Yield Planning

After, “When do I plant?” the hardest gardening question to wrap you head around is, “How much do I plant?” Everyone, from high-rise gardeners with a few pots to big time farmers with thousands of acres, has to annually decide how much of their land they will allocate to each crop they want to grow.

Now, if what you want more than anything is homegrown caprese salad, and all you have room for is a single tomato and two basil plants on the patio…well, your decision is pretty simple. Likewise, if your choices are corn or soy for your 15,000 acre farm, you’ve got a relatively straightforward decision.

Anything in the middle gets complicated.

I try to grow a diversified selection of vegetables that will feed my family twelve months out of the year. It’s kinda tricky to figure it all out. How many beets should I grow; how many slicing cucumbers keep us fed for fresh eating and how many pickling cucumbers do we need for putting up? At what point is the bounty of zucchini a burden? Does it really make sense to grow corn in a backyard at all?

I can feel fall crisping up the air. Let’s face it, the glory days of the summer – for what they were worth this year – are fading fast. But before the memory of the great, the failed and the overwhelming also fades, it’s a good idea to think about what you got from what you grew, and how your yield worked for you and your family.

Just the right amount for a little pickling, a little drying and a few meals.

This year has been particularly cool but, thanks to aggressive season extension techniques the harvest has been good. Here’s what I’ve observed this year about amount planted and yield harvested.

– 8 linear feet of sugar snap peas planted in a double row kept my family happily eating snap peas until we kinda didn’t want them anymore. Ideally I’d plant 2, 8′ rows, but stagger the planting by 4 weeks (one indoor start in gutter; one outdoor planting under cloche) to keep peek production up for the maximum time.

– 4 linear feet of romano beans + 4 linear feet of pole beans, each planted in a triple row, is perfect for generous fresh eating but will not be enough to pickle all the beans we’d like. Like peas, I’d double the amounts and ideally do a staggered sowing.

– 16 square feet of lettuce and other greens planted roughly every month keeps us over-supplied with salads.

– 32 square feet (18 plants) of mixed-maturation broccoli started in February and planted out in early-April kept me in gorgeous broccoli from late May to June. Another 18 plants with mixed maturation went in in July and should start heading up in the next several weeks. For freezing, I’d prefer to double these amounts, and would if I had room.

– 3 green zucchini and 2 patty pan summer squash are keeping me in plenty of zucchini and I’ve only just recently begun to feel a bit squash-overwhelmed.

– 6 slicing cucumbers are not quite enough to keep my family happily drowning in cukes. But we’re weird, we could eat 3 cukes a day…per person.

– 12 linear feet of pickling cucumbers have given me several large crocks full of lacto-fermented pickles. We’ll be fine on pickles as long as the LFs last in the fridge – 3 or 4 months – but I’d love to have some basic water bathed canned vinegar pickles in the pantry too, for late winter and spring. I didn’t grow enough to make that happen.

– 3, 4’x8′ beds of onions, each planted with 4 rows of onions, is an overwhelming amount of onions. Next time, split the 3-onion sampler pack with a friend.

– 18 indeterminate tomato plants trained to a single cordon and 6 additional determinates are giving us fresh eating & fresh cooking tomatoes plus a few additional Roma’s for drying. I’ll be buying an additional 100 pounds of Romas for sauce and drying from the Yakima Valley orchardist who’s been keeping me supplied with peaches.

– A 4’x8′ bed of chard is still a fine amount, but the chard this year just didn’t grow like last year.

This yield thing is really location, weather and family dependent. Using a harvest of 18 broccoli plants over the span of 6 weeks might seem impossible to a broccoli-hating family, but hardly any of our broccoli even made it to the kitchen. Oliver, it turns out, loves broccoli as much as the rest of us.

Nonetheless, when I picked up How to Cheat At Gardening And Yardwork by Jeff Brendenberg at my local library and was intrigued by a chart listing typical yield per plant. Now, I’m not sure these numbers are all that meaningful, but they are interesting. According to Brendenberg, you should expect the following from what you plant:

Corn: 1 to 3 ears
Cucumbers: 10 to 50
Melons: 1 to 3
Peppers: 2 to 10
Winter Squash: 6
Tomatoes: 6 to 24
Cherry Tomatoes: Up to 150!
Zucchini: 16 to 36

Food for thought.

Do you plan out how much of each vegetable you should plant? What goes into your thought process and what are your conclusions for your family?

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