How Many Pounds of Vegetables Per Person? (Can you really grow that much?)
How Many Pounds of Vegetables Per Person? (Can you really grow that much?)
Let's explore that idea further
Most people assume that you simply cannot grow enough food in a garden to make a difference to their food bills or their lives. Those folks would be dead wrong.
Gardening isn’t only a popular hobby that gets you outside and closer to the natural world. Gardening can put a significant dent in your food bill.
The mystery of how many pounds of vegetables per person is needed is really very simple to solve.
Let’s run a few numbers so you can see what I mean.
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Start with the basics
Let’s for arguments sake (and to keep the math super easy) assume that you are an average human person.
According to a Harvard Med study published in Circulation in 2021, an adult should have 5 servings of fruit or vegetables a day to reduce their risks of serious disease.
What is a “serving” of vegetables? In the UK, a serving is about 80 grams.
That means that 5 servings a day would be 5 x 80 = 400 grams or 0.88 pounds.
Let’s just be generous here and call 5 servings 1 lbs per day.
So our average (fictious) human needs 1 lbs of vegetables per day.
Why is this number important? Well that study I mentioned earlier showed that people who reported consuming 5 servings per day (compared to just 2 or 3 servings) had:
Death by any cause reduced by 13%
Death from heart disease or stroke was reduced by 12%
Cancer deaths dropped by 10%
Deaths involving chronic respiratory diseases dropped by 35%
These are some pretty convincing numbers when it comes to getting more vegetables and fruit into your diet! It seems to me that eating more vegetables is high on the list of ways to extend your life. Growing at least some of them yourself is high on the list of things to do if you are at ALL worried about money.
Can you grow it?
The question of the day is can you really grow enough vegetables to support your health? We’ve just seen that 1 lbs a day is the target amount to be consuming.
That means that you need to grow 365 lbs of vegetables per year (if you wanted to grow it all yourself). You could supplement your vegetable consumption at any level less than 365 lbs/per person and still be saving a LOT of money given the current high cost of food.
Three hundred and sixty five pounds (that would be 730 lbs for two people) sure sounds like a lot, right?
Except here’s the deal. If you have good, healthy, living soil, then you can easily produce 1 lbs. of food per square foot of garden space. I kid you not. This is an easy target to exceed on good soil, and especially if you use some vertical growing on at least some of your garden to help maximize the results.
365 lbs of food requires 365 sq ft of garden space.
What does that look like?
Believe it or not, that is a small garden overall!
Just 20 x 20 sq ft yields 400 sq ft of space, exceeding your 365 sq foot target by 35 sq ft (call that your contingency space in case something has a low yield).
So for example, you could design a garden with 12 (4 ft x 8 ft) raised beds and end up with 384 sq ft. Or if you like smaller squares instead, that is roughly 24 (4 ft x 4ft) squares.
You could make the beds longer 10 (4 ft x 10 ft) beds. Or even 8 (4 ft x 12 ft) beds.
See what I mean?
You don’t need acres of land to create food. You just need good soil and some space to make it all happen.
The more intensely you plant (and companion plant) your square feet, the less space you need. I like to do things like plant tomatoes in the center on a trellis fence and then plant beets or carrots or broccoli on the sunny side and lettuce or salad greens on the shady side of my central tomato line. This maximizes yield and makes growing each of these vegetables easy (and just FYI - I prefer 3 ft wide rows because it is easier for me to reach through those beds without falling in).
What are the best vegetables to grow?
That question always depends on what you love to eat most, and what is the easiest (or hardest) food to obtain where you live. It also depends on your own values.
If you are worried about going hungry and being able to pay the bills, for example, then you can’t go far wrong by focusing on staple foods like potatoes, onions/garlic, winter squash and dry beans. These foods yield the highest overall food values that will keep you feeling full on a cold winter’s night. They are budget stretchers. And they have huge contributions to make to your health and wellbeing.
If you are worried about the high cost of beloved favorites like tomatoes and peppers, then focus space on these. It is actually pretty easy to grow enough tomatoes that can be cooked in to sauce (I like to just freeze mine in 1 and 2 cup portions, ready to become a soup or sauce with a bit more work).
And I discovered a couple of years back that drying peppers and cherry tomatoes is a fantastic way to preserve them for winter meals. I grow the smaller style peppers like yellow Bananas and purple Marconi or Italian red. These peppers produce as many as 30 peppers per plant compared to only a few of the store-classic bell pepper varieties. And cherry tomatoes have massive yields.
Go for high yield heirloom vegetables if you want to truly maximize your yields in small spaces. Besides you can save your seeds and NOT have to keep buying seed stock year after year – another huge win for your pocket book and the planet.
Growing food is an ancient human practice
The best part of gardening is connecting to the earth, the soil, and to the most ancient parts of your human brain and body. Gardening literally grounds us in our ancient human culture. It provides your highly evolved senses with all the cues you need to be happy, healthy, strong and relaxed (Check out the Mind-Body-Food Connection series for more about the amazing ways we use our senses to find and enjoy food as humans).
What’s not to love? Time in the garden provides you with time outside, something desperately needed in our modern indoor lives. It provides you with the sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes that make your whole body come alive. Finding and preparing food is deeply written into our DNA and most of us have forgotten just how good it feels to align with that energy! And best of all, a garden gives you the freshest and healthiest food you will ever taste.
By now you know, if you have been reading along, that I love to look for all the wins. . . . and this is a win-win-win situation for sure: Ecological grounding – Outdoor energy – Great food!
Here in Canada August means the harvests are coming in strong. Enjoy that summer goodness and grow some food. There is still lots of time to get greens in (and out onto your plate) before winter sets in (Check out the Get Started Garden 30-day mini-course and use the coupon code: START23).
Happy Growing! What is your favorite thing to grow? Leave it in the comments.
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