Australia: Growing Enough Veggies to Feed Yourself Depends on These 3 Things
In a medium-yield garden, 72% of lawn on a typical block would need converting to produce enough vegetables to feed a household – equating to 67m².
By Isobel Violet Hume, Matthias Salomon and Timothy Cavagnaro
LifeHacker
June 14, 2022
Excerpt:
Research out of Adelaide, which surveyed about 30 home gardeners, found yields per square metre ranged from 0.24kg to 16.07kg per year. This suggests a high rate of variability in home garden productivity – notwithstanding the fact people grow different crops.
Not all of us have green thumbs and in some cases, your veggie patch might not yield as much as you hoped.
Perhaps you gave it too much or too little water. Maybe you didn’t have time to pull out weeds or harvest produce. Pests and fungus might have struck down your crop. You may have planted the wrong seeds at the wrong time or just have poor soil.
Our research suggests low-yield gardens would need 1,407m² of converted lawn to meet the vegetable needs of a household. However, less than 0.5% of properties in the analysed Adelaide sites had so much land. So to reach self-sufficiency in urban agriculture environments, medium to high yields are preferred.
Skilled gardeners with high yields will need much less land. Given the space constraints in cities, upskilling gardeners is important to maximising production.
