Winter Carrots

I have to tell you about the wonderful carrots we are eating right out of our garden this winter. The carrots you see in the photo were pulled January 18, swished in a bucket of water to take the mud off and photographed right in the garden. We had our first snow of the year the night before and you can see that didn’t bother them. The varieties I planted are Danvers 126 (on the left in the photo) and Chantenay Red Core (on the right). The seeds came from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. In their catalog both varieties were listed as having a blunt end, with Danvers growing to 6½’’ long and 2’’at the shoulders and Chantenay 5½’’ long and 2½’’ at the shoulders. I have done a taste test and looked at both varieties side-by-side and I have to say, unless I was really looking for differences, I wouldn’t be able to tell which was which. One was ever so slightly sweeter, but they were both so sweet, it didn’t matter. The carrots of both varieties varied in size. I cut the larger ones into carrot sticks to eat raw and put the small ones into soups and cooked dishes. A favorite snack (or quick lunch) of mine is to cut carrots into sticks and use crunchy peanut butter as a dip. Delicious!

To have all these carrots available now took some planning. They were planted back on June 27 into a bed that I had harvested rye from, cutting it at maturity for grain and straw. The planning, however, went back further than that. The rye was planted on November 3, 2011. Knowing that I intended to plant carrots next, I made furrows close together with a hoe and planted the seed in the furrows. Otherwise, I would have just broadcast the seed and chopped it in with my cultivator to cover it. When rye and wheat are harvested at full maturity, the roots are already on their way out and the soil is soft. The stubble was in rows and I just hoed between those stubble rows and sowed the carrot seeds, covering lightly. The brown stubble that was left in place gradually decomposed, feeding the carrots. I had to be diligent with watering and replant in a couple areas that had not-so-good germination, but I have been rewarded well. This photo was taken on November 22—Thanksgiving. On the left is the carrot bed we are eating from now and the rye that I planted on October 23. You can see the rows in anticipation for next year’s carrots.

Although these carrots were outside the part of the garden that I keep intense records on, I couldn’t resist finding out how much was really there. Of course, I wasn’t going to dig the whole bed all at once to find out. Neither was I going to weigh each carrot I harvested, something I would have done if I was keeping those intense records. Instead, I dug carrots from a 2’ strip for each variety. The bed is 4’ wide, so I was measuring how much was in 8 ft². From that measurement I calculated how much it would work out to for a 100 ft² planting. The results were 115 lb/100 ft² for the Danvers and 145 lb/100 ft² for the Chantenay. I think these are accurate estimates and the yield could have even been a bit higher. I had randomly harvested some carrots previously, so some could have already been taken from these areas. In this trial Chantenay yielded more than Danvers, however since I wasn’t paying too much attention to details (such as randomly harvesting earlier) I wouldn’t say that one variety out yielded the other—yet. Maybe I’ll be more serious about it next year.

Once carrots (and other root vegetables) get hit with frost they sweeten up. Eliot Coleman writes about that in Four Season Harvest. For that reason I only grow carrots for fall and winter harvest these days. Sort of like enjoying strawberries when they are in season. Summer carrots just don’t taste as good and there are so many other things to be eating from the garden in the summer. I need to plant the carrots so that they will be mature by mid-October. Keep in mind that once the nights cool down, growth slows. After mid-October they are just being held in cold storage in the garden until we eat them. If you have been following my blog you know I have trouble with voles. One end of this bed has had some vole damage, but not the devastation you would expect. That could be because I didn’t mulch these carrots. If we were to have harsher weather than we do, I would mulch with leaves, but not until the cold weather really sets in. I want the voles to find other winter homes before I cover the carrots.

At Christmas I usually give sauerkraut to some friends and family. This year I hadn’t made sauerkraut. I was celebrating the carrots that were bursting from that bed that I had tended all year, so everyone received carrots. I’m not sure they were as excited receiving the carrots as I was giving them, but oh well. Maybe I’ll get sauerkraut made for them next year—with carrots in it.

If you would like to be eating carrots like this in mid-winter, keep that in mind as you make your garden plan for this year. I actually make a note on my garden map to plant the rye in rows in that bed so I don’t forget. You’ve missed the window of opportunity to have rye planted in rows for this year, but maybe you can sneak some carrots in somewhere. Make sure to plant them early enough and water well. Good luck!

Learn more about winter carrots at http://www.motherearthnews.com/permaculture/winter-carrots.aspx

Keeping Garden Records

The seed catalogs have arrived and as you recover from the holidays you are getting excited about this year’s garden. I always have the best garden in January—meaning the one I plan in January. Things don’t always go as planned, but that’s to be expected. There are lots of garden books on your bookshelves, the library and the bookstore to guide you, but did you ever wish there was a garden book written just for you? It would be specific to your garden with your own crops, varieties, planting times and records of yields. Although it will take a little work on your part, you can have exactly that.

Fortunately for you, now is the best time to start writing that book. Actually it is a notebook you will be putting together, unless you prefer to put everything on the computer. I prefer pencil and paper myself and a book that I can hold in my hands (while sitting in a comfortable chair, possibly beside the wood stove). I do have some things on the computer, but they are printed off to go into my garden notebook. If you missed the back-to-school sales to stock up on 3-ring binders, paper, dividers, file folders, etc, these things are on sale again as people organize their financial affairs for taxes. The file folders are for your previous years’ records. Store those in your file cabinet or a cardboard file box that you can pick up while you are at the office supply store.

In my garden plan video I show you how to put together a complete garden plan using worksheets that are on the CD that comes with the DVD. On the resource page of my website you will find a list of the sections suggested for your notebook. You might have ideas for additional sections. You will need to make an inventory of the seeds you already have before you order new ones. Put that in the seed section of your notebook. You will need to know what crops you are planting and where, so you will need a garden map. After consulting your seed inventory and garden map, make a list of your crops and what needs to be ordered.  Before you send off your seed order you need to figure how many seeds you need. One of the worksheets on the CD helps you do that.

Knowing when to plant and when to expect a harvest is essential to be efficient at growing your food. The CD has a worksheet to help you determine those dates. Once you have the dates you can record them on the Plant / Harvest Schedule, also a worksheet on the CD and available as a free PDF on my website.  Ideally you will fill out a copy of that schedule as you plan it and an extra copy to fill in as the season goes along. It is always good to know what actually happened. Make notes that will be useful later.

If you are serious about feeding yourself from your garden, you should know how much you are producing. At first it just might be that you know how much you planted and if it was enough or not enough. Make a note of that. If you are canning, freezing, or drying, you could write down how many pints or quarts of everything you put up. Even a notation on your calendar would do. At the end of the season you could total everything up and the calendar provides your beginning and ending harvest dates.

However, I want to encourage everyone to eat as much as they can out of their garden all year long. As good as it is to know how much is coming out of your garden, it’s not fun to count or weigh everything. So don’t. You could only keep more detailed records on the crops that you are studying. Or, just weigh out the harvest on a portion of your crop, and since you know the area you have planted, it is easy to estimate your total harvest.

You can keep track of the climate in your garden by having temperature and precipitation records for the year. That is really handy to refer to in later years when you remember something doing particularly good (or bad) in a previous year and you think it might have been weather related. There are worksheets for that on the CD, also. In the weather section of my notebook, I like to include news reports of abnormal weather events to remind me of what was going on.

What varieties of each crop you grow could make a difference, so make sure to include that in your notes. If you can bear to cut up your seed catalogs (or better yet, cut up last year’s seed catalogs) you can cut out the information and pictures of the crops you chose and include them in your notebook. Highlight what it was that made you choose those varieties. It is easy to forget. You will, no doubt, see things in magazines or on the internet that you would like to try in your garden or ideas will pop into your head. Put that in your notebook in the Ideas! section.

Take photographs and put them in your garden notebook or an album devoted to your garden. I don’t mean keep them on your phone or in a digital file on your computer—actually have prints made. Remember, you are putting together a book here. Make sure there is a picture of you in there. You will be surprised how fast things change and it is nice to have a visual record. You might even write a summary of your garden experiences for the year and include it with your photos. In the summary include some yield figures of the things you are paying particular attention to, lessons you’ve learned (both good and bad), and anything else that you think is a highlight.

If you do all this you will be well on your way with record keeping. Some of you out there might have your own system. I invite you to share your ideas here.

Books: Gardening, Permaculture, Ferment, and Chickens

The cover crops are growing nicely in the garden, with the harvesting of greens and roots being the only thing going on out there right now. The days are short and nights are long. Winter is the time to spend on some self-directed education. Reading this blog and studying my DVDs is a fine start. I have some suggestions for good books to add to your program. All through my blog posts you will find mention of books that I will not repeat here. There is a short list on the resource page on my website. For the others, well you’ll just have to read the posts. These books are more recent and I think you will find them helpful on your journey. I’ll list them from newest to oldest.

Sustainable Market Farming is so new that it isn’t even out yet. The release date by New Society Publishers is February 1, 2013. I have been looking forward to this book all year and was fortunate to have the privilege of reading an advance copy. Author Pam Dawling is the garden manager at Twin Oaks, a community of about 100 people here in Virginia. She shows you how she plans the 3½ acre garden, manages the crew, coordinates with the kitchen, and generally, what it takes to feed 100. When you grow for the markets you are usually not so intimately involved with your customers as Pam is with her community. Everywhere she goes and every meal she eats, she is getting feedback about her efforts, which is the same as growing for a family, just on a much larger scale. If you have enjoyed my garden planning ideas and would like to get another take on it all, you will like Pam’s book. She has suggestions for planting and harvesting that are helpful whether you are growing for your own kitchen or for your market customers. There are excellent chapters on crops, including peanuts, potato onions and okra- crops you generally don’t hear a lot about. The last two chapters are about saving seeds, a topic of increasing importance to gardeners everywhere. Find out more about Pam, her book and her blog at http://sustainablemarketfarming.com/. You might want to catch her at one of the conferences she will be speaking at this winter.

The Permaculture Handbook by Peter Bane, editor of Permaculture Activist magazine, was published by New Society in June, 2012. It is nice to have a permaculture book written in the U.S. showing case studies of various farms and projects. Besides permaculture theory, this book gives practical information and shows it being put to use by Peter and his partner on their .7 acre property in Indiana. Peter discusses coppicing—allowing multiple trunks to grow back for future harvests—a subject I can never find enough information on.  I was also particularly interested in his chapter on Diet and Food. Learn more about Peter Bane, his book and where you can find him at http://permaculturehandbook.com/.

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz was released by Chelsea Green Publishing in May, 2012.
If you are a beginner to fermentation, this book might be too much for you. If what you want is some recipes to get started, read Wild Fermentation first, also by Sandor. If you have already played around with fermentation and really enjoy learning about the culture of food beyond the ferment, you will like this book. To Sandor Katz, food is a celebration. You will learn the deeper stories behind the food. Learn more about Sandor Katz, his books, and where you might find him at www.wildfermentation.com.

The Small-Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery, also a Chelsea Green book, was released in 2011. This book is much more than a how-to-raise-chickens book. A particular interest of Harvey’s (and mine) is Feeding The Flock From Home Resources, which is also a chapter title. Harvey explores raising worms and black soldier fly grubs. He grows cover crops to benefit his garden and his birds. As much as he can, Harvey integrates his chickens with his garden and is always experimenting and tweaking his system. Being in Virginia, his climate is the same as mine. Find out more about Harvey Ussery, his book and his homestead at www.themodernhomestead.us.

These books are hefty in both weight and content and not for someone just looking for some light reading. Be ready to delve headlong into the subjects. If your budget doesn’t allow putting them on your shelf, find them at the library. If your library doesn’t have them, fill out a request form. They can get it for you through interlibrary loan or purchase it for their shelves. That’s what libraries do. In fact, it is always a good idea to browse a book at the bookstore, library, or at a conference before you buy it to make sure it will be useful to you, no matter what the reviews say, including mine. Be assured that these authors are passionate about what they do and have written these books because they are just as passionate about sharing what they know with others.

I wish you all a wonderful holiday. These books should keep you busy right on into the New Year, as if you don’t already have enough to do. I am taking a break over the holiday season, so my next blog post won’t appear until January 8. See you in 2013!

Master Nut Cracker

Master Nut Cracker

                                                                                                                              We have a couple of black walnut trees near our driveway. Until 2008 I had only paid passing attention to them, never taking the time to harvest the nuts at the right time. To do that, every day or two I would have to pick up the green balls that fell from the trees and throw them in the driveway. Driving over them would remove the green husks. Then I would gather the nuts to air-dry and store for later. If they weren’t gathered from the ground in a timely manner, I would find worms in them. Shelling them was a challenge. I tried cracking them using a hammer and by squeezing them in a vice. Both methods were unsatisfactory. You can find information about these methods and more at http://www.nemahaweb.com/blackwalnuts/crackers.htm. Black walnuts are much harder than the English walnuts you would find in the grocery store and regular nutcrackers won’t work for them. Finally I called my friend Margaret to borrow her black walnut cracker.

Margaret and Jerry moved to their 50 acre farm in late 1982. They had black walnut trees in the yard and intended to make use of them. When Margaret told me of her search for a suitable nutcracker, I told her of an article I had recently read in the December 1983 issue of Organic Gardening magazine. I located that issue on my bookshelf while preparing to write this post. It still contained a note to Xerox the article for Margaret. (Back then we didn’t copy things, we Xeroxed them.) The article profiled four nutcrackers suitable for hard-shelled nuts—hickories, butternuts, and black walnuts. The Potter nutcracker was one of them, and the one owned by the authors, Mike and Nancy Bubel.  At the time, I had also checked my copy of Home Food Systems which listed the Potter as the “largest, heaviest, most powerful nutcracker we tested.” Home Food Systems was published in 1981. Margaret bought one and has used it all these years.

Margaret’s Potter Nut Cracker

Our black walnut trees seem to bear every other year, so I didn’t throw myself into thinking about black walnuts again until the fall of 2010. The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe was hot off the press and the green balls were, once again, raining down. Deppe talks about gathering nuts in her book, specifically the need to get them off the ground promptly. I borrowed Margaret’s Potter nutcracker again. However, the best way to store nuts is in the shell, with the cracking done as needed. It became clear that I should have my own tool. With the harvest skipping a year, there were no new nuts to crack in 2011, but I still had some left from 2010 to play with. I had my eye out for a used Potter, since they aren’t manufactured anymore. What I found is the Master Nut Cracker, similar to the Potter.

My husband gave me a Master Nut Cracker for Christmas last year. It is the one in the top photo and it came with a bag of black walnuts. It was just what I needed for my black walnuts—and as I found later—for the hazelnuts (filberts) and peanuts. My husband had also given me small vice grips to use for the hazelnuts, an improvement over my other methods. I thought my hazelnuts would be too small for the Master Nut Cracker, but I found that it cracked all but the very smallest. Eventually I realized that I could shell peanuts with it, also.

This nut cracker lives up to its expectations for cracking black walnuts. If you see advertisements for nutcrackers, read them carefully. If they list walnuts (rather than black walnuts), they mean English walnuts, which are easier to shell. One of the great things about this nutcracker is that it has a second set of anvils. You can see these in the picture. They’re inserted into their storage holes to the right on the board. Just unscrew the larger anvils and put these in and you’re all set to crack smaller nuts. These smaller anvils are what I put on for the hazelnuts. The anvils are concave, allowing you to crack the shells without smashing everything together, which is what happens using the hammer method.

If you are thinking of getting a Master Nut Cracker, be on the watch for the Duke Nutcracker. The Duke is a Chinese knock-off and of lesser quality, according to what I’ve read. Often Chinese look-alikes are inferior and will soon break or be less than enjoyable to use. Do your internet homework and order from Gerald Gardner, developer of the Master Nut Cracker, himself. You will have to send a check to him and the address is on his website, along with the story of how it all came to be. You might want to put a Master Nut Cracker on your Christmas wish list, like I did. Happy cracking!

 

More about my experiences with the Master Nut Cracker at http://www.motherearthnews.com/permaculture/master-nut-cracker.aspx

Growing Calcium

If you were getting most of your food from your garden, the three nutrients you would need to pay particular attention to are calories, protein, and calcium. I’ve already talked about calories and protein, so now I’ll address calcium. The next post (November 27, 2012) will be about something entirely different, I promise. The dairy industry has done a great job of telling people how much calcium is in milk and cheese. Such a great job, in fact, some people might think that’s the only place to get it. You can put calcium on your plate in the form of leafy greens right from your garden. You will also get calcium from the beans you eat.

A vegetable that is loaded with calcium is collards at 921 mg per pound. That translates to 357 mg calcium per cup of cooked collard leaves and stems. By comparison, a cup of whole cow’s milk contains 291 mg and a cup of goat’s milk has 326 mg calcium. Parsley has as much calcium per pound as collards. People don’t usually eat as much parsley as they would collards, but it is something to think about. Everything adds up, so including parsley in your recipes will increase the calcium content of those dishes. Kale is a good source of calcium at 601 mg per pound or 206 mg in 1 cup of cooked kale. These numbers come from How To Grow More Vegetables, 8^th ed, and The New Laurel’s Kitchen.  We usually eat steamed kale and collards with some vinegar added. These greens, along with garlic and/or onions cooked in butter or olive oil, are also good as a topping for mashed potatoes.

With a low tunnel we can grow collards and kale through the winter here, harvesting about once a week at most. The best over wintered collards I’ve grown were in the 12’x20’ greenhouse I had at one time. Once March hits, these crops realize they are in their second year and send up seed stalks. Leaving at least some of these plants go to seed will attract beneficial insects, as well as give you seeds.  You especially need to let your parsley overwinter. It comes back to life early in the spring to put out flowers attracting beneficial insects, just in time to protect the new spring brassica plants in your garden. By the end of March, or even earlier if you are putting them under cover, it is easy enough to have new plants set out.

At Ecology Action in Willits, California they grow perennial collards, otherwise known as tree collards. The summer nights are cooler there than here, and the winters aren’t quite as severe.  Bountiful Gardens occasionally sells tree collards and has more information in their catalog. I’m not sure tree collards would do as well here.

It is good to seek out varieties intended for your region and conditions. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (SESE) sells Green Glaze and Cascade Glaze collards. The smooth leaves are more resistant to cabbage worm and cabbage looper. Even’ Star farm in Maryland has been breeding collard and kale varieties specifically for winter harvest. You can find the Even’ Star varieties at SESE.

There is much more to know about calcium. You need calcium for strong bones and teeth. If you are pregnant and not getting enough calcium, your baby will take it from you. I had a friend who had to have major dental work done each time she was pregnant. No matter how much calcium-laden food you’ve eaten, other factors in your diet can work to block absorption. Not enough fat is one of those factors. You have probably heard that it is important to have enough vitamin D to work with the calcium and you can get vitamin D from being in the sun. However, what you might not know is that D is a fat soluble vitamin, so you need fat as a catalyst to help things along. That means, including some milk and cheese in your diet would be good after all, along with the greens. You could add peanuts and hazelnuts to your crop plan. Peanuts (313 mg/lb) and hazelnuts (948 mg/lb) are sources of calcium and are good sources of fat. I have heard of vegans who suffered broken bones from otherwise minor incidents, as a result of not enough calcium. It might have been not enough calcium absorption.  Sugar consumption and stress will relieve your bones and teeth of calcium, but it is best to avoid sugar and stress for so many reasons anyway. According to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, the best sources of usable calcium are bone broth and dairy products. When that old hen reaches the end of her laying days, make sure you stew up the bones for soup.

Phytates in grains might block calcium absorption. Soaking, fermenting, and sprouting will help prevent that. Soaking oatmeal overnight is a good idea. Not only is it better for mineral absorption in your diet, but if you do that, your breakfast is almost ready. It is already in the pan, just turn it on and let it cook while you make your coffee or whatever it is that you do in the morning.

 It is important that we get our nutrients from the food we eat and that food needs to have been grown in healthy soil. The nutrients in food come naturally packaged with other things necessary for their assimiliation in our bodies. If you rely on supplements, you could be throwing things out of balance. There is so much to know about a healthy diet. Educate yourself and eat a variety of foods from local, sustainable sources.

 

More about Growing Calcium at http://www.motherearthnews.com/permaculture/growing-calcium.aspx.

Growing Protein

When we think of protein foods we normally think of meat, dairy and eggs. However, we can also get protein from plants. Beans and grains contain the most, but there is some protein in all vegetables. Of course, if you depended on a plant-based diet for your protein, you would be wise to look to the concentrated plant sources for your needs, unless you are eating a really large amount of food.

Protein is used by the body for building and maintaining. It stands to reason if you are pregnant or nursing, or have been injured and need to repair tissue, your protein requirements would be higher than the recommended daily allowance of 46 grams/day for women and 56 grams/day for men. In my last post I talked about growing potatoes for needed calories. Potatoes have 7.7 grams of protein per pound, so if you ate a considerable amount of potatoes, you would also be racking up the protein. Carol Deppe spent a winter eating a lot of potatoes and wrote about it at http://caroldeppe.com/ThePotatoBin.html. On the other hand, if you ate corn and beans for protein, you would get about 40 grams of protein for each pound of corn you ate and over 100 grams per pound of dry beans. In addition to potatoes, Deppe grows her own beans and corn. If you are interested in growing a significant part of your diet, her book The Resilient Gardener needs to be on your reading list. 

Protein is made up of amino acids, many of which can be synthesized by the body, if enough nitrogen (protein) is available. However, there are eight amino acids, referred to as essential amino acids, that need to come from the food we eat. Animal sources have all the essential amino acids and plant sources do not. Interestingly enough, the ones the legumes (peas and beans) are lacking are the ones that the grains have plenty of, and vice versa. There are reasons for the traditional meals such as cornbread and beans, tortillas with beans, and beans and rice. Even peanut butter on whole wheat bread serves to give you the right combination. Beans and grains don’t need to be eaten at the same meal to get the benefit, but they both need to be in your diet somewhere.

Besides protein and calories, including grains in your garden plan provides carbon in the form of stalks and straw for compost making, necessary for feeding the soil without bringing compost materials in. In my garden I have straw from wheat and rye in June and from cornstalks in the fall for compost. Besides the straw from wheat and rye, much organic matter is left in the soil from their decomposing roots. The legumes are soil enriching crops, leaving behind nitrogen for the next crop. The most nitrogen is left in the soil if the legume crop is harvested at flowering, as you would if you were growing it only as a compost crop. After that, nitrogen is put toward producing the beans or peas. Nevertheless, some nitrogen stays behind and it is good to have legumes in your rotation.     

Other protein sources from your garden are peanuts and sunflowers seeds.  I harvest peanuts before the frost kills the vines, hanging them in the barn for the peanuts to dry on the vines. I pick off the peanuts when they are ready. You can see that in my DVD Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden. The vines become compost material, but that peanut hay could also feed small livestock. Peanuts and sunflower seeds contain 117.9 and 108.9 grams of protein per pound respectively. These crops also supply needed fat in your diet. In addition, they can be used for cooking oil. More information about that is at my post http://homeplaceearth.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/using-a-piteba-oil-press/. Sunflower stalks, like the cornstalks, are used in the compost. 

In a permaculture garden you might have hazelnut (filbert) trees. Hazelnuts have 57.2 grams of protein per pound. My hazelnuts form a border on the north side of my garden. I wrote about hazelnuts at http://homeplaceearth.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/hazelnuts-filberts-in-my-garden/. Hazelnuts trees can be pruned, with the trimmings feeding your rocket stove. These nuts also provide fat in your diet and can be pressed for oil. 

 Okay, I know you aren’t going to be eating a pound of beans or corn at a meal. In terms more easy to understand, a cup of boiled cowpeas (the beans I grow) has 13.3 grams of protein. I use ½ cup cornmeal, cooked with milk or water for a good-sized serving of cereal. That cornmeal has 5 grams of protein. A thick slice of homemade whole wheat bread has 3.9 grams of protein. A one ounce serving of peanuts has 7.4 grams. By comparison, a cup of milk contains 8 grams of protein and one large egg contains 6.3 grams. 

If you have enough calories in a varied homegrown diet, most likely you are getting enough protein. As you can see, growing grains for compost naturally gives you protein foods. If you were growing a significant part of your diet, you would also be concerned with having enough calcium. That’s the topic for next time.

 

More about Growing Protein at http://www.motherearthnews.com/permaculture/growing-protein.aspx.

Growing Calories

In my last post I wrote about how many more calories you could get if you grew beans and corn out and harvested the dried seeds. If you really wanted to grow a lot of calories in a small space, however, you would take a look at potatoes. The low Biointensive yield shown in the Master Charts of How To Grow More Vegetables (HTGMV) by John Jeavons is 100 pounds per 100 ft². There is an average of 349 calories per pound in potatoes—a little more in russets and less in white potatoes, with red-skinned spuds in the middle. If you were really hard-core in growing your calories, I suppose you would grow the russets at 358 calories per pound rather than the whites at 318, but I don’t care for the russet varieties as much as the others. A yield of 100 pounds, which is the best yield I’ve had, would give you 34,900 calories per 100 ft² bed. Comparing it to the corn that I talked about in that last post, with flour corn at 18,216, potatoes would give you 1.9 times the calories. Looking at the beans, with dried beans at 6,152 calories per 100 ft², growing potatoes would give you 5.7 times the calories in the same space.

In order to get all your calories from potatoes, however, you would have to eat many more pounds of potatoes than either beans or corn. To reach 2,000 calories per day, you would need to eat 5.7 pounds of potatoes, 1.2 pounds of flour corn, or 1.3 pounds of dried beans. Your calorie requirements might even be more than that, depending upon your age, sex, and lifestyle. The weight of the corn and beans is the dried weight. When considering the eating, multiply by 3 for the cooked weight, unless it is made into bread and tortillas, then multiply by 2. Hopefully your diet will be more diverse that just potatoes, corn, or beans, but this is how they would compare.

A man once told me that in survival training in the military, he was told that you could get everything you need from a diet of potatoes and milk. According to nutrition charts, a diet of too many potatoes could be toxic in potassium. On the other hand, if you need potassium, eat more potatoes. Having fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, in your diet would help rid your body of toxins. I think it was in the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price that I read that the people he met in the mountains of Peru ate mostly potatoes dipped in a “gravy” of kaolin clay. The clay would have helped rid the body of toxins. It depends on the soil, climate conditions, and how it is grown, whether a food has certain nutrients or toxins in it. Studying indigenous diets is important if you want to grow all your own food. Our culture has lost some of the practices that were important in bringing food to the table. Sometimes they are the key we need to be successful in our endeavors.

Sweet potatoes are another good calorie crop. They might yield a little less per bed, but have a little more calories per pound. At the low biointensive yield that would mean 30,750 calories per 100 ft². In HTGMV Jeavons designates crops as area-efficient if they produce significant calories per area and weight-efficient if the amount that needs to be eaten for all one’s calories is 9 pounds/day or less. Of course, potatoes head the list of crops that are both area-efficient and weight-efficient. Other crops on the list besides sweet potatoes are Jerusalem artichokes, garlic, leeks, parsnips, and salsify.  The information about area and weight efficiency for these crops is in HTGMV and is available online at http://www.growbiointensive.org/grow_main.html.

You might not be growing all your food, but putting a hearty meal on the table occasionally that consists of only food you have grown is pretty satisfying. Check out my Homegrown Friday posts to see some of my experiences on that in 2011 and 2012. If you have done something similar, by all means, add a comment and tell us about it.

 It is good to know what to grow and prepare that will fill you up. There are so many factors to consider when planning your diet around what you grow. You want to make sure it is a sustainable diet, so while you are growing crops for high yields in some things, you are also growing crops that will feed back the soil. That’s where the grains come in. They are weight-efficient, but not area-efficient when it comes to calories, but they produce a lot of necessary carbon for your compost making. The beans, also, are weight-efficient and not area-efficient. You could, however, grow pole beans up the corn stalks and that would up your yield of calories per 100 ft². Beans and grains pair well together to provide the necessary amino acids that make up protein. I’ll talk about growing protein in the next post. See you then!

 

More about Growing Calories at http://www.motherearthnews.com/permaculture/growing-calories.aspx.