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.
Cindy,
I believe research reports that the typical Irish diet (peasant diet, no doubt) before the great potato famines consisted on average of 10 pounds of potato per day. Pre-famine, that diet apparently was sufficient.
Thanks for your nuggets of data for garden planning.
Bill
Cindy,
Here is a mostly homegrown recipe I made this week. I found it on Sharon Astyk’s blog and is called West African Sweet Potato Soup. I’m not much of a recipe follower so my ‘throw it all in one pot’ adaptation goes something like this:
Saute some onions, garlic and jalapeno in some olive oil. Add some diced sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes and julienned green beans with enough canned tomato sauce and water to cover. Boil until veggies are done. Add peanut butter (about 1/2 cup for a pot of soup), cumin, salt and pepper. Stir well to mix in the peanut butter and it’s done.
For the batch I made a couple days ago, I used just picked walking onions and jalapenos, 2012 elephant garlic, sweet and Irish potaotes and green beans and my last jar of 2011 tomato sauce. I didn’t grow peanuts this year so the pb, and spices were purchased. I used olive oil for this batch but have just added the finely chopped onions and such to the other veggies and boiled them without the saute step. It came out fine.
My family is slowly learing to eat what I can grow in regard to calorie crops. I don’t know if that is a challenge for others but it is for me. Growing white sweet potaotes (Nancy Halls, especially) has helped as they are easy to substitute for Irish potatoes. I grew some dry corn for meal this year and the first batch of cornbread was a tasty addition to a mostly homegrown chili dinner. Do you know which peppers to grow to make homemade chili powder? That would help bring our chili all the way home.
Thanks!
Vicky in VA
Vicky, that sounds good! Our work isn’t done until we can get this food all the way to the table in a way our families will eat it. My children are grown, so the only regular fussy eater at the table is my husband–and he’s come a really long way over the years. The kids have become suporters of local/homegrown food now, rather than wondering why the food on our table is different than the manufactored food they see elsewhere. I don’t know much about hot peppers. The years I grew them, I would dry them on a string, then crush a pepper into the chili. About your cornmeal–you could put that cornbead batter into a cornstick pan, which is interesting, or make cornmeal mush. Cooked with milk it was called Hasty Pudding in the Little House on the Prairie books. Sweet potatoes don’t need to pretend they are anything else. Cut them into “fries” and give them a coat of olive oil. Bake the sweet potato fries for 45-60 minutes at 350. Everyone should like those. You can add herbs if you want. Mashed sweet potatoes are good with a pat of butter. Sweet potatoes, greens (kale, collards, or chard), and cowpeas are regulars on the table through the winter. They might make their first appearance as separate dishes. Then you could layer them to make a “lasagna”, maybe substituting tortillas for the noodles. Throw in some spaghetti sauce and maybe some cheese. I like cowpeas with just some butter and salt, but my husband puts barbecue sauce on them–at least he eats them. We usually top the greens with vinegar.
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Hi Cindy,
We will be planning on planting some calories this coming year. I wanted to know how you handle planting potatoes using the wide row method? I’m just trying to figure out how I’m going to hill up the potatoes in the row when my permanent rows are 4ft. wide.
You can plant the potatoes in two rows down your 4′ bed, which will leave plenty of room to hill them up. Or, you could plant them hexagonally at about 12″ between each spud and add mulch, such as leaves. The mulch takes the place of hilling.
If I plant in a hexagonal pattern how many potato slips would I need for 4′ X 48′ row?
Thank you.
You’ll have to figure that out yourself. I generally plant them 12 inches apart. You have to decide if the first row across the 4′ bed is four plants, do you want the next row to be a bit crowded with 4 plants or just put three, and so on. You can work it out on graph paper with everything equidistant. I talk about his in my garden plan DVD.
We don’t have a basement, cellar, or root cellar. Do you have any recommendations for saving the potatoes? I figure we’ll be eating regular potatoes for the summer, and then sweet potatoes for the winter, so they wouldn’t have to last for a whole year necessarily. For our canned goods I typically put them in crates and slide them under the kids beds, the beds are the farthermost point from the wood stove.
Denise, you’ll get some ideas for that from my post https://homeplaceearth.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/finding-places-to-store-the-harvest/