Vegetables and the Hundred Square Metres

Vegetables are the part of a subsistence system everybody wants to plan first and the part that feeds the fewest calories. Get the proportion right and the garden is a joy. Get it wrong and the garden eats the ground the grain needed.

Alik Pelman puts vegetables at about 100 square metres per person per year, and adds that this is for people who eat a lot. That is a little over a thousand square feet, roughly 11 percent of a 10,000 square foot holding. His own vegetable garden is 140 square metres for one person, about 40 varieties, a little more than the hundred because the extra is margin and variety. State those figures as his account, from his interviews and the 2024 paper, not as an independently verified standard.

What vegetables are for

Vegetables are micronutrients and appetite. They supply vitamins, minerals and the thing that makes a dinner worth eating, and in Pelman's table they carry about 280 of the 2,000 kilocalories, roughly 14 percent, plus 30 of the 105 grams of protein a day. They do not carry the calories. The grain and the legume and the oil carry the calories, and that is why the garden is a quarter of the farm and not the whole of it.

The value of the garden is breadth. Pelman grows about 40 varieties, roughly 25 in the winter and 15 in the summer, which spreads the household's micronutrients across many small crops so that no single failure takes the vitamins with it. The diversity is the design, and it is why the garden is worth the daily attention even though it carries the smallest budget.

The 100 square metres, laid out

The garden goes nearest the house and the water, because it is visited most and it is the only irrigated ground. On 10,000 square feet, give one person 100 square metres, about 1,100 square feet, and give the household a margin beyond that.

Divide it into four quarters. Pelman prepares and plants one quarter, about 35 square metres, and does that eight times a year, so one quarter comes out as the next goes in, and the garden feeds the kitchen all year. He grows vegetables seasonally, in the open, and his paper notes that this avoids the polytunnels, shading nets and other structures that summer vegetables would otherwise demand. The garden is a low structure, open ground operation, which keeps the cost and the labour down.

Then rotate. Run a long rotation, eight or nine years, so that any plant family returns to the same quarter only every ninth year. That long cycle is what keeps the pests and the soil diseases from building up in a garden that is worked this intensively.

Water only the garden. Pelman irrigates his 140 square metres in the dry months from March to October and uses about 50 cubic metres of water a year, while the rainfed staples take none. Put the garden where the water is easy to reach, store water high if the ground allows, and let gravity do the carrying.

Seed and seedling

Pelman gets about one third of his garden from purchased seedlings, one third from purchased seed and one third from seed collected on site. The saved third is the part that matters for autonomy, and it grows year by year. As the seed you save adapts to your own ground, the garden becomes less dependent on the shop and the crop becomes your crop. Save the seed from the plants that did best in the worst conditions, and the garden improves without any new input.