"This year I shared my seed order with a friend to bring the price down. I never plant 25 of the same plant. I am curious how much you spent of seeds this year. Also I am curious how many plants of what you are planning."

--- Kathleen

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.

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.