How much space would it take to feed say 2 people all year?

Please. I have been trying to find some info online and cant find anythning. I am talking a mild a year growing season with a good sized well. I would still purchase meat but would like to grow all veggies/fruits/herbs/spices/grain/beans suptainably. And someday hope to have livestock.

Maybe someone can show me a link or provide some information on just how much raised beds and crops I would need. The first thing I would do is start composting ayear and work on my soils. I would need some local sources of material to make compost to get my crops strarted. Maybe I could start with a good organic concentrated fertilizer then composting my unused leftover crops to get the cycle going.Crop rotation. So please any info would be good. Thanks.

Google the Path To Freedom website. They can tell you all that you need to know.

Basic "farmer's market" soft fruit and veg (AKA "Yuppie Chow": bok choy, sweet potatoes, tomatoes) can be grown at 200 - 400 sq ft per person. This DOES NOT take into account wheat, oats, rice, potatoes, or any other commodity. Those commodities are what provides the majority of an adult's caloric intake.

BioIntensive (Jeavons) says 800 sq ft of raised beds per person for a full year's calories, soft fruit and veg of a vegan diet, growing 8 months a year, average gardener with 4 years of experience. Please note that this includes crops which are specifically grown to create composting materials, so that the total amount of topsoil in the raised beds is INCREASED through Jeavon's Biointensive methods.

Add in orcharding and you can reduce that per person amount, but tree yields are frequently... uh... temperamental for the first 4 years. Same for Permaculture. Reduce your rotational raised bed size only upon standardizing the caloric income from orchard/permaculture.

We're doing this on 1.5 acres. Am starting with 480 sq ft of raised bed, 23 trees in the orchard this year. Next year or this fall will see another 400 sq feet of bed, a potato patch, and chickens.

I highly, highly, highly reccommend the book 'minifarming'. Have read it seven or eight times now.

Here is a link that might be useful: Minifarming: self sufficiency on a quarter of an acre

I've got a really small property, and I can't imagine being able to grow enough 'calories' in my garden.
Grains, apart from amaranth, need way too much space but it wouldn't be a massive shock to my system if they vanished from my diet.
But I am focussing more on growing protein and carb-dense, storable food:
Potatoes. If my climate allowed sweet potatoes, I'd be all over them. Anyone who says it's not worth growing spuds since...cheap...taste the same...shop...isn't doing it right!
Drying beans. Next season all my fences will be covered in these delicious heirloom runners I've found.
I'm squeezing fruit trees and berries in wherever I can. I used to be uncomfortable with the extreme...control of espalier pruning. Now my place is filling up with 2-d trees.
John Jeavons has comprehensively (obsessively?) written about what space it takes to actually feed a person. A lot is what it takes!

Yeah, Jeavons has spent his life doing figures. Glad it was someone else and not me.

800 sq ft isn't that much, really, it's backyard and frontyard in an average lot.

But the work Biointensive takes is... enormous. I much prefer the Minifarming method, though will use some of Jeavons' excellent and meticulous diagrams and methods.

Wow. Thank you alot for that. 800 sq ft is not much at all it is only 80x10. Raised beds are super productibeve of corse. I will grow 90% of everyhing I eat and will purchase only rice, meat and maybe dryed herbs/spices that are rare and not so easy to grow. I will be making 2 huge raised beds 10x40 then. They will be only about a foot high. Maybe I will make another taller bed for the large plants. I do know that this may be a few thousand dollar investment. As far as orchard trees go they will go right in the grownd I will dig large holes then fill with good soil and feed my citrus and orchard trees with compost. I know the trees will take years to start being productive but I look at it as an investment. So again thank you for the info. Well I have about 800 sq ft of raised beds to make ;) Thanks.

BTW- I want to have surplus so I think having the citrus/orchard trees in grownd and being I will buy rice/grain the 800 sqft should be good for two people?
Again Thanks.

To- plot thickens.

I missed that you said you are doing 23 orchard trees. Are you doing them in raised beds? How tall do the bedds have to be? I was thinking of planting right in ground is it easier to make beds I dont have a back-ho. Everyone thanks.

My orchard is bare root directly into the ground. No big deal, just keeping the deer out and watering as needed.

FYI: raised beds should never be wider than 4 feet across. This way you can reach into them from either side without walking in them. Stepping on the Earth severely compacts it and kills/discourages roots. If your beds are fluffy and deep and never walked on, your plants will be much happier.

Here is a link that might be useful: And The Plot Thickens: My blog on how I'm developing our property, and the rationale behind those choices.

Thank you. So I will be making about 600 sqft of raised beds 4' wide. Not sure why I was thinking of making 10' wide beds ;). Some of the beds I may make a insect net attchment right on them with shade netting to increase my yeilds in the hotter months keeping them bug free. I hope to post some pics when I am finished. I will have truck loads of top soil and compost droped off. I will fill with the soil and a little compost after building the beds then top dressing with compost when needed. I am building them with reg lumber lined with pastic to keep it from rotting. The only thing I have is tons of kelp supplemnt powder that I will spray on plants, this will be great with the compost. I have been growing in comtainers for ever with sythentic fertilizer and I cant wait to make these raised beds and just use compost.

Thanks Again.

Lumber will rot after a bit, but I hope it works for you.

Lining it with plastic will give the slugs and snails a comfy place to hide during the day.

Topsoil and compost must be tested for pesticides (grab a sample and testplant beans) and may be rampant with weeds&bugs and deficient in nutrients, as I discovered, along with being desperately expensive. Might be better to build your own, as I have resolved to.

Thanks. I maybe will make them from rock then. thanks alot.

Raised beds don't have to be confined by materials. The French Intensive method has gently sloped bed edges. These edges are planted, which actually increases total available planting space. This is easily accomplished with the big, full version of double-digging. It fluffs up the soil six or more inches, and as long as one does it while adding amendments according to the results of the soil test, that's all you really need to create raised beds. I've seen folks lay down pipe or boards or run string to keep the edges of the double-digging troughs in line. They use a 4 or 8 foot length to mark the edges and keep the fluffed-up soil in the beds, dig those 4 or 8 feet, and then move the edge markers.

You may want to get Seed To Seed, which talks about what you can plant where & when to enable seed saving.

Also, some Northern or Southern farmers will slope their bed faces toward the equator, to get more total sun exposure. But that's kind of a different issue.

Hey thanks! i May make alot of the beds just like that to keep the cost/labor down. Thanks!

I have a full sun area I will have all this in that may require some shade netting for some of the crops in the hot summer to keep them productive. Any other thoughts would be great.

Instead of netting, try a tree that will leaf out only in the summer. Or asparagus. Or a trellis of deciduous vines. Or... well, you get the drift.

Yea I may use netting. I was thinking of wire mesh but that would rust. Thank you. the netting will be cheaper aswell. That alone has saved me alot of time. I will update when I get stared.

Wait...You are saying use Plants as a raised bed? I was not sure what you ment.

Yep. Here's an example:

Here is a link that might be useful: Bed Types diagram

TheMasterGardener1, I had less than excellent experiences with raised beds, but different situations call for entirely different methods.
I live on sand and let's just say drainage is not an issue!
After spending lots of time, effort and cash, I found they were entirely inappropriate for me.
plot_thickens has it covered, but I'll reiterate: don't line the beds with plastic. The wood actually rots FASTER, let alone the gastropods...
Definely make your beds narrow enough to reach into wthout tromping around on them.
Align your beds South-North if you can, your plants will get much more 'even' sunlight
If you haven't already got it, I'd spend money on compost, rather than 'topsoil'. I got horrible stuff, full of mad weed seeds that I didn't have before it arrived...
Whatever you do, don't make the paths too narrow in order to try and get more 'garden' space. All of the above made me want to redo everything, but not being able to get the wheelbarrow round corners made me actually do it!
For me it all comes down to water retention, polyculture, cover crops, organic matter and mulch. Pretty much everything else is a refinement.
I highly recommend Gaia's Garden 2nd ed if you haven't read it; lots of good permaculture info.

I think it is Robert Kourik's book 'Designing and Maintaining
Your Edible Landscape Naturally' that listed how much of each type of plant you need per person, for just fresh eating, or for processing (canning, drying, freezing, etc).

The Jeavons method of biointensive uses many plants, closely spaced, producing less crop on each. Fewer plants, wider spacing produces larger crop yields and doesn't waste as much seed.

Sue

The Jeavons method of biointensive uses many plants, closely spaced, producing less crop on each. Fewer plants, wider spacing produces larger crop yields and doesn't waste as much seed.

Biointensive reccommends close recordkeeping, and experimenting with the layout of plants. This is important because, where my romaine may grow best on 5-inch centers, you may get better luck on 6. It lists reccomendations, based on his best results at his Willits farms -- it is expected that you will experiment and find the best solutions for your situation.

The close spacing you remember may also be due to J's interplanting techniques. He reccommends planting radishes inbetween slower things, like carrots or corn, really really tightly. This is because the radishes can be harvested before the other plants reach full maturity, and the radishes help shade out weeds on the bare ground.

Additionally, there are NO OTHER BOOKS OUT THERE which list what Jeavon's Biointensive books do:
*calorie content of every crop
*nutritional content of every crop
*how to combine the above two to make a balanced diet
*yield potentials of every crop based on beginner, intermediate, and expert gardener yields
*calculations for amount of land needed per crop per growing season
*what & how much to grow to compost to replace nutrients

Jeavon's techniques are severe and very very finely grained. He's spent literally decades doing meticulous recordkeeping and refining his life's work. I can't do his nit-picky perfection, but I can use his immense body of work (over 100 books and leaflets, and counting) to my advantage.

And it works.

The nutritional content of the crops depends on the nutritional balance of the soil. Most people won't even get their soil tested ONCE, much less every year.

I was reading somewhere (AcresUSA?) that in comparison testing of commercial crops of the 1940s vs the 2000s, the nutrient content had dropped something like 40%.

I'm not saying that Jeavons hasn't produced some excellent info, but too many people pick isolated bits out of it without seeing the larger picture, and when they get poor results, they say his system doesn't work.

Sue

The nutritional content of the crops depends on the nutritional balance of the soil.

And the crop. Weird crumpled strawberries are usually boron deficient, for example, but it's impossible to get all you need nutritionally out of, say, lettuce... no matter how perfect your soil is.

I was reading somewhere (AcresUSA?) that in comparison testing of commercial crops of the 1940s vs the 2000s, the nutrient content had dropped something like 40%.

Also Mother Earth News. Synthetic fertilizers have done us no favors.

I'm not saying that Jeavons hasn't produced some excellent info, but too many people pick isolated bits out of it without seeing the larger picture, and when they get poor results, they say his system doesn't work.

Using only small parts of any interconnected system is stupid. Yelling into a mouse and wondering why the text doesn't appear on the screen? Yeah, Garbage In... Garbage Out.