I'm sure lots of people would like to have your problem!
If it's a new garden/climate, it will take a while to find out how much you can grow/eat.
Experiment, but don't grow lots something if you only eat it sometimes- kale's a big one for me, I only need a couple of plants, but I end up with a jungle-
John Jeavons has written some extremely detailed stuff on succession planting. Personally, I'm WAY too disorganised to plant 3 lettuce seeds a week...
Also, if you've got more garden space than you can use, grow cover crops to build up the nitrogen and organic matter: I imagine it vanishes pretty fast where you are!

Sounds like you need to start canning and freezing. Except maybe for the lettuce and kale, you can "put away" the other stuff you've mentioned. That's how the past generations did it. That's the only way to "eat local" if you're trying to do that.

Also don't forget your local food banks who might be very glad to take your overages!

Lucky we live Hawaii Devra-no need produce a whole year's worth of veggies in one short season! We can grow and harvest year round. Here are a few thoughts to help keep things from getting away from you.

First i think you have to know how much produce your family eats in a week. Then plant accordingly. If you only eat beets once a week, for example, you might not need to plant a whole row at once. Check out square foot gardening for some ideas if you haven't already, there is a SFG forum on GW which might be a good place to start.

Finding crops that hold in the garden also helps. Take the beets, if you start harvesting when they are only marble sized you can extend the harvest over quite a few weeks as the beets gradually get larger and larger. No need to harvest the whole lettuce plant at once-pick the outside leaves and let the center continue to grow. For broccoli, try one that produces smaller side shoots over time instead of choosing a variety that crops one large head at once. i am trying Piracicaba this year for that reason, also supposed to be better in warm weather.

Maybe try look for vegetables that don't have to be replanted so often. Eggplants, tomatoes and peppers will continue to grow and bear for at least a year, longer sometimes.

Vegetable harvest is easier to manage than fruit harvest but still yet the garden sometimes produces more than we can consume. When that happens do as shebear suggests. i just canned a few jars of dilly beans. it's rare that i can't pick enough fresh beans for two people but pickled beans are a treat. Freezing or finding recipes that call for a lot of what you have on hand are other ways of managing overabundance. Check out the Harvest forum for some good ideas.

Finally, you might be able to trade or give your extras away through Craig's List and the food bank is always happy to accept donations of fresh produce so those extras shouldn't go to waste!

Plant like you shop for your groceries, you need a bag of onions per week, so plant as many onion seeds as what's in your bag of onions, they will mature in the same order as the amount you purchase each week.

Cucumbers grow as fast as they can, so maybe you didn't need as many plants as you have, make pickles or root cellar the rest.

A method of above ground root cellaring is taking dirt, putting boiling water on it to kill anything, dry the dirt in a way nothing can get into it, layer 1 inch of dirt in a box or crate, then put cucumbers onto the first layer of dirt not touching with a little room in between them, put dirt over them until it reaches 1 inch above them, put another layer of cucumbers, continue the same until the box is filled. Stack the boxes in a cool dry place.

I don't know if this is exactly accurate, but that is what the books say you can do.

You can also just trade with other local gardeners who didn't grow cucumbers. I wish I had your problem!

Thanks for the ideas, everyone. I didn't realize the Food Bank takes fresh produce. I thought they only dealt with canned goods/non-perishables. I also didn't realize you can start harvesting beets when they're small, so I'll start doing that, too.

I hadn't considered canning because, as Mauirose said, we can grow all year round here. But I'll definitely start canning tomatoes because so many recipes call for them instead of fresh. (The anti-oxidants are supposed to become stronger after canning, too.)

I always plant too much lettuce fearing that some seeds won't germinate, but when it comes time to thin the seedlings, I just can't bring myself to do such a brutal thing! I'll just plant a few seeds a week from now on. (My family will thank you because they're really getting tired of big salads!)

Thanks again!

My zone is 9b but we can also plant and harvest 365 days a year. We do have cool vegetable and warm vegetable weather, so of course we are sowing different things in January than in June.

Knowing how much to plant of what requires some adjustment in many different ways. I have had my present garden for 2 1/4 years and when I started I planted way too many greens. Partly this was because in my former garden greens did not do as well, so I was getting a lot more pounds of food per seed in my present growing environment. This was different for tomatoes, where I am getting less per seed in this garden. Then after you make these adjustments, you need to adjust for the extra vegetables your family eats just because they taste so much better than anything from the grocery store. This is what happened to us with carrots and beets. I always thought carrots were uneventful, until I tasted my first garden carrot. I never even liked beets before growing them, but now I do not have enough beets, even though I am eating a lot more of them than I ever was. So I am jealous of your predicted carrot and beet abundance.

I have things set up so I can harvest carrots every month of the year, and i did so in 2009. So now I always have carrots in the ground ready to pick or in the vegetable crisper, but never too many carrots. I literally plant something every week of the year, and I regret it if I do not. For us this will be different in January than May, but we are always planting something. Where? well, more carrots will find homes on the base of tomato plants, and in spots where i am harvesting cauliflowers, or on the beds with pole beans. Common beans get planted in trellises occupied by the peas, because by the time the beans need more room, the peas will be gone. Tomato seedlings get planted in the middle of the tomato cages i use to support bush peas. The peas make nitrogen with the fixing bacteria in their roots and shade the tomatoes from too much sun, protect them from the wind. By the time the tomatoes need more space the peas will be gone.

Picking greens as babies, or baby zucchini, baby beets, is a good idea. If you have too many things, eat the babies! so true for the baseball bat size zucchinis, isn't?

So with all this advice, I have to admit that I have peas and lettuces coming out of my ears myself. I am putting salad spring rolls on the menu pretty soon, to give us a break from plates of salad. I also cooked the snow peas into a soup, cream of snow pea soup. It was very good. Soups are a good way to use up A LOT of produce. I make cream of zucchini soup, cream of green bean soup, of course, butternut squash, even chayote!

Something else about extra produce. We intentionally try to get extra green beans and cucumbers in the summer, just so we can pickle them, because we love both types of pickles. We would not have known how much we like green bean pickles if we had not had an over abundance, I never even tasted them before. Same with tomatoes, having tomatoes to eat in the summer is not enough, we want canned tomatoes or frozen tomatoes to use when only the cherry tomatoes produce and the large ones go dormant or die.

We did freeze the extra greens and we still do when we have a little extra. At the end of the cool weather season, when all the brassicas have been pulled out of the ground (I know we could keep them as perennials but then we get bug issues), we thaw them out and make the greens into fillings for green empanadas (or pies). We then freeze those and they constitute lots of fast meals (heat in 350F oven for 20 minutes and eat). We will make less pies this year, but we still like to have extra frozen greens around to make some of them.

I live in Puerto Rico (I think thats like zone 12) and am so glad you posted this. It's hard to information on growing vegatables in this climate. If you have any good resources that would be great!

I love this forum -- you're all so helpful! I appreciate all the advice for solving my problem.

From now on, I'll plan like I shop for groceries, and I'll make it a point to plant at least one thing every week. That makes it a lot simpler. Pickled beans are high on my list too. I've never tried them, but with two recommendations in one day, they must be good!

Today I met a couple of girlfriends for lunch and thrilled them both with shopping bags full of organic lettuce, arugula, kale and radishes. (And my family was thrilled, too, because it went out the door instead of onto their dinner plates AGAIN!)

Note to Sweetlydark: I thought this might help you find your "zone." It's quoted from About.com. "The USDA hardiness zone map simply assigns Zone 11 for anywhere with an average annual minimum temperature above 40F. If they are following the zone system, then each zone is 10F higher than the last one, making Zone 12 at 50F and Zone 13 at 60F."

Here are a few links to get started with. Also check out what your neighbors are doing and what is being sold at the local farmer's market. Once you have the basics down go ahead and try to grow things that you are interested in. Suprising what works, sometimes ; )

CTAHR bookshelf
Leaves to live by
Amaranth to Zai holes

Don't forget to hang around gardenweb!

I recommend reading Small Plot and Intensive Gardening, a pamphlet produced by the horticulture department at Purdue University (link provided below). In it, there is a table with several columns. One column tells you how much produce to expect from one ten foot row of the plant. Another column tells you how much produce is required to produce one quart of canned or frozen vegetables. I thought this may help you plan.

Here is a link that might be useful: Small Plot and Intensive Gardening

Food banks accept fresh produce if they can handle it (refrigeration, etc). They usually also have limitations on how much or how often people can get food. But if you ask, they may have some suggestions on other places you can take it.

Do you know any seniors who are a little past their gardening days and would be thrilled to get fresh salads and veggies? Ask around your neighborhood. Or a poorer neighborhood.

Sue

By that calculation devra I guess that makes me zone 14 since the average minimum temperature for here (that I found online) doesn't go below 70. Kinda makes me feel like a wimp since I need a jacket when the temperature is around there o lower lol.

Now I need to start reading some of those links, Amaranth to Zai holes looks particularly interesting.

Don't automatically plant a row of everything you want... maybe try planting in squares, I found that helped me to not overplant something just for it to be a "proper" row.

Thanks for that tip, vikingkirken. I prefer to have things neatly organized, and planting in squares rather than rows will help me keep the garden nice looking without having to plant a whole row of the same thing.

(When I had raised beds, I planted via the square-foot gardening method. It hadn't occurred to me that I could do the same without raised beds.)

plant a small amount each month and keep it rotating. I found that some plants produce alot while others dont. No great discovery there. Once you find out which ones produce to the level you need you can adjust your plantings. I only grow one cucumber plant every 3 months conversly I need about 50 strawberry plants to provide for my five member family. Anyone else in zones 8-10 (of course anyone else who wants can too) can friend me on facebook, Id love to share experiences with others. I have soo much to learn!
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Here is a link that might be useful: robs urban farm