How many potatoes should I plant per person?
Short answer
10 plants fresh, 50–100 ft to store
About ten plants per person if you just want new potatoes through the summer. Fifty to a hundred feet of row per person if you want potatoes in the cellar through winter — that's the difference between a side dish and a staple, and it's why the recommendations you'll find online vary by tenfold.
The arithmetic
- USDA-NRCS puts a year's supply at 50–100 lbs per person, from 25–50 feet of row at about 2 lbs per foot.
- Missouri and Kansas State both say 50–100 row feet per person — roughly double NRCS's row length for the same poundage, a more conservative yield assumption.
- At 12-inch in-row spacing, 50 feet is about 50 plants.
- A family of four planning to store potatoes is looking at 200–400 row feet. That is a serious piece of ground.
A tenfold spread — and it isn't a mistake
Potatoes have the widest disagreement of any crop in the per-person tables, and understanding why it exists tells you which number is yours.
- Virginia Tech
- 10 plants per person
- WVU
- 10–15 plants per person
- Missouri G6201
- 50–100 feet of row per person
- Kansas State MF315
- 50–100 feet of row per person
- USDA-NRCS
- 50–100 lbs per person, 25–50 row ft
At 10–18 inch spacing, 50–100 feet of row is 33–120 plants. Virginia Tech's 10 plants is a fresh-eating figure — new potatoes dug through summer. Missouri, Kansas State, and USDA are describing a winter storage supply, where potatoes are a calorie staple rather than a vegetable. Once you separate those two intentions the numbers stop contradicting each other.
Ten plants per person for summer eating. Fifty row feet per person if potatoes are going in the cellar and onto the table twice a week from October to April.
What changes your number
- Yield per foot. Kansas State says 10 lbs per 10 row feet; Virginia Tech says 10–20; Clemson's plan works out to 50 lbs from 75 feet. USDA-NRCS assumes 2 lbs per foot. Soil, water, and variety move this more than anything you can control on paper.
- Storage or not. This is the whole question. A storage crop needs curing and a cool dark place; without one, plant for fresh eating and stop there.
- Variety. Early varieties are ready in 70–90 days and don't keep well. Late maincrop varieties take 100–120 days and are what actually stores.
- Spacing. Missouri: 12 inches in-row, rows 30–42 inches apart. WVU's intensive figure is 2 plants per square foot in beds.
Storing what you grow
| Crop | Temperature | Humidity | Storage life |
|---|---|---|---|
| Potatoes (late crop) | 38–45°F | 90–95% | 4–10 months |
| Onions, dry | 32–40°F | 65–70% | 1–9 months |
| Garlic | 32–40°F | 65–70% | 6–9 months |
| Winter squash | 50–60°F | 50–70% | 1–6 months |
| Carrots (mature) | 32–36°F | 95–100% | 4–9 months |
| Beets (topped) | 32–36°F | 95–100% | 1–10 months |
Two things in that table catch people out. Onions and garlic want low humidity — 65–70% — while nearly every other storage crop wants 90–100%; storing garlic in a damp cellar next to the carrots is a well-documented way to lose it. And winter squash wants warm storage at 50–60°F, not cold; it's damaged near freezing. Figures from USDA Agriculture Handbook 66 via University of Maine, cross-checked against South Dakota State and Iowa State.
Space it needs
Potatoes are the single largest land user in a storage garden — 200–400 row feet for a family of four, which at 3-foot row spacing is 600–1,200 square feet on its own. If you're working out total garden size, potatoes are usually the number that decides it.
What to do with the surplus
Potatoes need curing before they'll store — a week or two somewhere warm and dark to toughen the skins, then cool and humid for the winter. Skip the curing and you'll be sorting soft ones by December.
Then stop planning from averages
Homestead Paradise tracks what each bed yielded and what's left in storage, so you know in February whether you planted enough — and by how much you missed.
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Sources
Every figure on this page comes from a land-grant university extension service, the USDA, or a breed registry — never from another blog.