Feed a Family Planner

How to Use the Feed-a-Family Planner

• Pick the crop — each option shows a realistic yield for one 10-foot row.
• Set the number of people you are trying to feed from the garden.
• Enter how many pounds of that crop each person actually eats in a year.
• Keep row length at 10 feet unless your beds are a different size.
• Read the annual target, then the rows and feet of row you need to plant.
• Repeat for every crop on your list and add the resulting bed areas together.
• Keep a buffer row or two on the vegetables your household eats most.

The Reverse-Yield Formula, Explained

Worked Example: Potatoes for a Family of Four

• Four people, and a household that genuinely eats potatoes — say 25 lb each per year.
• Annual target: 4 × 25 = 100 lb of potatoes.
• A 10-foot row of potatoes yields about 12 lb with decent care.
• Rows needed: ceil(100 ÷ 12) = ceil(8.3) = 9 rows.
• Feet of row: 9 × 10 = 90 ft — roughly 90 sq ft of bed in single-foot rows.
• That is two 4 × 10 beds, a far cry from the 'a few hills' a first-timer plants and runs out of by February.
• Compare tomatoes for the same four at 30 lb each: 120 lb target ÷ 8 lb = 15 rows, or 150 ft — potatoes return over half the food in two-thirds the space.
• Plant one extra row as insurance; the calculator sizes a healthy year, not a bad one.

Yield per 10-Foot Row

Key Terms

Reverse yield planning

Starting from household consumption and working back to rows planted — the opposite of forecasting a harvest from a plot.

Row

A single linear planting line, conventionally 10 feet and about a foot wide for this math.

Yield per row

The pounds a well-run season returns from one row — the ranking figure that sizes each crop's space cost.

Succession

Replanting a short row every couple of weeks so salad and beans keep flowing instead of glutting once.

Storage crop

Potatoes, winter squash, onions and garlic that stretch a harvest across months, so annual pounds matter more than weekly ones.

What This Means for a Real Table

• Rank by yield-per-foot, not by love: a family garden is land-limited, so the squash and potato rows that feed people for a winter earn space ahead of a low-output salad run.
• The pounds-per-person number is a habit, not a fact — track what your household actually eats and you will find two or three crops carry most of the volume; plan those precisely and the rest loosely.
• Add about 25% to the fresh-eating crops you will preserve, because peeling, trimming and cooking shrink raw weight a lot before it reaches the plate.
• Feed-a-family math is per crop on purpose: the whole garden is the sum of nine or ten separate runs, and that total bed area is what tells you whether a plan fits your yard at all.
• Grow the expensive, high-yield staples first — salad greens and herbs are quick but a tomato transplanted from a nursery, not a saved seedling, is where the calorie-per-square-foot math actually works.

Common Mistakes & Fixes

• Planning a garden by favorite-vegetable count instead of pounds eaten, then drowning in zucchini and buying tomatoes at the market in August.
• Using optimistic per-row yields with no buffer, so a single bad-pest week turns a 'just enough' bed into a shortfall by midwinter.
• Forgetting storage shrink — a 100 lb potato target needs more planted than 100 lb because sprouting, rot and trim eat into the stored weight.
• Sizing salad and bean rows as one big spring planting rather than successions, which gluts the table for two weeks and leaves it bare for months.
• Ignoring that the whole-garden bed area is the sum of every crop's rows — a plan that fits on paper per crop may need three times the yard you own when totaled.

When to Use This (and When Not To)

Feed a Family Planner: Frequently Asked Questions