An Easier Way To Measure Garden Yield
Gardening and meal planning are essential life skills
Does any of this sound familiar? Spring comes and you enthusiastically start planting and growing. But once the rush and joy of spring are done, life gets in the way and the garden becomes . . . let’s call it feral.
Well that happens to me all the time, like EVERY YEAR all the time. I start out strong and enthusiastic and then garden can become just one of the chores to get done. Just because I LOVE gardening doesn’t mean I can pull off a magazine cover all year long. Besides, feral kind of suits me.
This trend means that while my spring planting records are detailed and the early months of my Garden Journal are packed, the yield information can be lacking. And while that is okay if this is the same for you – I mean it is your garden and your gardening journey -it does make understanding your food needs a whole lot harder.
For me there are two nearly separate purposes of growing a garden. On the one hand, I want to enjoy fresh garden food in season. Seasonal eating has all kinds of health benefits that we have lost because there is an international smorgasbord in your grocery store every day of the year.
You simply cannot get any more fresh, seasonal or local than food than from your own backyard. If you also save your own seeds, then it is quite literally free food provided fresh to you by the sun and rain and soil. Few things can compare to the taste and nutrition of homegrown foods.
On the other hand, gardening means saving some of that food to eat through the winter. As the cost of quality food skyrockets, it makes more and more sense to grow staples like onions and potatoes, and to freeze or process tomatoes, peppers, broccoli and other veggies for use in the winter.
But this where the yield information becomes key. How much do you have to grow to make meals in the winter?
Garden Yields vs Counting Meals?
I have to admit that I do not have a very good sense of how many pounds or kilograms of potatoes or tomatoes I need to last the winter. I could sit down and work it out. I tend to think in terms of meals and how well-stocked my pantry or freezer is instead.
For example, if I run out of homemade tomato sauce in Feb and new tomatoes won’t be coming for months, that’s when I start to wonder:
How many tomatoes did I plant?
Which ones gave me the most so I can plant more of that type?
How many more would I need to start and make room for in the garden so I don’t run out of sauce?
Should I be starting some of my plants sooner to give me a longer season?
Am I eating more Italian these days? Or what shifted in my meals has happened to make me run out so early?
Some of these questions are indeed answered in a Garden Journal by keeping track of what you planted, when, and which ones were your favorite or most productive or easiest to grow. But that ever-illusive yield piece remains.
You could drag out the scale and start weighing every harvest. Personally I just don’t have the inclination to weigh and measure food that way. I am not a calorie counter, nor do I use a scale to measure how much I am eating for a meal. In some ways, taking the step of putting the produce on a scale takes away some of my joy and the magic of it coming from the garden. Weird but true for me.
However, if you are weigh scale kind of eater - by all means get out that scale! Write down your results in your Garden Journal and problem solved.
I’ve just had to come up with a different angle to get the information I am after in a way that I can be consistent about it. For me, I prefer to track what’s going into the pantry and the freezer in terms of packages that contribute to meals.
By writing down how many units I have created for meals in the future, I also have a readily available list of what meals are already “in stock” for me, so I don’t need to have those on my shopping list. Every meal grown at home is a big win in terms of saving at the grocery store till later.
Here’s what I do:
I process the food as required for storage. That may be drying, blanching, or creating sauces or parts of sauces.
Then I record the number of packages created on the day they were created (I label packages with their processing date).
As the garden season draws to a close, I can easily see how many bags of raspberries, red currants, broccoli, green beans, tomato sauce, etc. have been frozen.
It lets me do some simple math like:
If I want to eat Italian with a tomato base once a week, and my own tomatoes run out in November (because you can ripen the last green tomatoes indoors), then I need enough packages for Dec to July. That’s 8 months x 4 weeks = 32 packages of 2 cups tomato sauce base.
If I want tomato soup or to use tomatoes in other meals each week as well, that’s another 32 packages of 1 cup tomato base too. (my tomato sauce recipe is here).
For me, 1 and 2 cup size Ziplock bags tend to be the easiest to use. If you are feeding more people, maybe you need 4 cup bags or larger? You do you. I find the bags can be frozen flat and take up way less space in the freezer than most other containers (just chill the sauce first before pouring into the bags). A piece of wax paper between the Ziplocks keeps them from freezing together in an unbreakable brick.
I like having flexibility while stocking my freezer while preserving the quality and taste of garden foods. That means I prefer NOT to make up 32 packages of ready-made Italian. Because I might decide I want Butter chicken instead. By keeping the sauce plain, it can be “doctored” into any dish. The point is there are many ways and degrees of finishing foods from the garden, and everything from the minimum to store it well all the way to fully prepped meals can work.
I follow the same thought process for dried food, keeping track of how many bags or quart jars of dried cherry tomatoes, sweet peppers, eggplant, zucchini and other foods are being loaded into the pantry, with winter meals in mind.
A Practical Solution
This method of determining garden yield based on meals is the most practical to me. In the end it doesn’t matter precisely how many kilograms of food are grown in the garden each year. What matters to me most is how far into the winter I can still be eating my own food.
I am counting meals, not kilograms, as my yield measure.
Having a meal focus also let’s me think more clearly about how my eating habits change when fresh from the garden foods are no longer available. That in turn lets me plan my spring garden better.
As I am getting ready to start my first cool season crops for 2024, I am reflecting on what I ran out of out and how this year’s garden can better accommodate my current eating trends.
For example, I tried growing celery for the first time just a couple of years ago. I was really only using it fresh and it was cheap at the store. It’s not a vegetable I would blanch and freeze like I would broccoli or snow peas. I do like celery in a lot of meals because it can drastically reduce the need for salt while creating great flavor.
As the cost of celery continues to climb (fueled in no small part by the celery juice craze), I began thinking it better become part of the garden regulars. Once I realized that I could dry the celery leaves and fine inner stocks for use in stews and soups, I definitely became more interested in growing a LOT of it. I also realized that it is easy to make flavor-boosting sofrito and freeze that in 1/4 and 1/2 cup sizes for adding to sauces.
Sofrito
finely chopped onion, carrot and celery
sauté in extra virgin olive oil for about 5 to 7 min
Regardless of how you carry your surplus garden into the winter, some type of yield information does make spring garden planning a whole lot simpler.
With the rising cost of food, gardening and meal planning are becoming essential life skills for us all. My mother always told me you can make or break your household budget in the kitchen. That holds true now more than ever.
Do you preserve food from your garden or just eat fresh? Let me know in the comments.
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