The Field Calculators → Growing
Growing
The February Pencil
How much ground you actually need to feed the people at your table — the one piece of arithmetic that decides the whole season.
Result
People to feed4
Days of the year you want to eat from it365
Square feet per person per day12
Add for paths and edges25 %
Planted bed area
17,520 sq ft
Actual growing beds, not counting paths.
Total garden footprint
21,900 sq ft
About 148 ft × 148 ft, or 0.50 acre.
Beds, if you build 4 ft × 25 ft
175.2 beds
Weeding, honestly
175 hrs/season
About one hour per 100 sq ft per season, and July is when it's decided.
What this will not do
- 12 sq ft per person per day is a planning figure, not a promise. It assumes ordinary soil, ordinary weather and ordinary skill. Your own harvest log beats it after two seasons — that's the whole point of keeping one.
- This counts *growing* food. It does not count calories: a garden of greens and tomatoes is mostly water. If you're planning to actually live on it, run the winter calorie arithmetic too.
- The number people get wrong is days. Eating from the garden 365 days a year means storage — a cellar, a freezer, jars — not a bigger garden.
The full build and the reasoning are in Chapter 16 of the guide.