How Much Food to Feed a Family for a Year — You’ll Be Surprised

Can a Backyard Garden Feed a Family of 4 for a Year? (Complete Plan & Guide)

Ever wondered if it’s possible to grow enough food to feed your entire family—right from your backyard garden? In this detailed guide, I’m breaking down exactly how much carbohydrate-rich staple crops you’d need to grow for four adults over a full year. Whether you’re aiming for complete self-sufficiency or just looking to supplement your food supply, this video provides a practical, step-by-step plan.

We’ll cover essential gardening topics including crop selection, garden layout, managing pests, irrigation systems, storage solutions, and realistic expectations for time and labor. I’ll walk you through exactly how many garden beds you’ll need, which staple crops offer the best yields, and how to keep everything manageable and sustainable. No fluff—just real gardening knowledge and experience you can rely on.

⏱ Timestamps (Jump to Sections):

0:00 – Intro: Growing enough food for your family

0:41 – What is Self-Sufficient Gardening?

1:28 – Setting Realistic Expectations for Homegrown Food

1:57 – How Many Carbs Do You Need for One Year?

3:00 – Critical Gardening Tip: Don’t Rely on One Crop Family

4:05 – Calorie Requirements for a Family of Four Adults

5:12 – Why Monocropping is Dangerous: Corn Borer Pest Example

6:06 – Special Thank You to Our Channel Members

6:44 – How Many Potatoes Should You Grow?

7:42 – How Much Corn to Plant for a Family?

8:05 – Sweet Potato Yield and Planting Guide

8:43 – Growing Sunchokes (Jerusalem Artichokes) for Calories

9:18 – Visualizing the Garden Scale for 4 People

10:48 – Designing Garden Beds and Walkways

11:17 – How to Plan and Layout Your Garden Effectively

12:37 – Bed Spacing Close-Up & Precise Dimensions Explained

13:00 – Real-World Challenges of Growing Your Own Food

13:57 – Pest Control Strategies for Organic Gardens

14:26 – Composting, Soil Management, and Garden Fertility

15:21 – Labor, Time Management, and Seasonal Workflow Tips

16:20 – Potato Storage and Root Cellaring Techniques

17:00 – How to Cure and Store Sweet Potatoes Long-Term

17:26 – Harvesting and Storing Homegrown Corn

17:58 – How to Store and Preserve Sunchokes (Easy Methods)

19:10 – Final Takeaways & Practical Advice for Gardeners

Whether you’re a beginner gardener, seasoned homesteader, or simply looking to become more resilient, you’ll find actionable tips to improve your gardening skills right away. Growing your own food is rewarding, achievable, and empowering—this is the blueprint you’ve been looking for.

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How much food would you actually have to grow to feed a family of four adults for an entire year? It’s something a lot of gardeners talk about, but not many people break it down clearly. Hey there, friends. I’m Andrew. I have a bachelor’s degree in clinical chemistry, and I’ve been gardening for a long time, long enough to learn a few things the hard way. In this video, I’m going to show you exactly how I approach this challenge. No fluff, just practical, real world guidelines that you can actually use whether you’re fully committed to self-sufficiency or trying to grow a little bit more of your own food each year. Let’s dig in. What is self-sufficient gardening? It’s growing enough food on your own to feed your family without having to rely on a grocery store. To break this down clearly, let’s quickly look at nutritional requirements. For simplicity, I categorize these into four groups. Carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, and micronutrients. In today’s video, we’re focusing exclusively on carbohydrate, the main energy source you’ll need to grow to sustain for adults. But if this video gets 500 likes, I’ll put together another video specifically covering how to grow protein sources next. So, hit that like button if you’d like to see that. Before we dive deeper, let’s set some realistic expectations. Even with years of gardening and farming experience, jumping straight into full self-sufficiency isn’t practical for most people, including myself. This is definitely something best tackled in stages. Personally, right now, I’m at the point where I’m growing about 10% of the food that I consume. Each year, I try to increase that percentage, but gradual progress is key. How much carbohydrate-rich foods you need to grow to feed your family for a full year. Let’s talk staple crops. The backbone of any self-sufficient garden or civilization. These are your calorie powerhouses. They store well, they grow reliably, and they keep your family fueled all year long. These crops built civilization. In this video, I’m focusing on reliable high calorie staples like potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, sun chokes, yams, rice, wheat, and rye. When planting your garden, select crops that grow easily in your specific climate and soil. Here in coastal Massachusetts, my top staples are going to be potatoes like red Yukon gold and russetss, sweet potatoes, corn varieties, mostly the popping or cornmeal types. Then there’s sun chokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes. Uh, and as you’ll see, these would function more so as a backup crop. One crucial tip is to never rely on crops from a single plant family. Let’s say you only plant potatoes, red gold russets. They’re all closely related, which means that they all share the same vulnerabilities, and you get one wave of potato beetles or a single disease outbreak could wipe out your entire crop. But by mixing it up and planting tubers like sweet potatoes and sun chokes in addition to the potatoes, each from different plant families, you significantly lower your risk. Here’s a graphic to give you an idea of calories produced per square foot. Throughout this video, I’ll use the standard measurements of garden beds being 30 in wide by 100 ft long. That’s a manageable, practical size. If you’d like to see what crops I’d choose for a different state or a completely different climate, let me know by liking this video and dropping a comment below. I’d love to make that video next. Or maybe the protein one next. We’ll see. Let me know which ones you guys want to see. Let’s break down the calories needed to grow enough stable crops for four adults. The average adult needs about 2,000 calories a day. Now, multiply that by 365 days and you get a big number. That is per year per person. For a family of four, that adds up to about 3 million calories for one year. As a reminder, we’re focusing just on carbohydrates. of that diet, which is about onethird of the total calories. That means we’re aiming to grow a million calories worth of starchy staple crops. To spread the risk and increase resilience, I’m dividing those calories across four different crops. 30% from potatoes, which comes to about 330,000 calories. 30% from corn, again, 330,000 calories. 30% from sweet potatoes and the final 10% from sun chokes at 100,000 calories. This mix helps protect against crop failure by rotating between different plant families, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Take corn for example. A serious pest you might encounter is the corn borer, a moth whose larvae tunnel into the corn stalks, the ears, and the cobs, weakening the plant and drastically reducing the yields. They’re a major threat to crops in the grass family like corn and sometimes sorghum. But the good news, they don’t touch your potatoes. They don’t touch your sweet potatoes or your sun chokes because those crops come from a completely different plant family. So even if your corn gets wiped out in a bad year, the other staples can carry the weight. That’s the beauty of growing diverse calorie dense crops from different families. It adds resilience to your food system and helps you avoid putting all your calories in one basket. Next, we’ll calculate how many standard garden beds you need per crop. Before we keep going though, I just want to take a moment to say thank you. A big warm shout out to our two channel members, Jerry D and Roxy 5. Your support helps keep these videos coming. And to everyone who’s still watching at this point in the video, seriously, thank you. Your viewership means everything to me. If you’re still with me, let’s have some fun. Drop the word favorite in the comments to let me know that you’re still here. Even if you don’t normally comment on videos, it’s super easy to do and honestly, it lights up my day to get those notifications and know that you’re enjoying the content. All right, let’s get back to the garden. So, how does this actually look in the garden? We’ve already split up our calorie needs across four stable crops. Now, let’s break down how many garden beds it would take to grow enough of each one. First up, potatoes. A well-managed 100 ft bed of potatoes can produce around 300 lb of potatoes. And with 358 calories per pound, that adds up to roughly 100,000 calories per bed. To hit our target of just under 300,000 from potatoes, we need about three beds. That’s it. Three beds of spuds and you’ve got onethird of your starch needs covered. Every year I plant first earies like the redskinned white fleshed potatoes weeks before the last frost and harvest it in June. This opens up the bed for a second round of potatoes or possibly corn, possibly doubling the yield of this bed. Next is corn, but not sweet corn. We’re talking about corn grown for grain, like flour or cornmeal. A single bed might give you around 58 pounds of usable dry grain. And corn is incredibly calorie dense. About 16,000 calories per pound. What that means is that one bed will yield nearly 100,000 calories. So again, about three beds gets us to our goal. Now, sweet potatoes. A solid bed can give you around 250 lbs. And each pound car count carries about 380 calories. That’s 100,000 calories per bed, which puts us right in the same ballpark. Three beds of sweet potatoes, and we’re on track. Though, I’ll be honest, with better conditions, I think that this crop can do even more. Sweet potatoes take a really long time to slip. So I would start the process in as early as January to ensure that they can be planted as rooted slips in early to miday. And finally, we have sun chokes. These are super low effort, almost no maintenance once they’re established. A bed can yield 375 lbs, though they’re less calorie dense, about 75 usable calories per pound. That works out to be about 30,000 calories per bed. So to get your 10% share from sun chokes, we’ll need about three and a half beds. These are best left in the ground all winter and harvested when needed or in the spring for replanting or eating in the spring as well. I call that the hungry gap when not a lot of food is ready. So, in total, we’re talking a dozen 30in x 100 ft beds, four staple crops grown in the right ratio can cover a third of a family’s annual caloric needs, all in one space that fits inside of a football end zone. So, now that we’ve crunched the numbers, the next question is, what does that actually look like on the ground? How much space does it take to grow all of this? Let’s take a walk through the layout from the full footprint to individual beds and break down how you could scale this in your own backyard or homestead. This yellow rectangle represents a garden area measuring 100 ft long by 42 ft wide. I placed here over a football field just to give you a sense of size. This isn’t a huge piece of land, but it’s enough to make a serious dent in feeding a family of four. Just remember this is onethird of the needed calories for this family, just the main carbohydrate or energy for their needs. Zooming in a bit, we’ve overlaid two fulllength tractor trailers end to end to represent the 100 ft of length and a school bus to show roughly 40 ft of width. This makes it easier to imagine how this garden would look in real life. It’s long, narrow, and totally manageable for a serious backyard grower or homestead. The scale here on the images I’m about to show you aren’t perfect. These visuals are simply meant to be an aid. Inside that highlighted space, we can fit 12 30-in wide garden beds, each separated by 1 ft walkway. This layout maximizes growing space while still leaving enough room to move around and work comfortably. The total width here is 42 ft, which includes all 12 beds plus the 11 walkways in between. These walkways are not wasted space. In many cases, the roots from nearby plants will occupy the soil space beneath. Now, we divide the garden into four main sections. In the upper left, we’ve planted six half rows of corn in a square formation. This is intentional because corn performs better when they’re planted in blocks rather than in rows, especially for wind pollination. In the upper right quadrant, we’ve planted 6 and 1/2 rows of sun chokes. Both corn and sun chokes grow tall, which is why they they’re placed at the north end of the garden. That way, they won’t cast shade on the rest of the crops. Since in most of the United States, the sun travels primarily across the southern sky. The bottom half of the garden is divided lengthwise. The upper portion is dedicated to three rows of sweet potatoes and the lower portion to three rows of potatoes. These crops are low growing and won’t interfere with light exposure for anything else in the plot. The sweet potatoes will grow vines in every direction and could curb the growth to towards the potatoes, but let them crawl through the corn and sun chokes. I’ve been experimenting for a few seasons now planting beans and squash amongst the corn. That is an option, but we won’t be talking about that more in this video. Check out this video up here on the three sisters planting method if you want to learn more. Zooming in even further. Here’s what the bed spacing looks like up close. Each bed is 30 in wide with a 12-in walkway between. Within the corn section, plants are spaced nine inches apart with rows spaced at 24 in. This gives each plant enough room to reach its max potential, ensures good air circulation, and keeps the garden efficient and productive. Growing enough food for your family isn’t just about numbers on paper. It comes with realworld challenges. From watering and pest pressure to compost storage and time management, there’s a lot that goes into making self-sufficient garden actually work. Let’s walk through what you’ll want to plan for. First up is irrigation. Watering can become a full-time job without the right setup. The best system I found, hands down, is drip irrigation. I recommend laying down two to three lines of drip tape per bed, depending on your space. If you’re running everything at once, you’ll need strong water pressure, which most standard city water lines can’t handle. So, split it up. For example, rows 1 through 4 at 7:00 a.m. and rows 5 through 8 at 8:00 a.m. and so on. Automating this with timers makes massive difference, especially during dry spells. When it comes to pest control, I found that the best defense is a healthy plant in healthy soil. Nutrient-dense, well-airrated beds create plants that are naturally more resilient to both pests and disease. That said, no garden is immune. Stay observant. Check under the leaves, watch for signs of stress, and intervene if you need to. But don’t stress it. It’s not perfect. Small losses are just a part of the process. Fertility, compost, and soil management. This is the foundation of everything. For new beds, start by laying down a landscape tarp to suppress existing grass and weeds. After a few weeks, cover that area with about 4 in of highquality compost and you’re ready to plant directly into it. If you want to be even more careful, lay it out all winter long. In every following year, top up your beds with about 2 in of compost to replenish the nutrients. You can also add slowrelease organic fertilizers like feathermeal, bone meal, or micronutrient blends. Just follow the directions on the label. I’ve linked some of the pro products that I use down in the description. And if you want to go deeper into this topic, check out the video linked at the end of this video or head over to the garden update playlist. I cover it all in detail. Finally, let’s talk about time in labor. This scale of gardening isn’t a daily grind, but there’s key moments in the season where everyone needs to pitch in. Planting, harvesting, and preserving food all happen in waves and they require focused effort. If you’re using clean compost, the weeding weeding burden is minimal. But preserving food, freezing, canning, drying, that’s where the real work comes in. It’s 100% doable, but don’t underestimate the time that it takes to get it all done. Growing the food is only half the story. The other half is keeping it from going to waste. That’s where good storage and preservation comes in. Whether you’re root sellering, canning, dehydrating, or freezing, how you store your harvest has a big impact on what you grow and how much space you’ll need. Let’s look at how to match your storage methods for these four crops that we’ve just covered. Rootering for potatoes. Rootering is hands down the best method for storing potatoes. Make sure you choose russetss for these. Russets are best for storage. These crops thrive in cool, dark, humid conditions and can last for months without refrigeration. If you’ve only got a basement, insulated garage, or even a buried cooler, you’ve got root seller potential. But from my experience, a typical closet or basement will not do. A dedicated specialbuilt root seller is essential. Curing for long-term storage. Now, now this is going to be sweet potatoes. They’re a little bit different. They need to be cured first, kept warm and humid for about 7 to 10 days after harvest. After curing, they’ll store for several months in a dry, dark, slightly warmer spot than typical root cellar conditions. Think like 55 to 60 Fahrenheit. A standard residential basement has worked well for me here. Okay. For corn, if you’re growing it for grain like popcorn or cornmeal, you’ll want to dry it fully on the stock, then harvest, husk, and shell it. Storeed in airtight containers. Dried corn keeps for a year or more on any old shelf. The best part, none of these crops require freezing, canning, or electricity. That makes them ideal for a self-sufficient setup, especially if you’re focused on long-term lowmaintenance storage with minimal inputs. Now, overwintering, one thing that stands out about sun chokes is their ability to self-preserve right in the ground. If you’re in a climate where the ground doesn’t freeze solid, you can leave them in place all winter and simply harvest as needed. It’s one of the easiest, most loweffort ways to store a crop. No digging, no bins, no prep. But if you do need to harvest them at all at once, whether you’re cleaning a bed or worried about deep frosts, you’ve still got options. Sun chokes can be stored shortterm in a root cellar or sliced and dried for longer shelf life. Drying concentrates their earthy flavor and inulin content, making them great for use in soups, stews, or even ground into flour for baking. Just slice them thin, dry them fully in a dehydrator or an oven, and store them airtight in a cool, dry place. Whether left in the soil or preserved in jars, sun chokes offer one of the most forgiving and flexible storage profiles in the garden, making them an underrated gem for any self-sufficiency plant. And it’s an added bonus that they’re native to where I live. All right, let’s bring this all together. The big takeaway here is start with a realistic goal. Focus on calorie dense staples that store well and plan your garden space around what you’ll actually use and have the ability to preserve. Don’t let the scale of the numbers overwhelm you. You don’t have to grow everything at once. Start with one or two staple crops and build from there. Maybe this year it’s potatoes and corn. Next year you’ll add sweet potatoes or sun chokes. Maybe it’s all of those four pro four crops in a single bed. Remember, self-sufficiency is a process, not a one-season goal. I’ve been gardening for years, and I’m still learning and scaling bit by bit. The key is consistency. Make a plan, grow what you can, and let each season teach you something new. I’d love to hear from you. Have you tried growing enough food for your family? what’s worked for you and what’s been a challenge. Drop a comment below and just type favorite if you’ve made it to this point. Even if you don’t usually comment, it genuinely makes my day when those notification notifications show up. If you want to if you want a deeper dive, check out the garden update playlist at the end of this video. I’ve also got a seed giveaway going on for members and behindthe-scenes content every week and early access to videos each week. Thank you so much for walking for walking. I’m tired. I guess the sun has set. Thanks so much for watching. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and I’ll see you in the next