Even though it's a little cheaper to buy all of our seeds at once, I actually plan on two orders per year --- one in the winter for the main season and one in early summer for the fall and winter garden.  This year, I spent $86 on the spring order and I spent $27 last summer on the fall order.  Keep in mind that I do buy from a relatively expensive company (Johnny's) and I buy big packages of many seeds since we grow all of our own vegetables and since I plant heavily in cold soil instead of starting many seeds inside.  On the other side of the equation, I do save a lot of our own seeds and I am sometimes able to eke out last year's packet for another year even for types of vegetable seeds we don't save.  Finally, this calculation doesn't include cover crop seeds, which probably come to another $25 to $50 per year.

To answer your second question --- I plan our garden by area, not by number of plants.  For example, I'll put in 8 beds of broccoli this spring and the same amount again in the fall.  Each bed is roughly 15 to 20 square feet, and I plant using a high-density system, so that would be about 80 broccoli plants for the spring planting and another 80 plants for fall.  As you can see in the table below, since I start most of our spring broccoli plants outside under quick hoops where germination isn't as perfect as inside on a heating pad, I went ahead and bought 1,000 broccoli seeds this year so I'd be sure to have plenty for both spring and fall plantings.  My rule of thumb is to have at least two or three times as many seeds as I need so I can plant heavily and can replant if the first set doesn't come up, gets scratched up by Huckleberry, or gets killed by a freak weather event.  It's always cheaper to buy the next size up than to rush in an extra seed order and pay an extra round of shipping for one package of seeds.

Crop	Spring/Summer Beds	Fall Beds	Seeds ordered
Arugula	1		Saved
Basil	1		Packet
Beans, Green	5 (Succession planted)		Saved
Beans, Mung	2		Saved
Broccoli	8	8	1,000 seeds
Cabbage	4	2	1,000 seeds
Brussels Sprouts		8	(Will order in fall)
Carrots	2	6	5,000 seeds
Corn, Sweet	17 (Succession planted)		1,000 seeds
Cucumbers	6 (Succession planted)		Saved/leftover from last year
Garlic		13	Saved
Kale		12 (Succession planted)	Saved
Lettuce	4 (Succession planted)	10 (Succession planted)	1/4 pound (I plant very heavily so we can harvest lots of  baby leaves)
Mustard		4	Leftover from last year
Okra	2		Saved
Onions	10 (These are bulbing onions from seed.  In addition, I have a bed of perennial Egyptian onions for greens.)	3 (Potato onions)	1,000 seeds.  (In addition, potato onions are planted from divided sets.)
Parsley	3		Packet
Peas, Sugar Snap	4	4	Leftover from last year
Peppers	2		Packet
Poppies, Breadseed	2		Saved
Squash, Butternut	4		Saved
Squash, Summer	8 (Succession planted)		Saved
Strawberries	4 (The goal is to rotate our entire planting every three years, so I remove four beds and plant four new ones every year.)		Started from rooted runners in other beds
Sweet Potatoes	4		I start my own slips from saved tubers.
Swiss Chard	1		Saved
Tatsoi		1	(Will order in fall)
Tokyo Bekana		3	(Will order in fall)
Tomatoes	15 (This is 30 plants)		Saved
Watermelon	4		Saved

I hope that helps you get a handle on how much of an area to plant and how many seeds to buy for those of you planning big gardens this year.  The table above is geared toward Mark's and my tastes, of course, so I don't recommend that anyone precisely mimic what we do.  Total acreage (including small perennials not mentioned here, extensive areas set aside for cover crops, and aisles) comes to about a quarter of an acre, and the biggest cost for that vegetable garden is the straw we splurge on every year for mulch.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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