Ridgerunner
Garden Master
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2009
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- Location
- Southeast Louisiana Zone 9A
Unfortunately the only answer is trial and error. You will never get it right because of different growing conditions each year and other variables but you can eventually work out what works best for you most years. What you are looking for are general guidelines for a starting point to start that trial and error process. There are just too many things that are different between you and me than just growing season that I can't help with hard numbers. What I'd suggest is that you chat with your county extension office and see what guidelines they can give you. At least you get some local knowledge that way. Another good resource might be to hook up with your local master gardeners. Your extension office should have a contact with them.
I'll try to go through an example as to why it is hard to answer your question or why you might get a lot of different suggestions for the same vegetable. You mentioned beans. I'll assume green beans instead of dried beans. Do you want a constant supply of fresh green beans to eat on or are you mainly worried about preserving them? Bush beans tend to produce a lot in a short time while pole beans are more likely to produce all season as long as you keep them picked. You might want to plant a few pole beans to eat off of while you plant a larger amount of bush so you can preserve them in larger batches, then rip the plants out and plant something new if your season allows. How will you preserve them, canning or freezing? If canning, how many jars a year will your family eat? That's probably in winter when your garden is not producing. Pints or quarts? How big is your pressure canner? How many jars can it handle at a time? It takes a lot more time to pick, clean, and break 18 pints of green beans than 4 or 5 pints. If you don't pick the green beans off of the plants every few days the pods toughen and become inedible plus production stops. There were times when I'd pick them and give them to a food bank when I didn't have time to preserve them or let them go a bit long and toss them on the compost just to keep them producing.
My strategy for green beans was to plant some bush beans for early green bean production as they typically produce earlier than pole. My wife prefers blue lake pole beans for eating and canning so I'd plant quite few of those. Instead of ripping out the bush beans when the pole beans started producing I'd let the go to seed and use the dried beans. After I canned enough pole beans to last us plus some for family I'd let most of the pole beans also go to seed while keeping one section picked for fresh eating. I'd get three or four good cannings a year in a two to three week time period plus freeze some to use in soup. Others use totally different strategies with beans. I'd typically have a 20' row of bush beans and use about 70 feet of my garden deer fence to grow pole beans. When I caned green beans it would usually be 18 pints plus some frozen for soup. I'd pick, clean, and break them one day, store them overnight in an ice chest in ice water, then can and freeze the nest day. I sometimes did that in one day but it's easier to cook supper when I'm not using the kitchen for canning.
Then you mentioned beets. Are you growing them for the bulbs or the greens? I like the bulbs, my wife prefers beet greens above all others. I'd typically plant an area maybe 2' wide by 3' long with beets spaced maybe 2" x 4". That produced more than we needed. I'd pick some greens for the table and freeze a few bags of greens, but not that much. While the beets were producing greens I'd also be getting a lot of lettuce, spinach, turnip greens, as well as chard and kale. Even if you eat some form of greens each day there are only so much greens you can eat and chard and kale are good for freezing. I'd cook beet bulbs for the table a couple of times during the season, but not that often. They take a long time to cook plus again we were eating a lot of easier to prepare veggies fresh. I'd can most of the beet bulbs for us and give a few to my daughter-in-law. I'd make one batch of pickled beets, mainly to give to my brother-in-law. He really liked those.
I was already retired when I did all this so I had all day most days to work on this. I'd can and freeze a lot of other veggies plus would probably make 15 to 20 batches of jelly and jam a year. I raised and butchered chickens. There was no way I could have done nearly as much if I had a full time job, but I also did not have family helping. There are just too many variables for us to be able to tell you how much of anything you need to plant, let alone how much you can take care of.
I don't know how easy it will be for you to expand next year. My main suggestion is to start relatively small and see how it goes. Use that first year as a learning experience. You'll plant too much of some stuff, not enough of something else. So what, I still do that. If you can't get helpful guidelines from your extension office or local master gardeners you do an online search for some suggestions, but these are not for your area and they don't take all the variables into account. Still, it is a start.
