Presuming we have air to breath, reasonably clean water to drink, and some sort of shelter then food becomes a top priority. Unless you’re prepared to go “hunter-gatherer”, and I’ll bet that most of us are not, then growing food becomes a really important. The foods that you will be most concerned with are not the ones that most casual gardeners grow, such as tomatoes and cucumbers. Here I’m talking about staple foods. These are high calorie, storable foods that will get you through the winter and most of the next growing season.
At this point in the discussion, we’re going to leave meat aside because growing meat takes even more special skills and uses more land resources than most people have. Some exceptional meat animals that can be grown in small spaces include chickens, ducks, rabbits, guinea pigs, and fish. If you’re an angler and have a clean fishery nearby, then you might have a fairly cheap source of protein and calories on your hands. Much the same story for hunting, but as I said, I’m not covering meat in this discussion.
So, staple foods. The easiest to grow are beans and peas, not the green beans or wax beans that you eat in the pod, although they’re good. I’m talking about dried beans and peas. Think navy beans and field peas. These legumes will be listed under ‘dry beans’ in the seed catalogs. Next easiest in my experience is storage squash. You’ll want the longer storing squash like Hubbard, Butternut, and similar squashes. Acorn type squashes do not store very long but should last through December. Plant a seed, provide water, and wait. Fertility needs aren’t huge, but they do need somewhat fertile soil. Most people don’t include onions and garlic in the “staple crop” category but I do. Plan to grow a lot of both, they really aren’t difficult to grow, harvest, and store. Then come potatoes and similar tubers. There’s more work for tubers because they prefer more deeply worked soil, and they need to be dug out of the ground. This job can be pretty hard on the old body without the right tools (and I don’t have the right tools). Corn rounds out the list ahead of small grains primarily because corn is easier to harvest and process with simple hand tools and techniques. The challenges with corn include high fertility needs, reliable pollination, and GMO contamination. Then come the small grains, rye, wheat, barley, etc. We grew some wheat last year, and while we did get a decent crop out of the small area we planted, we realized what a challenge threshing and cleaning the wheat by hand can be. There are more.
So you plant a row or two of these crops and you’re all set, right? Wrong. You eat a LOT of these staple crops. Take some time before planting season and keep track of how much you eat each week. You might not be eating many of these right now, but if you’re going to grow most of your own food, then you will be.
Take wheat for example. My family consumes eight loaves of bread every week. That’s right about 32 cups of wheat flour. If we’re making sourdough, we also use 1 cup of sourdough starter for each loaf, so that’s basically 1 cup of rye flour. Wheat flour weighs about 4 oz per cup, rye will be about the same so we’re not going to quibble over that. So a quick little spreadsheet calculation:
I used the “low fertility” values here because that’s what most of us are likely to attain to start with. Even this fertility level is better than most ground that has been “factory farmed” for many years. But you can make substantial improvements on even abused land. One section of our garden was so poor that even weeds wouldn’t grow. Now we get a pretty decent yield, but it took some work and lots of organic matter to get there. Someday we might get up to the high fertility values but it’s best to use a conservative estimate until we have some experience under our belts.
Now these values were computed assuming that bread would be our only use for wheat. But we consume pasta (Remember Prince Spaghetti Night!), pancakes, muffins, cakes, and other delicious items. So we should plan to at least double our estimated consumption. Right off the bat, we’re looking at 1/2 acre of wheat and around 1/8 acre of rye. Woof! I don’t know if you’ve ever tried harvesting, threshing, and cleaning small grains by hand but you should do it on a small scale before you tackle a project of this magnitude.
Most of us don’t have that kind of land area cleared and available. Right now we’re buying wheat and rye from a farmer nearby and focusing on other crops that we can manage more easily.
If you currently eat meat at one meal per day, you’ll need to assume that you will not continue to do so on a regular basis unless you’re able to raise your own. Don’t forget that the animals need to eat as well. Instead you’ll substitute legumes, fish, and game for protein and will probably eat more carbohydrates and greens along with them. Figure out how many lbs of dried beans you’ll need, calculate out how much you’ll need to grow and how much land area you will need. This is one of the many areas where John Jeavon’s “How to Grow More Vegetables…” comes in very handy. With experience you’ll be able to estimate based on your own results, but if you have no other basis for your calculations you could do a lot worse than this reference.
You can follow the same process for each of the staple crops, plan on growing several different varieties. The same stuff day after day, 365 days a year gets old really fast. And don’t forget other crops, fruit, carrots, turnips, beets, brassicas, leafy greens, tomatoes, herbs, spices, etc. These provide needed nutrients and give you the opportunity to put some variety in your diet.
When you start making your calculations, you’ll be astounded by the volume of food that you actually have to grow to survive. Make sure that you also factor in some spoilage, because it will happen no matter how careful you are. If your household consumes 5 pounds of potatoes every week, figure on growing around 250 to 300 pounds of potatoes. That translates to a minimum of 25 pounds of seed potatoes, I’d recommend more. Stored crops can and do go bad even under the best conditions, and yields can sometimes be disappointing.
Focus on the crops that are relatively easy to grow, harvest, and store. For most people that list includes beans, storage squash, onions, potatoes, and corn but not small grains. We use a lot of garlic, so that’s included in my list of staples.
You should also build redundancies into your cropping strategy. Plant more than one variety of each crop and plant multiple crops that almost fit into the same dietary niche. Potatoes and squash are an example of crops that we’ve grown and used as substitutes. Maybe we didn’t get as many potatoes in one year as we wished, but we were smothered in squash. The opposite can be true. No, they’re not the same nutritionally but they both fill the hole in your belly and provide lots of calories. That’s a big deal when you’re trying to survive.
Multiple storage methods and locations are other redundancies to consider. Remember that disasters happen. They might not have the global reach of an earthquake and tsunami as in Japan, but for a family just trying to scrape by even small failures can be disasters. If everything’s frozen and the freezer doesn’t work for a week or so, you’re going to have a problem. If one crop fails, you’d really like an alternative crop ready. If rodents get into one store of root vegetables, you’d better have staple foods stored someplace else too. Canning and fermenting food are two alternative storage methods to freezing or cold storage. While you’re considering, also look at the energy required to preserve the food. Low acid foods require pressure canning for proper preservation according the USDA, but pressure canning requires a tremendous amount of energy on a traditional stove. (A rocket stove is likely to be more efficient for canning, but we haven’t tried one yet. It’s in the plans for this summer.) Fermentation is a much lower energy means to preserve food that you might want to try.
So far I’ve only talked about annual crops. That’s because annuals are what most people eat. But what about perennials? Jerusalem artichokes are fine after resting in the frozen ground all winter. Hazelnuts are high calorie food that come back year after year without much effort at all. Chestnuts are another high food value staple. We’ve planted all of these, it just takes a few years or more to get a decent crop going. Let’s also remember wild crops out there which are typically free for the gatherer (remember hunter gatherer!) such as acorns and burdock roots. While they’re not staples, we hunt blackberries, mulberries, and wild black cherries around our place. In fact I just transplanted a bunch of volunteer mulberries last fall. I can’t wait!
I hope you get the idea. Making your staple crop plan isn’t hard, it’s just tedious. Anyone can do it and everyone should. If you find out that you need more land than you have, don’t let that discourage you. You can always find more space or grow a high value crop for trade on the limited space you have. Your options are almost endless, two that come right to mind are crop sharing with the landowner and leasing land. Trading some of your crops for those someone else grew is another possibility. A little creative thinking will uncover many other options as well.
Since we’re talking about staple foods and bread is a staple for many folks, here’s my recipe for Honey Whole Wheat Sourdough bread:
For the sponge:
5 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups water
2 cups sourdough starter (see “Wild Fermentation” by Sandor Katz for a good starter recipe)
1 tablespoon honey
Mix all ingredients in a large bowl, cover with a clean damp towel, and put in a warm place overnight. When the starter is good and bubbly proceed with the rest.
For the loaves:
1 bowl of sponge from above
3 cups whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons salt
3 tablespoons honey
Mix all ingredients thoroughly. The dough should be very sticky but not runny. Butter the insides of two loaf pans and dust the inside bottoms of the pans with flour. This will help the loaves release from the pans easily. Turn half of the dough into each loaf pan. Cover the pans with clean towels and place in a warm spot to rise. (The loaves rise in about an hour at our house.) When the dough has risen even with the tops of the loaf pans, bake in a 400 degree F oven for 35 minutes. At the end of the 35 minutes, remove the loaves from the pans and set upright directly on the oven rack and bake for 5 more minutes. When the 5 minutes are up, place the loaves on a rack to cool for at least 15 minutes, 30 minutes would be even better.
No, I didn’t forget about kneading, it’s not helpful for this recipe.
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