Well, here we go! Outside of gardening, programming is one of my hobbies. I love numbers and data. If one looks hard enough, they can find all kinds of data related to gardening. While one can find out a suggestion for how many plants to sow per person, fresh and putting by, there exists a chunk more!

Data is available for the “average” amount of production per 100 feet. Data is available for the “average” amount required per canned produce. Data is available for recommended plant spacing. Data is available for recommended planting dates. And on and on.

Well, I know how much and how often we eat certain items. My line of thinking is that there has to be a better way of matching what we eat to the amount that we plant. First off, one must consider the word “average”. Nothing is written in stone and results will vary – sometimes significantly! Still, there has to be a baseline for attempting this.

Taking all of this into consideration, I’m building a calculator based on this data. I intend to be able to enter the number of “cans”, quart or pints, that I wish to put in the pantry and get an idea of how much that I need to plant. I’m still deciding on which language I want to use, which database I want to use and so forth, but the output will end up looking similar to https://pantryplanting.com/cgi-bin/howmuch

It currently defaults to one quart of pole type green beans … but this is where it is heading. If I want to have one quart of green beans available per week, I’ll enter 52 quarts. The result will inform me of the “average” amount required to achieve that goal. I’ll know how much space that it will take as well as how many seeds to have on hand.

The garden is still going but the days are getting shorter. During my down time this winter, I’ll build this calculator on out and will use it for the 2023 garden. So hang around – lots of experiments and experience to be shared! It is gardening and “next year” will be better eh? We learned a lot this year, and sometimes experience gives us a few things that we did not care to know … but “next year!” 😉