I've loved growing plants for years, but in 2021 I started keeping very detailed records of what I grew and how much I harvested. However, there have been some problems with the data, such as inconsistency and incompleteness. The way I've recorded the data has varied a lot, from scribbling notes on scraps of paper to using digital notes to entering structured data in a form. Another, more mundane problem that is also much harder to fix is that it's hard to resist snacking on fresh fruits or vegetables while walking around the garden. This leads to underreporting of anything that can be eaten with a bite or two.

Tracking data like this is not only fun for me, it helps me to answer various questions that pop into my head. Recently, I was wondering how close I am to only living off food I grow myself. While this is not something I aim for, it provides a good sense of the scale of hobby food production. Following Vaclav Smil's approach of reasoning about these questions in terms of energetic quantities, I decided to use the number of ingested vs produced calories as a proxy. Since I already track the weight of my harvests I can easily calculate the calories of my harvest. Of course there are significant seasonality effects, but assuming perfect storage of my harvest this should provide a good approximation. According to my tracking I consume on average at least 500 kcal more per day than the average sedentary male, so for me the minimum number of calories I need to ingest each day is 3000. Converting the harvests into calories is straightforward in theory, but estimates of caloric content for various vegetables can vary a lot depending on the source of the data. I also expect that the weather conditions greatly influence the caloric content in certain vegetables, and specially fruits, since the sugar content highly depends on high enough temperatures to develop through ripening.

These disclaimers aside, in 2021 I grew 24 kg of produce, the majority of that tomatoes, pumpkin, squash and broccoli. However this only resulted in 5,456 kcal which is equivalent to sustaining myself for 1.81 days. In mid 2022 I was able to acquire some additional growing space, which increased the production to 72 kg of produce. The biggest contributors to that were 7 kg of potatoes since they are both high yielding and relatively high in caloric density. Even though I tripled my production that still amounts to only sustaining myself for 8.81 days. In 2023 I expanded the growing space with a new bed but focused a lot more on growing low-maintaince staple crops like pumpkins, carrots and parsnip. Generally it was a really bad year for tomatos with a really low yield of 9 kg (-7 kg) and that with way more plants than the previous year. In the end it was about 101 kg of produce, which ends up at 38,669 kcal, or 12.88 days.