I collect a lot of data as part of this RED Gardens Project, I keep track of all of the
yields of everything that I harvest, and all of the time that I put into each of the gardens
doing all of the various tasks.
I also keep track of a lot of qualitative information, about how the plants grew, about
pest and disease pressures and about the weather.
All of this information is very useful to move around biases and preconceptions, and
to challenge the assumptions that I made about growing vegetables in this climate.
It’s in the details of all this information that I can best tease out the differences
between all of the various methods that I am trialing.
But it was in a search for the broader information, the wide view, that led me to want to develop
this project in the first place.
I have been fascinated by the questions of how much food could I grow?
Or, how much land do I need to provide all of our vegetables?
Or, how productive can a vegetable garden really be in this climate.
And I began to feel that having realistic answers to these questions was a key component
of making the argument that growing your own food was an important and really useful thing to do.
I’m currently managing seven family scale gardens, each one about 100 square meters
or 1000 square feet, and of these seven, five of them are broadly comparable, because they’re
all growing a range of different vegetables.
Four of these are outside and one is under the cover of a polytunnel.
An additional garden is growing a much more restricted range of vegetables, and another
garden is focused more on perennial plants.
I harvested a total of 514 kg of vegetables from the Intensive Garden in the 2017 season.
This is a lot of food from a garden that size, and this method of gardening has developed quite well.
I did lose some crops to slugs, and rats seemed to have eaten a lot of my peas and beans from this garden.
I also could have sown a lot more crops in the early and late part of the season.
So, while this past season has been quite good, I’m hoping that next year will be even better.
In comparison, I was only able to harvest 372 kg of vegetables out of the Extensive
Garden in the same season.
Some of this reduced yield can be explained by the different philosophy of trying to produce
the highest quality crops rather than the greatest yield.
There was also problems with the squash crop which didn’t produce, and I had a lot of
problems with slugs in my potatoes, and some of my experiments with intercropping didn’t
work out so well.
So, while 2017 was a reasonable harvest, I’m hoping to be able to get a lot more out of this garden in 2018.
I was only able to harvest 345 kg of vegetables out of the No-Dig Garden in this past season.
This was quite disappointing, and the main reason was that I was transitioning from one
no-dig method to another no-dig method, but didn’t have enough compost to be able to
do the job properly.
So, while I did harvest a lot of food, I really need to get my act together, before I can
do any realistic comparison between this gardening method and any of the other gardens.
I was able to harvest 476 kg of vegetables from the Polyculture Garden in this past season,
which is pretty close to the yield of the Intensive Garden, and I’m quite pleased
with that as I’ve struggled with this gardening method in the past.
There’s still some work to do on building up the soil fertility, and my skills at harvesting
and intercropping can definitely be improved, so I am expecting significantly higher yields
in the coming years.
The Simple Garden produced 540 kg of vegetables last year, but it's not really fair to compare
it to the other gardens because I’m only growing four high yielding crops.
Having said that, this is a really new garden, and the potato crops went in very late, and
I haven’t really been able to work on building up the soil fertility yet.
So, I’m intrigued by how much higher the yields from this Simple Gardening method can get.
The Polytunnel Garden produced way more than the other gardens, with 939 kg of vegetables
harvested in a single season.
That’s almost double the yield, simply by growing under a sheet of plastic.
I’m still growing a wide range of different vegetables, but have been able to add in cucumbers
and tomatoes that I can’t grow outside.
I think it’s possible to get more than 1000 kg out of a garden like this, especially if
I grow more overwintering crops, and manage some of the watering and fertility issues
that I’ve experienced over the last few seasons.
I can’t really compare the results of the Perennial Garden with any of the other gardens,
not yet anyways.
But it will be interesting to see how they compare, once the existing plants become more
established, and I’m able to focus on diversifying the range of crops that I’m growing in this garden.
Looking at all the gardens again, we can see that the Intensive Garden, the Polyculture
Garden, and the Simple Garden all produced good yields and are broadly comparable.
The Extensive Garden and the No-Dig Garden were more disappointing, and could definitely
be improved, especially the No-Dig Garden.
And the Polytunnel Garden is in a league of its own.
But looking at all of the outside gardens, using a variety of different methods, we see
that the average is about 450 kg or close to 1000 pounds.
And if I did my job properly, I could definitely see this rising to almost 500 kg on average
or perhaps even more.
This translates to 5 kg/m2 or about a pound per square foot, and more if you exclude the
paths from within the garden.
So now when I’m asked how much food can be grown, I generally say about 5 kg/m2, in
this climate at least.
So, if you had a bed that was 10 m2 in your back garden, you could expect to get about
50 kg of mixed vegetables from it in a season, or 100 lbs from 100 ft2 of bed.
You could probably grow a lot more if you were in a better climate, or had more time
to focus in the garden, or grew only higher yielding crops.
And you could probably get a lot less if you had poor quality soil, or if there was water
stresses in your area, or if you didn’t have enough skills or decided to grow a lot
of peas instead.
And you could probably double that if you decided to grow in the shelter of a poytunnel
or in a greenhouse.
But 5 kg/m2 or 1 lb/ft2 are nice round numbers that are easy to work with and easy to remember.
They’re equivalent to about 50 tonnes per hectare or 22 tons per acre, which are fairly good yields.
Next season, I hope to be able to harvest 6 kg/m2 on average from all of these gardens,
but I do need to accept that very rarely do we get everything right.
So, for now, 5 kg/m2 is a useful number, it's a good place to start at least.
And the reason for collecting all of this data is not to prove how good of a gardener
I can become, but to help other people grow more of their own food.
That’s the purpose of this project, and that’s the purpose of this YouTube channel.
We’ve been experiencing some crazy weather over the last day or two as I’ve tried to
get this video together.
There’s a cold blast of arctic air that’s sweeping over Europe at the moment, and it
looks like it’s going to get even worse.
This is probably going to delay the start of the growing season for at least another
couple of weeks.
But that gives me a chance to get a couple more videos out, including one where I talk
about how much time I spend working on each of the gardens.
So, keep your eye out for that, and if you like the work that I do, please consider becoming
a patron on my Patreon Page.
It also really helps if you like, share and subscribe, but most importantly, thanks for watching.