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Plants That Produce The Most Food

High Yield Fruits and Vegetables

By Aaron ThompsonPublished about a year ago Updated about a year ago 13 min read
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Plants That Produce The Most Food
Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

The best thing about gardening is the harvest at the end. Well maybe eating it is, but the satisfaction of filling a basket or bag of fresh, delicious fruits and veggies that you grew with your own hands is pretty spectacular.

You grow a garden to produce food, but what plants produce the highest yield? Tomatoes, potatoes, summer squash, leafy greens, pole beans, peas, and many root vegetables can produce abundant crops for you and your family. All garden plants provide food, but these plants produce the most food per season.

With a small initial investment, most times less than $100, you can provide food for yourself and your family for many months. With rising food costs, shortages, and much more uncertainty in today’s world, growing a garden is becoming a necessity for many families. The following plants will certainly help by providing a plentiful bounty.

Garden Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits With High Yields

One thing to keep in mind here is what you and your family will eat. If no one will eat tomatoes or green beans, there’s no sense in planting them. You’ll end up with tons of veggies that just end up going bad.

Stick to foods you and your family will use, but you can still try planting new vegetables you’ve never tried before. Just plant one or two of these experimental plants and give them a shot. I hadn’t tried turnips until I was well into my 30s, but when I did, I found that I really enjoy roasting them with potatoes and other root vegetables.

Turnips have a mildly sweet, slightly earthy taste, and are slightly softer than potatoes. There are so many ways you can fix them. Roast them, boil and mash them like potatoes, cube them with the greens, which are edible and tasty, and put them in soups and stews; the choices are endless.

Enough about my turnip obsession, let’s get on to the plants that will provide you with the most food.

1. Love Those Leafy Greens And Lettuces

By pina messina on Unsplash

Nearly all leafy greens will continue to grow, even while you harvest them. The trick is to use sharp, clean scissors and snip off a few outer leaves while letting the rest mature and continue to grow.

Spinach, many varieties of leaf lettuce, chard, arugula, mustard greens, and kale can be harvested like this. Some of these plants are cold hardy such as spinach. It can handle a slight frost, which actually makes it sweeter.

Being somewhat cold hardy means you can start them earlier and start harvesting before some of your other vegetables are still growing. When hot days settle in, these plants will bolt, meaning they grow a stalk from the middle, produce flowers, and go to seed.

When leafy greens and lettuces bolt, the leaves start to get bitter and tough, and the plant stops producing as much. Sometimes you can snip off the bolt as soon as you see it which will allow the plant to produce a little longer, but most times you should remove the plant and reseed.

Lettuces and leafy greens can provide you with salads, sauteed dishes, and more for many months. You can also grow 2 or more crops in a single season!

2. Pick A Peck Of Peas And Pole Beans

By Matilda bellman on Unsplash

Beans and peas can produce nearly a pound of food per plant. They are easy to grow as long as you have a trellis, a fence, or something for them to climb. These plants also replenish nitrogen in the soil so they make great companions for heavy nitrogen feeders such as corn.

Both these plants grow quickly so you’ll start harvesting after around 60 days. Pole beans will produce until frost. Sugar snap peas are cooler weather plants that you can plant in early spring, and then again in the fall.

3. Radical Radishes

By Jason Leung on Unsplash

Not everyone likes these little, crunchy root veggies, but if you enjoy the peppery crunch in your salad, you’ll love how easily, and quickly they grow. Another great thing about radishes is the green tops are edible as well, don’t throw those away!

Of course, a single radish doesn't produce much, but they take up so little space they make great companion plants, and you can harvest radishes sometimes in less than a month!

Plant these little roots under your peppers, tomatoes, beans and peas, squash, cucumbers, and herbs such as dill. The radishes will help to loosen the soil, and won’t take up extra space.

Want to know another radish superpower? These little plants also help repel insect pests such as squash pests and cucumber beetles.

Radishes produce a lot of food because they grow so fast, you can plant them among other veggies, and you can grow multiple crops. Let a few go to seed, then harvest the seeds for extra savings!

4. You Can’t Beat Beets

By Melissa LeGette on Unsplash

While borscht is one of the most popular methods of using beets, this root vegetable is very versatile and grows quickly. If you’ve tried canned beets, don’t let that deter you. The canned variety is boiled to death and removes not only all the flavor, but most of the nutrients as well.

You can roast, steam, saute, or pickle them, and even eat the greens too. Beetroots are high in fiber, B vitamins, minerals, and naturally occurring nitrates. Gasp! Aren’t nitrates bad for you?

According to Healthline.com, the nitrates added to bacon, lunch meats, and other foods can produce nitrosamines when cooked at high temperatures, which can be harmful to the body. But naturally occurring nitrates from vegetables can actually provide a host of health benefits, as vegetables are rarely cooked at such high temps.

Beet greens are high in calcium, iron, minerals, and tons of vitamins such as A, K, and B6. So, don’t pass on the beets and the greens.

Beets are ready to be harvested when they get about 1½ to 2 inches in diameter, bigger beets start to become woody. You can harvest them in about 55 to 60 days after germination, meaning you can have at least 2 beet crops in one season, and if you include the greens, you get a lot of food for one small plant.

5. Carrots Grow In The Garden And Containers

By Nick Fewings on Unsplash

As we continue with great root vegetables, we can’t forget the popular carrot. Like our other root vegetables, carrots don’t take up much space, and you can plant them around other vegetables to maximize your space.

Plant carrots with your tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, onions, leeks, and herbs. These companion plants are mutually beneficial.

The only thing about carrots, is they prefer deep, slightly sandy soil to grow the best. While this can be a lot of work in the garden, you can save your back by planting carrots in containers. You’ll need pots at least 10 inches deep with well-draining soil. Add vermiculite, pearlite, or all-purpose sand to your soil.

Harvest your carrots after 60 to 80 days, and then replant them in the fall. They are cool weather-loving plants. In some zones, you may even be able to grow them through the winter!

6. Crank Out The Cucumbers

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There are bush and vine varieties, small cucumbers that are best for pickling, and long varieties that are best sliced for salads, sandwiches, or cucumber water. However you consume them, cucumber plants can produce up to 3 pounds of these cool veggies per plant.

7. Have A Handful Of Hardy Herbs

By Kevin Doran on Unsplash

Herbs are great for seasoning your favorite dishes, they’re easy to grow, they’re great companion plants, and many are perennial, meaning they’ll come back year after year.

Herbs such as dill, basil, chives, mint, rosemary, and lavender all have pest-repelling qualities. So plant some basil with your tomatoes—it will help enhance the flavor and repel many bugs. Dill and chives attract beneficial insects such as hoverflies and ladybugs which are aphid decimators.

Herbs can be harvested while they continue to grow. Just snip off a few leaves or a branch or two and the plant will continue to produce. Once they start to bolt, let them go. You can harvest the seeds, or let them fall off and they’ll reseed themselves.

Rosemary and Lavender can survive some winters and produce more plants year after year. Mint is another herb that will return year after year. In fact, mint can take over and become invasive, so it’s best to keep any kind of mint in containers.

8. Bag A Bunch Of Banana Peppers

By Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Pepper plants in general are pretty heavy producers, bell peppers included, but the mildly spicy banana pepper plant beats them all. Another great thing about peppers is you can harvest the seeds year after year.

You just have to be careful if you plant hot peppers and sweet peppers at the same time. They can cross pollinate, giving you a hot bell pepper in the next generation.

Plant some banana peppers if you truly love them, or if you plan on preserving them for later because you can end up with 30 peppers per plant.

9. Raise A Ruckus With Rhubarb

By Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash

What’s better than growing your own sweets for jams, jellies, pies, and cobblers? That was a rhetorical question, quit coming up with so many options.

Rhubarb takes some time to get started, but once they are established, it will return year after year for decades. It generally takes two years before you can start to harvest rhubarb, but once it has matured, you can harvest the stalks from summer into fall.

Rhubarb is super easy to freeze so you can store it for the lean winter months and serve up fresh rhubarb pie for Thanksgiving or other Holiday gatherings.

To freeze rhubarb, slice the stalks into 1-inch segments, then lay them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet and place them in the freezer. Leave them overnight, then transfer them to freezer bags, remove as much air as possible and keep them frozen for up to a year!

Just be sure to only harvest the succulent stalks. The leaves contain a lot of oxalates which can be toxic when consumed. You’d have to consume several pounds of leaves to put you in the past tense, but only a little bit can make you sick, so leave them in the compost bin.

10. Beautiful Bountiful Berries

By Timo Volz on Unsplash

Blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and even grapes are wonderful plants that produce a ton of fruit yearly. Blackberries can even become invasive if you don’t keep them trimmed because they will send out shoots and grow more canes every year.

Raspberries tend to behave better, but they don’t produce as much as blackberries. The latter can produce up to 20 pounds of fruit per plant!

Blueberries need acidic soil, moist ground, and plenty of sun, and they need to be cross pollinated. This means you’ll need two to three plants to get fruit. While purchasing these plants can be expensive starting off, they will grow for years.

If you buy a lot of berries from the store, you’ll recoup the initial investment shortly.

Grapes can produce a lot of fruit too, but they need a place to climb and require yearly pruning to keep growing clusters. Grapes only grow on year-old growth, but a well maintained plant can make up to 20 pounds of fruit per year!

11. Try Growing Tasty Tomatoes

By Tom Hermans on Unsplash

When picking a tomato plant, you need to decide how you want to harvest these big red berries. Do you want them all at once, or would you rather get fresh tomatoes all summer long?

With determinate growth tomatoes, you’ll be able to harvest them all in a 2 to 3-week timeframe. You can stagger your planting to keep them coming or plant a second crop.

Indeterminate growth varieties grow slower but will produce tomatoes until a hard frost shuts them down. These are better for slicing and eating as you only get a few ripe tomatoes at a time.

Whichever you choose, you’re looking at around 8 pounds of tomatoes per plant! Tomatoes are another plant you can regrow from the seeds, so you should never have to be without them.

12. Grow Some Prolific Potatoes

By Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

You don’t have to purchase seed potatoes to grow your own. You can get them from the grocery store, just look for organic varieties because some mass produced potatoes are sprayed to keep them from sprouting.

All you need to do is wait for them to start sprouting, cut them into chunks with an “eye” on each piece then let them dry out for a few days.

Potatoes need deep, rich soil to grow a lot of spuds, so containers work great here. For more detailed information, check out my Guide To Growing Potatoes.

When these plants get the water, sun, and nutrients they need, you’ll end up harvesting about 10 pounds of potatoes per plant! In a cool cellar, basement, or pantry, you can store fresh potatoes for several months.

13. Scrumptious Summer Squash

By helena munoz on Unsplash

There aren’t many plants that are as prolific or easy to grow than summer squash. Zucchini, yellow crookneck, and pattypan are the most popular varieties of these plants.

Start these plants when there’s no longer a threat of frost, and make sure you give them plenty of room, at least 2 feet apart, because these plants get big. If you only plant one zucchini, and one yellow squash plant, you’ll still harvest nearly 10 pounds per plant.

Squash are great companion plants for corn and beans because the texture of the plants deters deer, who love to eat corn and beans.

14. Big, Bad Butternut Squash

By Andie Kolbeck on Unsplash

The most prolific plant on our list is the butternut squash. These beauties can produce 10 to 20 squashes per plant. The average weight of mature butternut squash is between 1.5 to 3 pounds. Doing the quick math, you could end up with 60 pounds of food from one plant!

What’s better is that these hard-skinned squash can last up to 3 months without any refrigeration.

The drawback is how much space you’ll need for these huge plants. It’s recommended to give butternut squash 50 square feet to grow because the vines can grow over 10 feet long.

You can let them grow up a trellis to save ground space, but you’ll have to support the individual squashes or they’ll end up falling off the vine.

There You Have It

We just went over fourteen plus fruits and vegetables that will keep you and your family fed for months. We are all looking for the most bang for our buck, and growing our own food is something that any of us can do.

Pick a few of these plants, start growing, and enjoy the massive bounties that they provide.

Bio: I grew up in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina where a common past-time was picking apples, wild blueberries, or blackberries, then taking them home to make pies, cobblers or jars of preserves. It’s a tradition I want to pass down to my family. In addition to that, I have always had a fascination with growing plants. It didn’t matter what kind, flowers, trees, fruits, or vegetables, if it came from the ground I wanted to try my hand at growing it. Some of my favorite things to grow are flower bulbs (nearly any kind though daylilies and irises are top of the list here), tomatoes, beans, okra, and squash.

My dream is to one day live as much off the grid and be as self-sufficient as possible. I love growing and preserving my own food as it just seems to taste so much better. When I’m not in the vegetable or flower garden, I’m writing blogs, freelancing, or working on novels.

You can check out more of my random ramblings here on Vocal Media or at

Author Website

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About the Creator

Aaron Thompson

New self published author. If you like these stores please continue to support by sharing with friends, dropping a donation, and checking out my other works at https://www.AMTwriting77.com

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