How much should I plant?

I've been in a real cooking rut lately. When this happens I find the easiest way to get inspired is to do inventory of my freezer and pantry. Today I went through all my freezers to find out just what I have on hand. A couple days ago I organized my root cellar/pantry. You may be asking what in the world does going through the freezer and root cellar have to do with gardening? Well, for me it gave me a great picture of how many veggies I need to plant. We have been out of beans, corn and broccoli since the end of January. I have a 4 - 2 cup baggies of diced celery left, some whole tomatoes, strawberries, shredded zucchini, cole slaw, pumpkin, a few 2 cup baggies of wax beans (not our favorite to eat alone) and 3 – quart baggies of sweet potatoes. I also found buried in the depths of the freezer one more quart each of beans and corn. When I checked my butternut squash I found that we still have 4 that are usable and 4 that are starting to get wrinkly and spoiled. Spoiled veggies don't disappoint me since I know they can feed the pig.

In my root cellar I am down to 6 quarts of Tomato Sauce, 3 Quarts of Tomato Soup, 1 Quart of Speg Sauce, 8 quarts of diced tomatoes, 6 pints of BBQ sauce, and about 10 pints of Salsa. We still have a lot of pickles and relishes.

A couple days ago I thawed one of my zucchini crisp baggies and cooked it up. It smelled WONDERFUL cooking however, the texture was not very nice. Now I know that freezing zucchini for winter crisps isn't worth it!! So, Pinky (our sow) will be enjoying some zucchini over the next week. I only have 3 other gallon baggies full of it because I didn't want to do a lot just in case it was gross... which it was!!

As a result of my freezer diving I know that I need to plant a lot more beans, peas, corn, and broccoli to freeze for winter use. I also want to freeze more spinach. We like spinach in our baked egg dishes. I'm planning on enough space for over 500 onions (I use 1-2 onions a day) along with a full bed 20 X 3 of leeks. I'll be planting some green onions in the lettuce and spinach beds to be used with our salads.
Phil is going to explain how we do our garden layout using excel, hopefully he'll be able to post our garden layout too.