A simple guide of how much produce to store for a truly self-sufficient winter, from one of my favorite books, Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables by Mike and Nancy Bubel
based on a family size of four:- Beets: 1-2 bushels
- Carrots: 2-3 bushels
- Cabbage: about 30 heads
- Brussels sprouts: about 10-15 plants in garden
- Chinese cabbage: 20-30 heads
- Celery: 10-20 stalks
- Turnips or rutabagas: about 1 bushel of each
- Potatoes: 6-14 bushels
- Sweet potatoes: 2 bushels
- Endive: 10-20 plants for storage, more in the row for late fall
- Squash and pumpkins: 30-40
- Onions: 1-2 bushels
- Parsnips: 1-2 bushels
- Salsify: 1/2-1 bushel
- Leeks: 15-40 plants
- Celeriac: 1/2-1 bushel
- Kale: 50-100 foot row
- Winter radishes: 1/2-1 bushel
- Kohlrabi: 1/2-1 bushel
- Garlic: as desired; a 25 foot wide row planted 4 cloves across should be plenty. Yield would be approximately 8 pounds.
Now some of these your family might not like so I wouldn't grow and store those, but if you only wanted the basics of oh, say, things like potatoes, carrots and onions, then I would definately store more of those.
Keep in mind though, that this list does not include items such as wheat, rice, flour and sugar etc that you should also be storing.
So now that I know amounts of produce I should be storing, I need to determine how much space that will require. I do have a cold storage room currently but I'm thinking the garden shed my cute hubby wants to build in the backyard might just happen to get a real live root cellar underneath it--he just doesn't know that yet!
4 comments:
Ohhh Great post - - again. Nothing like figures for us to realize where we need to head. That is more than I had realized!
Thanks! This is kind of my little spot to start gathering all this information together. I'm glad you're finding it useful too!
Wow! Those numbers seem like a lot. I'll have to start tracking what we eat per month and maybe figure that for our family of 4. I can't believe that much! But then, maybe we should eat more veggies...Thanks for posting this. It gets me thinking.
Lisa in MN
It does seem a lot doesn't it? I'm just using it as a guide too. Not sure how accurate those numbers are anyway. But I guess it would be better to have more food than not enough food if that was all you had to live off of.
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