A few years into trying to freeze enough green beans and can enough tomato sauce to last all winter, I had the realization…if I could just shift the base ingredients of all our recipes to homegrown our diet would be 30-50% closer to self-sufficient. What were those base ingredients? Onions, garlic, and carrots…all three things I hadn’t grown in our vegetable garden that year…Oops! I’m not sure why it hadn’t crossed my mind to plan my garden around our mainstay recipes before. Such a simple shift in mindset from just growing vegetables to growing ingredients helped us learn exactly how much to plant for a year’s worth of food and eat all of our favorite recipes.
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Novelty vs. Practicality
It’s so easy to get caught up in the romance and novelty of blue pumpkins, exotic eggplants, and fancy flowers…and forget our main goal is to grow food that we actually eat and eat regularly. Growing every color of the tomato rainbow is great fun, but do I really need that many plants to feed us? Or would it be better to use some of that valuable garden space to grow a different ingredient? Since gardening space and time is limited, it pays to calculate how much you need to grow to prepare your favorite recipes all year long.
What do we eat?
The first step in learning how much to plant for a year’s worth of food is to take a closer look at your family’s favorite recipes. If you’re anything like us, you probably have 5-10 recipes that you make over and over again. Whether taco Tuesday, Friday night pizza, or one pot of chili every month in the winter, you have some tried and true family favorite recipes that are on the menu like clockwork.
So now’s the time to gather the recipes of your most commonly cooked meals. I’d recommend pulling out the physical recipes or printing them off so you can compare ingredients and make notes, but it’s not necessary for this exercise. Now that you have all your recipes in front of you, estimate how often you make a particular recipe in a given month and multiply it by twelve to get your annual total. For example if you make spaghetti twice a month, you make it 24 times a year.
How much do we need to grow?
The next step is to identify the ingredients in that recipe that you’d like to grow and multiply that by how many times you make it in a year. This will give you the total amount you need to grow to make that recipe until the next growing season. So continuing with our spaghetti example, let’s says we want to grow the following ingredients for the recipe:
- 1 quart of tomato sauce x 24 = 24 quart jars
- 15 oz jar tomatoes x 24 = 24 pint jars
- 1 onion = 24 onions
- 5 garlic cloves = 12 garlic bulbs
- Oregano = 48 tsp
- Basil = 48 tsp
Total Up
Just tally up how much you need of each ingredient for each recipe and you’ll have your master list of how much to plant for a year’s worth of food. So say, we also make a soup once a month that requires an onion as well as the spaghetti mentioned above. Now we know we need 24 onions for spaghetti and 12 for the soup, so we know we need to plant 36 onions to make those 2 staple recipes. Rinse and repeat for all your favorite recipes to determine how much you need to grow to feed your family for a year.
It can be rather overwhelming to see how much food it takes, but the good thing is we don’t have to grow it all ourselves! Check and see what local farms in your area grow to see if you can source a crop that you can’t or don’t want to grow. If you ask, you can often get bulk discounts or wholesale prices for high-quality local veggies to preserve. Don’t forget you can still preserve food that you didn’t grow!
Garden Menu Planning Workbook
If you’re wanting to dig deeper into and be guided through this process more. We have a garden menu planning workbook with worksheets, charts, and tables to simplify planning your family vegetable garden so you too can know exactly how much to plant for a year’s worth of food for your own family.
It comes complete with an A to Z list of average yield per plant and simplified formulas to calculate precisely how many plants you’ll need to grow based on your favorite family recipes. We hope it helps you plan your garden for maximum self-sufficiency while cooking all the foods your family loves. Let’s get planning!