How much do you plant?

I'm reading a really inspiring book at the moment called 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle' by Barbara Kingsolver. I picked it up randomly and it's taking my addled brain a long time but it's a really interesting read. It's about her family's move to the country and their aim to grow or locally purchase everything they ate for a year. It's got my thinking about my own gardening...which is pretty pathetic in comparison. I have dreams of managing to at least grow all the veges and most of the fruit that we eat.

So my question is, how do you decide how many plants of each thing to put in? Do you calculate it based on family members? Do you think about storing things in some form over winter or do you just eat what you pick at the time?

Hmmm, more than one question...sorry.

I need to get better at using seeds. I did alright last year with a few things but ran out of space for them really. I'm also not good at successive planting - I need to be more organised I think.

I already have strawberries, blueberries, peaches, cape gooseberries, broad beans, lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli and cabbage in. I'm also putting in potatoes (for the first time), pumpkin, zucchini and cucumber. My gardening is total trial and error but I'm really enjoying being able to eat things straight from the garden!

I do my seeds in groups of 4 different varieties of veg. Then do that twice a week. So say I do lettuce, spinach beans and peas and I plant a punnet of each

Then 3 days later I do another 4 veg

Then week 2 I do 4 more of different things.

And do that in cycles for the successive gorwing things.

However things like my zuchini (that just came up), tomatoes and other things I dont do successive sowing.

I do it all in one go but if it gets time consuming then I just do a couple of punnets a day.

Kids help out (although I must say this year Andrew is a lot better, last year he would throw the sand out to get to the seeds to give it back to me).

Once certain things get bigger I transplant them. (like the peppers, tomatoes and chillies). Just transplanted 58 of quite a huge variety of tomatoes. (decided this year I aint planting more. I was aiming for a hundred. but the raised gardens is not all gonna be ready in time). Last year we had 16 or so of just hybrid ones and I just made 6 batches of tomatoe sauce extra the rest was consume during the summer. So want to bottle everything extra this year so I dont have to buy through the year. Cant stand the taste of the store bought things now.

What things do you choose do freeze SMS? I froze spinach, tomatoes and a tomato sauce to use with pasta etc last year. I guess this year I could freeze broad beans and hopefully runner beans if I have enough though both are a bit of an experiment!

Pretty much what T Rex said

I also pureed fruits and freeze and add to muffins etc or even into DDs breakfast.