One of the biggest questions about planning a one-acre homestead is a simple one:
Can one small garden actually grow enough food for one person for an entire year?
Rather than guessing, I decided to work backward from what I actually eat.
This isn’t a garden designed to grow a little bit of everything just because it sounds nice. It is designed around the foods I will actually use, preserve, store, and eat throughout the year—and around the reality that I have only one 33′ × 66′ crop paddock available for the annual human-food crops. I eat a lot of casseroles as you will notice as you read this.
That gives me 2,178 square feet.
But I also need to be able to walk through the garden and work in it.
The 4-Foot Bed System
I decided to divide the entire paddock into long, continuous growing beds.
The beds are 4 feet wide, because that works beautifully with square-foot-style planting. I can reach the middle of a bed from either side without needing to step into the growing area.
The beds run the 66-foot length of the paddock.
That gives me seven growing beds:
7 beds × 4′ × 66′ = 1,848 square feet of growing space.
Between them are six narrow walking paths.
I am allowing just 10 inches for each path.
Some people might think that is too narrow, but this garden is being designed for one person: me. I won’t normally be working shoulder-to-shoulder with another gardener. If I am lucky enough to have someone helping me, we don’t have to occupy the same path.
That gives me:
- 1,848 sq ft of growing beds
- 330 sq ft of walking paths
- 2,178 sq ft total
The paths will be there every growing season, even though I will still work the entire paddock over after harvest. So I think it is more honest to count them as part of the practical garden design.
What Goes in the Seven Beds?
The crops don’t need to be divided into seven equal gardens. Instead, the long beds can be divided into sections according to the amount of each crop I actually need.
The current working arrangement looks like this:
Bed 1 — Popcorn and Zucchini
This bed will contain my popcorn, along with zucchini.
Popcorn is one of the crops that still needs a little more variety-specific calculation. I want an open-pollinated variety so I can save my own seed, and I want to make sure its growing and pollination period works as well as possible with the sweet corn.
For now, popcorn has the remaining space available in the overall calculation rather than a permanently fixed acreage.
Zucchini is much simpler. I don’t need a huge planting. A few productive plants should provide plenty of zucchini, with selected mature fruits deliberately left on the plant for seed.
Bed 2 — Potatoes and Leafy Greens
Potatoes will provide the bulk of my root-crop calories in this bed.
I don’t actually eat enormous quantities of potatoes by themselves. Much of my potato use is in casseroles, with some additional potatoes reserved for occasional mashed potatoes or other potatoes.
The bed will also contain dedicated leafy greens such as spinach, Swiss chard, baby or tender kale, and mild lettuce.
These greens have two jobs: fresh greens for sandwiches and greens for casseroles.
My winter supply of fresh sandwich greens will also be supplemented by a protected growing area near the house, which is outside this paddock.
Bed 3 — Cruciferous Vegetables, Carrots and Peppers
This bed is where much of my daily vegetable-side supply comes from.
I want a cruciferous vegetable with dinner every day, for a total of 365 servings per year.
The current mix includes:
- broccoli
- cabbage
- Brussels sprouts
- kohlrabi
I especially like Brussels sprouts, but I don’t want them every day—about once a week is plenty.
Broccoli will provide florets, peeled stems and side shoots. Its leaves will have another job: they can go into my casseroles as leafy greens.
Cabbage is different. For my calculations, only the heads count as human food. Tough outer leaves can go to the livestock.
Kohlrabi is still something of an experiment for me. I haven’t eaten it yet, but it sounds appealing because the bulb reminds me of a peeled broccoli stem. Its leaves are not being counted as part of my human leafy-green supply.
Carrots will mainly go into casseroles, with some available for occasional fresh eating.
Bell peppers are a small crop for me. I don’t eat huge quantities, but I want some for variety and nutrition.
Bed 4 — Melons, Sweet Corn, Snap Peas and Tomatoes
This is my fresh summer-food bed.
I love cantaloupe and green-fleshed melons, so I want a useful supply of those, with some small watermelons as well.
Because my growing season is short, I am not depending on multiple melon successions. I’ll use one well-timed planting and choose varieties that can mature in the available season.
Cantaloupes that reach physiological maturity can be harvested at an appropriate mature-but-firm stage when the variety allows it, then brought indoors to finish ripening. Any fruit that needs to be preserved can be frozen.
Watermelons are different: I want them to mature on the vine.
Sweet corn is also here. I want an open-pollinated, short-season sweet corn because I love eating fresh corn right off the cob.
Popcorn is a separate crop. Both are corn, so I cannot simply assume that different days-to-maturity automatically prevent cross-pollination. When I choose the final varieties, their actual flowering periods will matter because I want to save seed.
Tomatoes will all be paste-type tomatoes. I don’t need a separate slicing-tomato crop. I want one type that is meaty enough for sauce but good enough to eat fresh.
I’ll use the tomatoes for fresh eating, tomato sauce, preservation, and seed saving.
Snap peas have another useful feature: I can eat both the pods and the tender leaves or shoots.
Bed 5 — Beans, Cucumbers, Onions, Garlic, Roots, Herbs and Ground Cherries
This is the bed where the smaller crops can share the long growing space.
My green bean crop will be Italian flat beans, harvested about once a week. I can grow them vertically, which makes much better use of the bed.
The tiny pickling cucumbers will also be trellised. I don’t want big cucumber pickles—I like little baby pickles. I plan to experiment with old-fashioned salt fermentation rather than relying entirely on vinegar.
Ground cherries get a small section because I really enjoy them.
Onions and garlic will provide everyday cooking ingredients as well as ingredients for the casseroles.
I also want some garlic specifically for drying and using as seasoning.
The remaining root vegetables—turnips, rutabagas and parsnips—will rotate with the carrots and beets in the casserole system. I don’t need huge quantities of any one of them.
And there will be a small amount of space for culinary herbs.
Beds 6 and 7 — Hard White Wheat
The last two beds are primarily wheat.
I want to make one loaf of sourdough bread every week.
That is 52 loaves per year.
Each loaf uses about three cups of flour, so the bread itself requires about 156 cups of flour per year. I also need flour for maintaining and reactivating my sourdough starter.
After allowing for milling and cleaning losses, seed for next year’s crop, and a reasonable cushion, my current working target is about 62 pounds of harvested hard white wheat per year.
The present calculation uses about 620 square feet for wheat.
That works out to two complete 4′ × 66′ beds, plus a section of the third bed.
I like the idea of that. When I look at the paddock, I can actually see where my bread comes from.
Seed Saving Is Part of the Plan
One thing I had to keep reminding myself throughout this calculation is that growing enough food for one year isn’t enough.
If I want this to become a self-sustaining system, the garden has to produce next year’s planting material too.
That doesn’t mean I need a separate seed garden.
Instead, seed production is built into the crop itself.
I’ll deliberately save:
- wheat grain for next year’s planting
- potatoes for seed tubers
- garlic cloves
- mature beans
- mature peas
- mature cucumbers
- tomato seed
- pepper seed
- corn seed
- mature zucchini fruit for seed
- selected onion bulbs for seed
- selected carrot and beet roots for their biennial seed cycle
- seed from selected cruciferous plants
The plants used for seed are part of the crop’s growing space.
That is an important distinction. Seed isn’t something I can simply forget about until fall.
The Other Food-Producing Areas
Not everything I eat needs to come out of this 33′ × 66′ annual crop paddock.
Around the house and elsewhere on the property I will have:
- fruit trees
- strawberries
- berry bushes
- grapes along the fence
- compact hazelnuts
- rhubarb
- lamb’s quarters
- mushrooms in a shaded production area
- protected winter greens
Lamb’s quarters are particularly special to me. I used to pick and can wild lamb’s quarters when I lived in Ohio, and I really loved them.
I plan to buy seed and establish them as a recurring/perennial-type food crop outside the annual vegetable paddock. I’ll let selected plants reseed themselves while keeping them under control. Some of the harvest can be frozen for later use.
That means the 1,848 square feet of annual growing beds don’t have to carry every single plant food I will ever eat.
What This Garden Is Really Designed To Do
The goal isn’t to make every square foot look like a traditional vegetable garden.
The goal is to make the space work.
Some crops are there because I eat them frequently. Some are there because they preserve well. Some provide ingredients for my casseroles. Some give me fresh summer food. Some provide seed for the next year.
And some crops do double duty.
Broccoli gives me florets and casserole greens.
Beets and other roots give me both roots and useful greens.
Snap peas provide pods and edible shoots.
Tomatoes provide fresh food, sauce and seed.
Zucchini provides food and seeds.
Wheat provides flour and next year’s seed.
That kind of thinking is what makes a very small garden much more productive than simply planting a little of everything.
Is One Paddock Enough?
That’s the question I’m ultimately trying to answer.
Right now, my seven 4-foot beds give me 1,848 square feet of actual growing space.
Our current working calculations are filling it.
This isn’t an imaginary garden anymore.
It has a fixed footprint.
It has actual beds.
It has walking space.
It has crops assigned to those beds.
It includes food, preservation and seed saving.
And now I can keep refining the numbers without changing the basic structure of the garden.
That’s exactly what I wanted when I started this project:
Turn a one-acre dream into a plan.
