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Plant for a Year’s Worth of Food

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Skip the seed-packet guesswork — there’s an actual formula for how much to plant if you want your garden to feed your family for 12 months straight.

Melissa K. Norris, a fifth-generation homesteader and author, has built a following on exactly this problem: gardeners who plant with enthusiasm every spring but never grow enough of anything to actually stop buying groceries. In her guide and video “How Much to Plant Per Person for a Year’s Worth of Food,” Norris lays out a three-step math formula that replaces generic seed-packet charts with numbers pulled straight from your own kitchen. It’s the same system detailed in her book The Family Garden Plan.

• Norris’s formula: track weekly household consumption of a crop, multiply by 52 for annual need, then divide by average yield per plant to get your exact plant count.
• Her family-of-four onion example: eating 3 to 4 onions a week adds up to 40-60 pounds a year, requiring 200 to 250 onion sets — all fitting into just two 12-inch rows spaced 4 to 6 inches apart.
• She stresses planting far higher volumes for crops meant for canning, freezing, or root-cellaring than for crops eaten fresh off the vine.

The Three-Step Formula

Norris’s method starts with an audit, not a seed catalog. Step one is tracking what a household actually eats in an average week — not what a chart says a “typical” family should eat. Step two multiplies that weekly number by 52 to get the true annual requirement. Step three divides that annual total by how much a single plant of that crop yields, which produces the actual number of plants, sets, or seedlings to put in the ground.

It sounds simple, but Norris argues it’s the step most home gardeners skip entirely, which is why so many end up with three tomato plants that produce way more than they can eat while running out of onions by February.

The Onion Math

Norris walks through the formula using onions as her baseline crop for a family of four. If that household eats roughly 3 to 4 onions a week, the annual need comes out to 40 to 60 pounds of onions. Because each onion plant produces just one bulb, meeting that demand takes 200 to 250 onion sets or seedlings.

Eating 3 to 4 onions a week works out to 40 to 60 pounds needed for the year — which means planting 200 to 250 onion sets, since each plant gives you exactly one bulb.

Despite that volume, the space requirement is modest: the entire year’s onion supply fits into two standard garden rows, spaced 4 to 6 inches apart within 12-inch rows. That’s the part of the formula Norris says surprises people most — the math sounds intimidating until you see how compact the actual planting footprint is.

Planning For Storage, Not Just Fresh Eating

Norris draws a hard line between crops eaten fresh and crops meant to carry a family through winter. Staples destined for canning, freezing, or root-cellaring — tomatoes, green beans, root vegetables — require significantly higher planting volumes than the same crop grown just for fresh summer eating. A household snacking on a few tomatoes a week needs far less than one trying to can enough sauce to last until next August.

Variety selection matters just as much as quantity in her framework. She points gardeners toward long-storage varieties — storage onions rather than sweet salad onions, winter squash bred to hold for months rather than summer squash that spoils in days — and toward matching day-length and climate requirements to the grower’s actual region. Gardeners experimenting with space-efficient crops for this kind of long-term planning might also look at how to grow raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries in containers, another approach to squeezing serious yield out of limited square footage.

Auditing The Pantry Before The Seed Order

The last piece of Norris’s system is less about math and more about honesty: know what your family actually eats before you plant it. She stresses auditing pantry consumption so garden space doesn’t get wasted on crops nobody in the household likes, and prioritizing high-yield staples that make a visible dent in the grocery bill instead of filling rows with novelty crops. For anyone converting unused yard space into that kind of production garden, the groundwork looks a lot like the process covered in turning a lawn into a vegetable garden — get the beds right first, then let the consumption math decide what goes in them.

Run Norris’s formula against your own kitchen and the numbers get specific fast — not “plant more onions,” but plant 200 to 250 of them, in two rows, because that’s what 3 to 4 onions a week for a family of four actually costs over 52 weeks.