Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
 

Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!

If more Americans grew a little food � instead of so much grass � our savings on grocery bills would be astounding.


In 2007, I began to get lots of questions about growing food to help save money. Then, while working on my new book, Edible Landscaping, I had an aha! moment. As I was assembling statistics to show the wastefulness of the American obsession with turf, I wondered what the productivity of just a small part of American lawns would be if they were planted with edibles instead of grass.

I wanted to pull together some figures to share with everyone, but calls to seed companies and online searches didn�t turn up any data for home harvest amounts � only figures for commercial agriculture. From experience, I knew those commercial numbers were much too low compared with what home gardeners can get. For example, home gardeners don�t toss out misshapen cucumbers and sunburned tomatoes. They pick greens by the leaf rather than the head, and harvests aren�t limited to two or three times a season.

For years, I�ve known that my California garden produces a lot. By late summer, my kitchen table overflows with tomatoes, peppers and squash; in spring and fall, it�s broccoli, lettuces and beets. But I�d never thought to quantify it. So I decided to grow a trial garden and tally up the harvests to get a rough idea of what some popular vegetables can produce.

The Objective
I took a 5-by-20-foot section of garden bed by my tiny lawn to see how much I could grow in just that 100 square feet. I wanted to produce a lot of food, and because it was part of my edible landscape, it had to look good, too.

The Plants
I wanted to make this garden simple � something anyone in the United States could grow. I didn�t include fancy vegetable varieties; I chose those available at my local nursery as transplants. I also selected vegetables that are expensive to buy at the supermarket, as well as varieties that my experience has told me produce high yields.

The first season (spring/summer 2008), I grew the following:

Two tomato plants: �Better Boy� and �Early Girl�
Bell peppers, which are often luxuries at the market when fully colored: two �California Wonder,� two �Golden Bell,� one �Orange Bell,� and one �Big Red Beauty�
Four zucchinis: two green �Raven� and two �Golden Dawn�
Four basils (expensive in stores but essential in the kitchen)
18 lettuces: six �Crisp Mint� romaine, six �Winter Density� romaine, and six �Sylvestra� butterhead
The only plants I grew from seed were the zucchinis. Hindsight is always 20/20; I should have thinned each of the zucchini hills to a single seedling, but I left two in each hill. As a result, I needed to come up with creative uses for zucchini, including giving them away as party favors at a dinner I hosted.

3 more pages at link . . .

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organ...ning-Food.aspx

Re: Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
 

A gram of MJ is more expensive than an OZ of silver.

Re: Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
 

Thank you for the link

Re: Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
 

This would be a good experiment for anyone, to find out what varieties grow well in your climate, what foods you eat the most of, etc. If you want to produce a LOT of food in a small space, check out Square Foot Gardening. It may not be the highest yield/sq foot, but it's up there, and not highly labor intensive once you have everything set up.

Re: Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
 

My wife would love for ME to try this.