What is the minimum amount of garden space required to sustain one person?

Question

what would you plant?

Answer 1

I was told that in the middle ages one acre was defined as the amount of land one person needed to grow food for themselves. Of course, this was using middle ages agriculture techniques. These days, with permaculture techniques, it would be less than that. But I don't know. Give me half an acre.

Answer 2

16 square feet. Just about anything and everything.

Answer 3

It doesn't take a lot.  I have a 40 foot by 80 foot garden and grow all the vegetables our 2 person family needs.  In it, I have 14 kinds of dried beans (great for protein), lots of tomatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, asparagus, turnips, rutabegas, lettuce, arugula, spinach, mustard greens, sweet corn, lots of potatoes (for starch), summer squash, lots of strawberries, onions, garlic, soybeans, green beans, brussels sprouts.  In addition, I have a separate 20 foot by 20 foot plot for field corn that supplies dried corn for grinding into corn meal.  The only food I have to buy is wheat, oats, oil, and spices.  But I've read that a 50 foot by 50 foot plot of sunflowers would be enough to provide oil for the year, and it wouldn't take much more to grow wheat and oats.  And this is in a cold climate in the Northeast US--it should probably take less room with more variety in a warmer climate.

Answer 4

Depends on what you want to grow and how you want to grow it. Generally though, I would say a 1/8th of an acre give or take.

Answer 5

i would recommend at least a quarter of an acre and would plant root veg fruit bushes salads and some herbs remember to add plenty of organic matter into the soil before planting

Answer 6

If you're going to completely sustain yourself off that land, I'd say one-quarter acre. If you want to plant fruit trees (for apples, pears, peaches, etc) you'll need more space (and patience-  they take a while to produce fruit.) In my garden, I planted tomatos, carrots, bell peppers, and lettuce, but you can grow lots of other tasty stuff like onions, garlic, eggplant, etc.

Answer 7

the most intense kind of planting one can do utilising all space

and thinking in cubic terms rather than just horizontally is Permaculture

Everything dpends on your climate

and we can already grow a lot in a back yard

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

on this page are more answers

http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_r...