The farms will support 12-15 villagers, more with coconuts and shrooms.

You won't be able to grow much more than that until you solve your present food source problems.

Ok thankyou all very much for your responce it is greatly appreciated

I'm having the same problem. My people keep dying because the crops won't grow fast enough and the mushrooms don't come fast enough and i'm still working towards level 3 food, but I think everyone will be dead by then :-(

It is very possible on easy and normal to make it to level 3 farming with a villager of 10-12 people buying all level 2 techs before you even get level 3 farming. Just takes a little strategy. Keep trying

You'll need to keep your population down until you can clean the ocean. I will not go over 9 until then. Since it takes time to meet the requirements to solve puzzle 7 you have to manage your food resources a lot better then in VV:ANH. As we have said, you will have to come at this game in a different manner as compared to VV:ANH.

well I only have 7 people and most of them are adults.. and i'm playing on easy so i'm not sure what i'm doing wrong then

I don't know. The farm will easly support 7 villagers with only one farmer. Or they getting sick and maybe not being healed?

nope :-/ none of them say they're sick, but it also takes like 400 minutes for the food to regrow and then that food is usually gone within 3 hours or so!

Ok, switch it to 2x speed until the garden comes back, then switch to normal or slow speed. Then when the crops are done switch back to 2x speed, and so on.

What speed are you playing at?

You should normally be able to build up a big enough stock of food to tide your villagers over the period of the empty field with the help of the mushrooms.