I changed my homemade milk plan from soy milk to oat milk, and so I also removed the soybean plot. I expected the other parts of my Daily Dozen homestead plan to stay much the same, but two areas needed a closer look: the dry beans and the oats.
The earlier estimate for dry beans was too low. It did not fully account for the Daily Dozen target of three bean servings every day.
How much is a year of beans?
The Daily Dozen lists three servings of beans per day, with a serving example of ½ cup cooked beans. That comes to 1½ cups cooked beans per day, or 547½ cups for a year. NutritionFacts.org’s Daily Dozen
University of Maine Cooperative Extension estimates that one pound of dry beans—about two cups—makes about six cups cooked. Using that conversion, I need about 91 pounds of dry beans for the year to meet the target.
I’m adding a 20% planning cushion for saved seed and handling or storage losses. That brings the planned harvest to about 110 pounds of dry beans.
The corrected bean acreage
The earlier homestead plan used a working yield assumption of 1,200 pounds of dry beans per acre. That is a planning estimate, not a guaranteed harvest, but it gives me a consistent basis for sizing the beds.
At that yield, I’ve allocated about 3,975 square feet of growing area to beans. I’m dividing it among four varieties:
- Pinto
- Navy
- Cranberry
- Black
That works out to roughly 994 square feet per variety. The original plan had only 36 square feet per variety, or 144 square feet total, so the bean area had to grow substantially.
Growing the oats for milk
The oats have two separate purposes in my plan. I’m keeping 700 square feet of naked oats for the Daily Dozen whole-grain category, and adding about 1,970–2,250 square feet of oats to make homemade oat milk.
Together, that’s about 2,670–2,950 square feet of oats. The oat-milk acreage is based on my recipe of one cup of oat groats to four cups of water, which yields about 3½–4 cups of milk. Growing the oats myself lets me replace the soybean area while keeping homemade milk in the plan.
What changed in the acre drawing
The annual crop field is now about 11,670 square feet, including the 10-inch paths. The enlarged field keeps the rest of the planned annual crops in the layout:
- Naked oats: 700 square feet for the Daily Dozen grain requirement, plus about 1,970–2,250 square feet for oat milk
- Hard white winter wheat: 1,250 square feet for the weekly loaf
- Dry beans: about 3,975 square feet, including the 20% cushion
- Other planned crops and pea/barley seed beds
The herb and rhubarb bed remains separate at 60 square feet. The drawing also keeps the house, turnaround, orchard, berries and grapes, well, and septic area in the one-acre concept.
The new crop-field footprint takes up about 0.27 acre. The rest of the acre remains available for the home and the other homestead areas shown in the concept. The drawing is a planning layout, not a surveyed site plan.
This correction makes the garden-only goal clearer: the bean beds are sized around the full-year Daily Dozen target, and the oats now explicitly include enough growing area for homemade milk. The final harvest will depend on actual growing conditions, so I’ll compare the plan with the first seasons of real yields and adjust if needed.
I thought the other plan was too small, and this acknowledged it was even without switching to oatmik. This is much more realistic.
