgeanne Brennan's In the French Kitchen Garden: The Joys of Cultivating a Potager has diagrams and seasonal recommendations for an almost year-round garden to feed a family. She does a lot of interplanting and she uses the same areas over and over again as the seasons change and plants come to maturity and then stop producing. It's inspirational reading!

http://www.amazon.com/French-Kitchen-Garden-Cultivating-Potager/dp/B00006JO20/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273491651&sr=1-8

My library doesn't have this book so I will truck on down to the book store and check it out. Thanks for the commendation.

You might be able to find it used at addall.com . I get a lot of my books there.

That is so funny. I did start my tomato seeds in 2 week increments...hopefully that helps.