How Much To Plant For A Years Worth Of Food
Figuring out how much to plant for a year’s worth of food for your family is a worthwhile venture. Food prices have been on the rise in recent years, and the grocery bills probably won’t be going down anytime soon. Most of our food is grown and distributed far away from where we live, making the supply chains a bit shaky at best. If you’re purchasing all of your food from your local grocery store, it could only take one big economic or natural disaster to separate you and your family from your food supply. Learning how to grow your own food, and how much you need to grow to supply your family with a years worth of food is a valuable skill to learn.

Knowing how much to plant is going to vary based on the size of your family and where you live. As your family grows you’ll need to plant more each year, and then potentially plant less as your kids move out and start their own families. So knowing exactly how much to plant can kind of be a moving target. However, there are some guidelines I’ll give you to start with. If you track what you grow each year, you’ll soon figure out exactly how much you need to plant for a year’s supply of food.
You don’t really need that much land to grow food for an entire year. If you have a small amount of space, consider vertical gardening and succession planting to get the most of your growing season. You can also build cold frames and grow vegetable crops and other fresh produce like lettuce for fresh eating through the winter months.
My experience
I grew up raising a very large vegetable garden with my family each year. We’ve grown all of our own vegetables as long as I can remember. So gardening, canning and cooking that food from scratch so as not to have to depend on the grocery store much is second nature to me. Right now I’m growing a ½ acre garden each year, which not only feeds my family of seven, but provides a lot of extra produce that we sell weekly at a farmers market in our small town.

I share all of my best gardening tips in this blog post: Best Vegetable Gardening Tips For Beginners and Experts Alike
Always Plant Extra
It is a good idea to always plant more than you think you’ll need. You are never guaranteed a crop. Late or early frosts, hailstorms, pests, excessive heat, or critters getting in your garden are all factors that can work against you. Seeds don’t cost that much compared to groceries, so don’t be afraid to plant a few extra. If you happen to have a bountiful harvest one year, and have way more than what you can store in your pantry, you can always give produce away to your neighbors or put it in the compost pile which will enrich your garden for next year.
Aim For 2 Years Worth Of Food
I always plan to have enough vegetables and fruits preserved in my homestead pantry to last us two years. That way if I get hailed out one year, or have excess pest pressure, or an early frost, I will still have food to feed my family for the coming year. I have worked hard over the years at preserving extra each year until now I have at least 2 years worth of food stored up.

Now, not everything I grow can be stored that long, like squash, potatoes and onions, although I do try to can a little bit of those items to get me by just in case. But I do have plenty of things like spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce, vegetable soup, broth, pickles, and vegetables like green beans and carrots canned. We might get tired of some of them, but if we had to, we could eat on them for a long time.
I keep a lot of flour, sugar, dried beans, and whole grains stocked in my pantry as well. And with these items I can make hundreds of different meals to feed my family. It’s important to note that in the old fashioned homestead days, they were more content to eat the same foods over and over if that’s what they had, and we can learn a lesson from them too. They “ate to live” instead of “living to eat”. I’m all about variety in our diet, but if we had to survive on what we had, we could do it for a long time.

Grow A Few Things At First
If you are brand new to gardening or have limited space, I suggest that you grow a small garden with a few main crops at first. Once you’re used to growing them, then start adding other crops as you have time and space. Assuming you live where most vegetables are easy to grow, I suggest you start with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, potatoes and green beans. These are staple crops that are easy to grow, and easy to preserve. You can also make a lot of different meals using these vegetables as the main ingredient, and that will save you a lot of money at the grocery store. Plus you’ll have the satisfaction of having this food stored in your pantry, which will increase your food security.

Estimate What You Currently Use
Start by estimating how much of a certain vegetable you use, or think you could use each week if you had it readily available. For example, I use at least one onion everyday, as it seems like a lot of our meals start by sauteing an onion for soup, scrambled eggs, casseroles, and more. So I estimate that I use at least 1 onion per day for our family of seven, so that means I need to grow at least 365 onions per year. I also know that I use a lot of onions in canning for making things like spaghetti sauce and canned vegetable soup. And then keeping with my rule that I should always plant extra, I usually plan to plant at least 500 onions per year for our family.
That may seem like a lot of onions, but hopefully that example helps you to start thinking through how much you might need for your family. It also helps if you can keep track of what you purchase at the grocery store for a few months, as this will give you a good insight into how many fruits and vegetables you’re using.

Make a list of the meals you could make from the things you grow in your garden. Then estimate how many times each month you could eat each meal. For example, you could eat spaghetti twice a month without getting tired of it. You could also make lasagna and baked spaghetti that would use similar ingredients another couple of times a month. So if you made one of these Italian dishes once a week, and you use one quart of pasta sauce each time you make one of those dishes, you would need 50 quarts of pasta sauce for a whole year. That is how I figure out how much spaghetti sauce I need to preserve for the year.
Cook From Scratch
Keep in mind that we cook almost everything completely from scratch. We buy no processed foods and eat out at a restaurant about once a year. Now, it took me many years of cooking from scratch for my family to find that groove. And we’re always refining it, always finding more ways to use the produce we can grow in our northern garden. You will figure out exactly how much you should be growing too. The important thing is to just start and keep records as you go! It’s also important to start slowly learning the skills you will need to turn the basic food in your pantry into nutritious meals for your family. Start by learning to bake your own bread, make your own pasta and tortillas, or cook a simple vegetable stew. Over time it gets easier and easier, and you can keep adding skills to your list.

For all of our favorite from-scratch recipes – click here.
Food Preservation
Because we live in a climate where it’s not as easy to grow food in the wintertime unless you have a greenhouse, we preserve a lot of the food we grow by canning, freezing and dehydrating. So I grow a lot of food during our short growing season, and then preserve a lot of it for our homestead pantry during the harvest season. If you live somewhere where you have a longer season length and your growing conditions are different, then what you grow and when you grow it will obviously be different. I try to grow a lot of root vegetables because they can be grown later into the fall, and they also store well without any reservations. These are things like potatoes, carrots and onions.

How Much To Plant For A Year’s Worth Of Food – Family Of Seven
This is what I plant or have growing to feed our family of seven. Except for the fruit trees and grapes, this will all fit into a 70’ X 100’ garden area with careful garden planning. If your family is half the size of mine, you could probably plant half as much. This accounts for extra in case of some crop failure and if it all produces, you can store extra away in your pantry in case of a difficult year of growing a different year.

- Potatoes – 50 pounds of seed potatoes
- Onions – 500 onions
- Garlic – 100 cloves
- Winter Squash – acorn, butternut, delicata – 6 each
- Sugar Pie Pumpkins – 6 each
- Zucchini – 3 plants
- Tomatoes – 100 plants
- Cucumbers – 5 plants
- Green Beans – ½ lb beans (100’ double row)
- Carrots – 25’ bed (6 rows wide)
- Beets – 25’ bed (6 rows wide)
- Cabbage – 15 plants
- Broccoli – 10 plants
- Cauliflower – 10 plants
- Peppers – 50 plants
- Herbs – basil, dill & cilantro – 15 each
- Shelling peas – ½ pound – 50 foot row
- Asparagus – 50 foot row
- Sweet potatoes – 100 plants
- Lettuce – 75 (plant 15 every two weeks)
- Strawberries – 300 plants
- Raspberries – 50’ row
- Apples – 5 trees
- Grapes – 16 vines
The only things on this list we don’t preserve for winter eating are the lettuce and the cilantro. Everything else is either canned, frozen or stored raw like potatoes, onions, garlic and squash.

To learn how we preserve each of these items, check out the preserve your own food section of our website.