High Yield Crops: Get the Biggest ROI by Growing the Following Crops
Maximize your garden’s ROI with high-yield crops! Discover easy-to-grow perennial plants, multipliers for doubling harvests, and tips for layered gardening. Start growing more with less effort using sustainable practices.
2/3/20256 min read
High Yield Crops:
These Bring the Biggest ROI
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High Yield Crops
That bring you the biggest ROI
Want to get the biggest bang for your time, money, and growing efforts?
Start by being very choosy about what you decide to grow this year. A high-yield garden doesn’t have to be complicated—it’s about knowing how much time and effort something takes as well as how expensive it is to buy. In this blog, we’ll explore tips and growing techniques to ensure you get the biggest ROI from your plants this year, including:
Multipliers: 2x or 3x your Harvest
Use Crop Rotation to Grow Year-Round
Designing a layered garden to grow in 3D
Let’s dig in!
1. Choose Easy-to-Grow, High-Yield Crops


As you look through the table and think about which items you'd like to for your garden, try to use these three basic principles:
Pick plants that are a good combination of easy-to-grow and high yield.
Try to pick 3 or 4 different plant families. While tomatoes are a favorite, growing only tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers increases the likelihood of soil depletion, pest problems, and weather issues that could devastate your harvest.
Pick plants you like to eat. It doesn’t make sense to grow 50 pounds of radishes if you dislike their taste.
As you can see from the chart, fruiting plants and tubers tend to have the highest effective yields.
However, they might not always be the best choice since they typically take longer to mature in order to form bulbs or produce fruit.
Crops like carrots, while not fruiting plants, are great economic bets. They can produce heavy yields, require minimal maintenance, and thrive under the right soil conditions.
"There are several key factors in our decision-making process when it comes to adding crops to our rotation:
Markets: Do we have a place to market this crop?
Agronomic: Do we farm in an environment suitable for this crop?
Economic: Can we be profitable while raising this crop?
Equipment: Do we have the equipment necessary to raise this crop?
Management: Do we have the time to produce this crop? Where does it fit in our current rotation?
These four questions are the beginning of our thought process when it comes to adding crops."
- Michelle Erickson-Jones,
Montana Farmer and founder of Big Sky Farm(her)
Below you will find a table of Annual Plant Yields.
It contains common annual plants we like to eat, their prices, (It was made way back before the pandemic. As such, the prices are outdated, but likely the trend in prices is not.), their yields and the level of difficulty to grow.
Principles for Plant Selection


Common Annual Plant Yields
2.Why Perennials are Ideal
Permaculture focuses on perennial plants because their combination of resilience and yield is unmatched by annuals, which must establish a full root system from seed in under 100 days.
As we like to say, perennials make us lazier and lazier gardeners.
Below are a few easy-to-buy perennial plants worth considering for a beginner's garden. They produce abundantly within the first year or two and are less susceptible to pests and weather than their annual counterparts.


To learn more about perennial vegetable options you can grow, click HERE.
3. Multipliers:
2x or 3x Your Harvest
I like to use the term "multipliers" to describe actions you can take in your garden to double or triple your harvest. While this might sound magical or complicated, these steps are surprisingly simple. After your first growing season, design your garden and planting calendar with these multipliers in mind to quickly scale up to hundreds of pounds of vegetables and fruits.
Here are two multipliers that can make the biggest immediate impact on your yields:
Most annuals require fewer than 100 days from seed to harvest. By rotating new plants in after your first crops are spent, you can easily grow two or even three complete cycles of crops in a single year.
Many gardeners are unaware this is possible, but it’s one of the easiest ways to multiply your harvest.
What are Multipliers?
"Before heavy givers, plant light feederfs (all root crops) to give the soil a rest before the next heavy feeder onslaught.
Three vegetables are low-nitrogen lovers: turnips (a light feeder), sweet potatoes (a light feeder), and green peppers (a heavy feeder of nutrients othern than nitrogen)"
-John Jeavon in his book , "How to Grow More Vegetables (and fruits, nuts, berriesm grains and other crops)"


Managing Soil Health with Crop Rotations
The idea is to adapt the old farming practice of rotating crops yearly into a smaller venue and shorter timeframe. Properly planned multi-cropping can enhance your soil life instead of depleting it. Here's an example of what we mean by that:
First crop: Legumes, which add nitrogen and green matter to the soil.
Second crop: Heavy feeders like tomatoes and melons.
Third crop: Light feeders like lettuce or carrots.
Avoid growing successive crops of the same plant type to reduce soil depletion and pest issues.
Use Crop Rotation to Grow Year-Round
Remove fruiting crops like beans or tomatoes when harvests drop to once a week instead of daily.
Trim the stalks of spent crops at ground level instead of pulling out the roots to protect soil structure.
Start the second and third waves of plants indoors so they are ready to transplant when your current crop finishes.
Key Tips for Multi-Cropping Success
We live in a three-dimensional world, but it’s easy to forget that plants grow in three dimensions too. When space is limited, use your garden’s vertical space effectively by designing layers of plants.
Layers in a Garden
In suburban gardens, there are about five layers of plants (space-wise) to consider:
Small Trees (10-20 feet): Examples include dwarf fruit trees.
Shrubs: Berries like blackberries and raspberries.
Herbaceous Plants: Non-woody vegetables and herbs.
Vining Plants: Pumpkins, hops, or hardy kiwi.
Ground Covers: Strawberries, yarrow, and wild raspberries.
If you live in a bigger space, you likely have more vertical layers to think about.
Grow in 3 Dimensions
Root crops like potatoes, garlic, and carrots add another layer without taking up space above ground.
Optimizing Sunlight for Multiple Layers
Many gardeners worry about whether there is enough sunlight for layered plants, but the sun provides ample energy for all layers. During summer, each square foot of your garden receives about 70 watts of energy, while most high-light plants need only 40 watts and low-light plants even less (around 25 watts).
Plants have evolved to compete and grow in low-light environments, so with careful design, you can grow multiple layers of plants successfully.
Practical Tips for Layered Gardening
Use vertical supports like trellises for vining plants such as sweet potatoes, grapes, or indeterminate tomatoes.
Pair root crops like carrots or garlic with other crops since they don’t take up much above-ground space.
Use ground covers like strawberries or yarrow as living mulch under shrubs or berry bushes to retain moisture.
Take advantage of existing structures like fences or walls to mount containers for quick-growing crops like lettuce or radishes.


Final Thoughts
To ensure you have high-yielding crops this year, diversify your garden. Surround your cash crops with companion plants that promote growth, deter pests, and provide additional food. Building a resilient, diverse garden not only boosts yields but also creates a thriving ecosystem.
“The more diverse your system, the more stable it becomes.”
-Geoff Lawton
Choose one next step.
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GROWN BEFORE BUT WANT BETTER YIELDS
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