[Community_garden] 10,000 pounds of food on 1/10 Acre

[yarrow at sfo.com]

At 6:16 PM -0800 1/17/08, Don Boekelheide wrote:
....>My second is biological. That's about 25 lbs out of a little 
square bed, 3 ft 3 in x 3 ft 3 in (more or less 10 ft2). Might work - 
if the garden had no paths and was nothing but production.....

Don, I agree with you about the supersizing mania.

But 25 lbs. per tomato plant (with one plant in that 3x3 bed) seems 
routine to me. A couple years ago, from one plant each I harvested 
261 Early Girls (even if they were only 3 oz. each, that's 49 
pounds), 1366 Galinas (at half an ounce each, 42 pounds), 389 Black 
Plum (at 1 ounce each, 24 lbs.), 326 Purple Calabash (at 2 ounces 
each, 40 lbs,), 54 Aunt Ruby's German Green (some were a pound, some 
were 4 oz, so say 6 oz each, 20 lbs.). I didn't weigh them, and I've 
probably underestimated the average weight. All of this was in a 
continuously planted community garden plot fertilized only with 
compost and heavily mulched. After a couple years of generously 
adding homemade compost, I don't even bother with snail/slug control 
anymore, so that container of Sluggo I bought last year on sale is 
still full.

I haven't weighed anything else, either, but I'd guess anyone who's 
been gardening a few years and who paid attention to the annual 
yields would be surprised at the total.

Choosing varieties that you like and that do well in your area has a 
lot to do with getting big yields. Some years, a few tomato plants 
hardly produce, or taste so bad they get pulled early, or the 
squirrels take a bite of every single one before it has a chance to 
get ripe. Season extenders (walls-o-water) can help, though here 
they've pushed harvests only a couple weeks or so earlier.

I grow lots of kale -- at least 6 varieties and several plants of 
each, mostly in part shade. In the winter, my favorite is walking 
kale, which needs no care and is not bothered by any pests. I can 
harvest a grocery bagful every couple weeks from one plant. In past 
years I've also harvested a lot of broccoli leaves from the 
5-ft.-high Purple Sprouting Broccoli plants, but this year the kales 
have been so productive that I haven't gotten around to eating many 
broccoli leaves.

The sunniest part of my plot is for flowers and herbs. (The crocuses 
are coming  up!)

A garden on one of the local organic garden tours had a few no-care, 
high-production plants, because the gardener was a new dad and had no 
time to spend in the garden. So he had perennial walking kale plants 
in the heavily mulched suburban front yard, a large self-seeding 
chard patch in the back yard, and fava beans growing as foundation 
plants in front of the house.