Rosalind
Deeply Rooted
I decided to be a locavore this year, starting in spring. It seemed like a good idea at the time, as I have a monster veggie garden laid out, a big fenced-off orchard, a bunch of chickens and a convenient pollution-free reservoir within biking distance in which to fish. Also kindly friends who give me free venison.
This weekend, I'm starting seeds indoors, right? I have my handy-dandy Excel spreadsheet, and I know approximately how many plants of each type will fit in the garden. I know what sort I can sow successively and which kind I can overwinter a bit. The ones that get successive sowings, I can plant less of, and the ones I can overwinter can be planted later, perhaps when the yard warms up and is no longer a mudpile. I'm sort-of meal planning for a whole year in advance. And yeah, I am shocked by how much I need to plant and preserve in order to be sure I've got enough to feed me and occasionally DH. A lot. I'm gonna need a big chest freezer in the barn for sure.
Here's where it gets tricky: Most seed packets don't tell you even a vague estimate of how much produce you'll get per plant. Yes, I realize this is highly variable, depends on weather, site, watering, fertilizer...Let's just take the "optimal condition value" and multiply by 0.6, assuming I will lose 40% to neglect or bad weather or what have you. I know this is a fudge factor which could mean an overload of one veggie, and two dinky little bits of another, but it's about what I normally get for yields, from counting flowers vs. fruit, averaged over every species of veggie and berry, also considering the estimates in my organic gardening book vs. reality.
Also, this is the first big veggie garden I've had since I moved to Massachusetts from Ohio. I used to be in the Cleveland/Akron area, close enough to the lake that I got all the lake effect. I used to be on clay and silt, and the only soil amendments I used were a scattering of mushroom compost, greensand, and blood meal. Here I'm on clay, clay and extra clay, with play sand, trucked-in municipal compost, chicken manure and bedding, autumn leaves, wood ashes, horse manure, and greensand for amendments. You would think this would make an awesome tilth, but in fact I've only tried potatoes and asparagus on it and they still produced about 60% as expected. It's a northern slope, with a tree and a retaining wall on the south side, it doesn't get the best sun. Don't want to cut down the tree either.
I need estimates of how much food you get per plant in climates that get snowy winters for the following:
Tomatoes--heirloom, regular, paste, any kind
Sweet bell peppers (the chile peppers, oddly, came with yield estimates)
Eggplants
I never bothered to keep track of yields accurately until the last year of the last garden I planted; stuff was either "pretty good" or "nah, that sucks" before then. And I lost that notebook. And IIRC, all my peppers got smushed by Ohio Edison trucks, so it wasn't a good year anyway.
This weekend, I'm starting seeds indoors, right? I have my handy-dandy Excel spreadsheet, and I know approximately how many plants of each type will fit in the garden. I know what sort I can sow successively and which kind I can overwinter a bit. The ones that get successive sowings, I can plant less of, and the ones I can overwinter can be planted later, perhaps when the yard warms up and is no longer a mudpile. I'm sort-of meal planning for a whole year in advance. And yeah, I am shocked by how much I need to plant and preserve in order to be sure I've got enough to feed me and occasionally DH. A lot. I'm gonna need a big chest freezer in the barn for sure.
Here's where it gets tricky: Most seed packets don't tell you even a vague estimate of how much produce you'll get per plant. Yes, I realize this is highly variable, depends on weather, site, watering, fertilizer...Let's just take the "optimal condition value" and multiply by 0.6, assuming I will lose 40% to neglect or bad weather or what have you. I know this is a fudge factor which could mean an overload of one veggie, and two dinky little bits of another, but it's about what I normally get for yields, from counting flowers vs. fruit, averaged over every species of veggie and berry, also considering the estimates in my organic gardening book vs. reality.
Also, this is the first big veggie garden I've had since I moved to Massachusetts from Ohio. I used to be in the Cleveland/Akron area, close enough to the lake that I got all the lake effect. I used to be on clay and silt, and the only soil amendments I used were a scattering of mushroom compost, greensand, and blood meal. Here I'm on clay, clay and extra clay, with play sand, trucked-in municipal compost, chicken manure and bedding, autumn leaves, wood ashes, horse manure, and greensand for amendments. You would think this would make an awesome tilth, but in fact I've only tried potatoes and asparagus on it and they still produced about 60% as expected. It's a northern slope, with a tree and a retaining wall on the south side, it doesn't get the best sun. Don't want to cut down the tree either.
I need estimates of how much food you get per plant in climates that get snowy winters for the following:
Tomatoes--heirloom, regular, paste, any kind
Sweet bell peppers (the chile peppers, oddly, came with yield estimates)
Eggplants
I never bothered to keep track of yields accurately until the last year of the last garden I planted; stuff was either "pretty good" or "nah, that sucks" before then. And I lost that notebook. And IIRC, all my peppers got smushed by Ohio Edison trucks, so it wasn't a good year anyway.
