2022 Review: square footage by vegetable
Did my allocated square footage of vegetables yield the right amount of food? If not, how much do I adjust for 2023?
The biggest win of the season was probably potatoes. We allocated more square footage than ever to our potatoes and it paid off — 44 feet of bed (4x44, planted in 3 different locations). We harvested over 200 pounds in fall, in addition to many pounds from August to the final harvest when I’d pull some up for a specific meal. We increased our square footage too, by probably 30%. Our winter eating will determine if we keep that square footage or decrease it (last year we harvested 170 pounds and we didn’t eat them all by April).
I usually allocate about 4x20 to our peppers, and that feels like the just right amount. It ends up being about 30 plants or so, and we will continue to grow a wide variety.
I also didn’t get my fall brassicas in nor did I have the right mix this year, but the square footage we have for them, which is about 4x20 or more does seem to be the right amount, given the Brussels sprouts occupy other beds, and other successions like turnips, carrots, and radishes are allocated elsewhere.
Sweet corn also had the right amount, thanks to how I succession planted it. In the past, I often planted it late but only one succession. This year I did two succession, and the second was slightly larger than the first succession. The first planting was about 4x4 and the second 4x6. We yielded several meals out of each planting over two weeks, spread out across about 6 weeks.
Our Brussels sprouts were a larger allocation this year, and because our cabbages came up short, we are relying on them more this fall. We grew 12 plants, spaced 24” apart for a total of 4x12. Sadly, my last 3 plants we didn’t harvest before the bitter cold a few weeks ago caused them to start rotting on the inside so we lost several pounds of sprouts this fall due to that lack of action.
Our carrot bed might have been a little short this summer for the root cellar. I had three different areas with a total square footage of about 4x12. I will probably do a large sowing of fall carrots in late June in 2023 due to our summer plans. We also always plant a 4x4 bed of early carrots (sown around April 1, uncovered) we enjoy throughout summer and that is a solid plan for us annually.
Dry bean productivity is still in process as we shell them all, but it’s safe to say we’ve increased productivity immensely. We grew 26 row feet of borlotti under the bean tunnel; another 8 row feet on a trellis; 16 row feet of Tiger’s eye; 10 row feet of my Borlotti F3, a saved seed experiment; and approximately 24 row feet of Dapple Gray beans interplanted with our flour corn, for a total of 84 row feet or the equivalent of a 4 x 28 foot bed, over 100 square feet, or about 3 1/2 raised beds.
Cucumber square footage of 24 square feet is ample for us, when in the right proportions. I like about 2/3 in pickling and 1/3 in slicing.
The dry corn we grew was an experiment and a lot of square footage — we will see how it cooks up, but it occupied most of our largest triangle bed and another 4x6 bed for our cornmeal corn. In total we had about 130 square feet in dry corn.
Winter squash had a slightly less prominent place in the garden this summer. I grew four plants, two each of Candystick delicata and Waltham butternut. It was in a large bed, 5x6 feet, so they enjoyed a 30 square foot area plus whatever they ended up doing in the adjacent asparagus and into the paths. We have a decent harvest, but I would be happy with more butternuts than we have.
It’s hard to say how we did with onions because the goal is storage through winter, and they store with mixed results. However, we grew more onions this year, and were never skimpy with them, and so I think our extra square footage is paying off. We have shallots and 3 kinds of onions in our root cellar, plus we had another variety strictly for fresh eating too. All told, we had about 4x14 allocated to onions and shallots.
