Staple Food Crops

[Steph S]

 Gophers is a new one for staple crop!    Between the deer, moose, rabbit, and other staple eaters I guess  there's always a fall back if they leave you hungry enough.   When I see rabbits about in the oregano, I like to think of them as "self seasoning". 
The only way I can grow any vegs here is by fencing the vegs in small pens, and letting the animals roam through and munch on the perennials.  Moose will steer away from my garlic beds (which they otherwise trample) if I put up a simple rail that they can see.   Row cover, tied on and flapping, is a better all purpose veggie fence than chicken wire or anything like that, here.   Rabbits and squirrels that would find a way through wire stay away from the row cover wrap.  Rats are another story, nothing seems to bother them. 
I have a dream... to build "the great moose bypass"  that is a sort of corridor lined with their favorite things that would channel them happily away from my garden.   Shrubs of all sorts, black currants and evening primrose for the ladies,  an oak or two for the fellas.  Sigh.

[S.Simonsen]

I am in the humid subtropics but we get pretty regular droughts in Australia. Last spring we went for about 7 months without any real rain.

I have trialed just about every grain you can imagine here, but we have clouds of birds of many different species. Amaranth does OK but the germination is finicky (needs high nitrate in soil to get going?) and the yield isnt high enough to be considered a staple. I have a strain of white maize I have developed that is fairly bird resistant but not super reliable since we need wet weather to get it going and dry to harvest a decent quality product, which only happens about every second year. Planting a big crop and getting nothing half the time is pretty off putting. Rice also stands up to birds surprisingly well, and doesnt suffer as much from wet at harvest, but I need to find a simple way to hull it to justify scaling up. Genetic diversity available in rice is pretty limited here as well. Dry legumes also suffer from inconsistent wet/dry cycles, plus a nasty sucking bug that ruins most species, but luckily lima beans have proven themselves worthwhile and I recently found a source for wider genetics to work with. I am also developing seed pumpkin strains from a few different moschata types that grow like weeds here. The low tech production of a high value product that stores easily in a humid climate is a big plus.

Tuber crops seem to be the place to focus for me, though they have issues as well. Potatoes grow really well through our late summer/autumn when we normally get good rain, but storing tubers in our warm climate all through spring and summer without refrigeration is very difficult. Some years I can also grow a spring crop, but if we get a spring drought then I can lose all my stock. I was hopeful of figuring out a way to grow strains from seed to get around this but I am still experimenting. Sweet potato grow very well here but our cracking clay soil makes weevils a major issue, so the crop cannot be relied upon. I am experimenting with other Ipomoea species. Even cassava has a hard time with bandicoots digging up the roots before harvest (even in high cyanide forms). Luckily winged yams and canna do really well here. I am breeding canna and collecting yam diversity to try producing seed. If I can't breed a crop I don't consider it to be a long term staple to rely on. Cocoyam, taro, Calathea allouia and Maranta arundinacea will always only be minor subcrops for this reason. I am considering becoming a starch extraction specialist, since the same equipment that purifies starch from canna can also be used on Typha roots at a different time of year. I am also starting work with Plectranthus as a tuber crop, but need to find a source of P. esculentus to really get going as P. rotundifolius is a bit too water dependent/tropical to do well here.

We also have a few tree staple crops. I am trialing chestnuts but it might be too humid for them to be a major crop here, but preliminary results are pretty good. They mature quickly so I might be able to get somewhere with them. We also have a legume tree called black bean (Castanospermum) that produces huge starchy seeds. They are also packed with toxins that can be removed by roasting and soaking in running water as the natives did. I reckon I could do starch extraction on them instead, similar to how mung beans are turned into starch in Asia, as a way to detoxify instead. We also have the massive bunya nut tree (Araucaria bidwillii) that I am collecting local diversity from, hoping to cross with the related parana pine from Brazil in the future to domesticate the genus. I am also trialling Schotia from south africa, which has fairly large starchy seeds that are meant to be edible after roasting. Macadamia grows like a weed here and I am planting lots of them as an oily nut crop.

[Chance]

I've been mostly experimenting with squashes and less common root crops.  Taro did really well here last year, and we like the taste.  Shrugged off the hot humidity and was super easy to harvest by pulling up the main stem.  I would like to collect some flowering types and try for seed.  I really like yacon as well, and plan to perfect yacon chips for a winter staple.  What I've been focusing on is starting to breed Dioscorea polystachya.  I now have a population with different sexes and chromosome numbers.  D. polystachya is very well adapted to my climate and tastes good.  The issue is the difficulty harvesting, but now I have some types that aren't so troublesome.  Should be a good staple here than can even perennialize in less cultivated parts of the landscape.  I like Apios americana a lot as well for the high protein and flavor.  I'm growing some improved selections and look forward to growing out seedlings and trying some mutation style breeding or graft mutagenesis with them.  Not many people know that Solomans seals/Polygonatum have been used as staple foods both in North America and Asia.  Some species even have large potato like rhizomes.  I'm putting together and population of species that have been used as staples to make inter species crosses.  The goal is to increase vigor and suitability as a good crop.  Polygonatum grows best in 50% shade and is grown as a perennial so occupies an unusual niche for a staple crop.

[Greenie DeS]

Old topic, but a fun one.

I'm in northern British Columbia, Canada: cool short summers, long long cold winters. For me a staple must be reliable with very little work to the point where I can really rely on it no matter what.

I'm trying to determine my starch staples right now: potatoes grow well but they're hard to store where they won't freeze, I'm trying to develop a harvest technique for wheat and barley, squash and corn haven't ripened for me before but I'm working on that.

My calorie/oil staples are currently eggs, goose, and pork; geese are hands down my preference for a low-input system. They transform grass, potatoes, hay, and grain (depending on the season and what's abundant that year) into very cold-resistant packages of oil and meat, and they are charming.

My staple greens are stinging nettles, mint(tea!), and sorrel in spring, and lamb's quarters in summer. Cabbage is the fall staple and gets krauted in the basement along with turnip leaves; if it fails there's kale or some other brassica leaves for the kraut. These don't require more work out of me than I have to give, and they're dead reliable.  I'm trying to work a self-sowing parsley bed into my system but as long as I'm nursing those slow-germinating seeds it doesn't meet the definition.

I really want turnips (and turnip pickles) to be a staple but I have too much vole competition.

Fruits that are staples here, from spring through fall: rhubarb, rose petals, haskap, saskatoon, raspberry, and apple.

[William Schlegel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNR8JfHah00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN6RuFqvOns&t=6s

I found the two above videos about Alik Pelman a professor who has been growing his own food. Wheat, Favas, Olives, and a plot of mixed vegetables. Carob Trees for a sugar source. I think what is remarkable about this is Alik is doing this regularly and in the present. It is a lifestyle choice to have a lower environmental impact. It also seems very culturally and climate appropriate for the region Alik lives in- and would likely work well in other Mediterranean climates around the world. One of the interesting things about Alik's work is that it includes an oil crop and he suggests that is a normal part of similar systems around the world. In my area that might be sunflowers. I think favas and wheat do well here but I don't have a culinary tradition of using favas.

A little over a decade ago Joseph Lofthouse wrote three very interesting articles about survival seed banks

https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/survival-seed-banks-zbcz1312/
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/survival-seed-banks-part-two-zbcz1312/
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/survival-seed-banks-seed-storage-zbcz1401/

https://www.motherearthnews.com/tag/joseph-lofthouse/

One thing that is interesting about Joseph's articles is that Joseph gave very clear instructions on seed quantities needed for a more realistic seed cache- and as far as I can tell none of the companies selling emergency seed supplies has remotely followed that advice. Just continuing on with the types of seed quantities generally done before the article came out.

Since I read those articles about seven or eight years ago, I have been gardening heavily and have generally had a very large seed hoard- easily enough to cover the articles quantities. Though I worry about periodically growing out that seed. I would like to have a chest freezer dedicated to long term seed storage- but I haven't, so I reckon some of my seed may be aging out. I grew out beans the year before last 2022. Saved some sweet corn seed in 2024. Have some fairly recent flour corn seed.

My career has picked back up outside of gardening and I now have less time to devote to gardening. I'm focusing my breeding efforts still on tomatoes so that leaves less time and space for other vegetables. Fortunately, many seeds are long lived. Though not all are! Though looking at what Alik does while continuing an academic career, I wonder if I could manage things a bit differently and actually produce more of my food in the process? Rototilling my garden plots is a very time-consuming affair with the small equipment I have. Alik rents a tractor and gets the big field done quickly.

One side note: maintaining sunchokes, garlic, and parsnip patches around my gardens has been working in a very minimalistic way. They just kind of hang out for the most part and come back on their own. I reckon as long as I keep watering, occasionally disturbing, perhaps sometimes establishing a new patch, and allowing seed set that there will always be those three vegetables available in case I ever want to start gardening them more intensively again.

I think for food security it makes sense to grow regularly the staple foods we eat readily. Wheat, beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), corn, potatoes, and sunflower seeds are all very normal grains and vegetables to eat for me and align well with what I grew up with. It also makes sense to use such normal staple foods in our plant breeding.

If my calculations are correct. It would take just 6.4 lbs. of fava beans to plant the 3500 square feet and 3.5 lbs. of wheat seed to plant the 2153 square feet. These don't seem like insurmountable figures. In this climate, with what I am familiar with growing, I would use sunflower seeds as the oil crop. An acre takes only 3 to 5 lbs. of sunflower seeds to plant and yields about 780 lbs. of seed.  A 20th of an acre or 2178 square feet would yield 39 lbs. of sunflower seeds. That might be a bit light, but it might also be an interesting place to start. It might not be necessary to actually press them into oil to eat them either. I would say my garden is currently about 16,976 square feet and at 750 meters squared Alik's is 8073 square feet. So, in theory I might be able to emulate Alik in half the garden space I currently employ. Though Alik devotes 140 meters squared or 1506 square feet to vegetables and just 50 meters squared or 538 square feet to oil production. So, if 2178 square feet of sunflowers were planted that would make my total 152 meters squared more or 902 square meters or 9709 square feet. Moreover, the vegetable patch could include tomatoes. So, in theory I could make my garden much smaller and still do what Alik does. I'm not sure though what my yields would be given my shallow soil. I also have quite a bit of land outside of my gardens and it isn't entirely non-productive. There is an asparagus patch, parsnips, some limited fruit, and some sunchokes outside of my current garden boundaries.

Though I assume Alik's figures are for one person, so for my family of three we would need presumably 3x that. Not an insurmountable figure- I think at its height my garden was 3/4 of an acre or 32,000 square feet which is roughly the right size for 3x. I think for curiosities sake I wouldn't want to try that- at least not right away. However, I think to be sustainable this would need to be less work than it is for me currently. More efficient tillage might be helpful.

If you wanted to replace the favas and a portion of the wheat with beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), corn, and potatoes the yield of beans is about 227 lbs. or 104 kg as it would be in the same space for the 84 kg of favas. Painted Mountain corn (bred in Montana) runs about 50 to 70 bushels to the acre as opposed to 48 for wheat. Potatoes yield about 10 tons per acre. The book "How to Grow More Vegetables" says that using their methods which involve double digging that it only takes 1200 square feet to grow enough potatoes for one person's total calories. Though that would take eating 6.7 lbs. of potatoes a day and they recommend no more than 2.5 lbs. I suspect especially in my soils that the actual yield would be much lower, but still potatoes are an extremely efficient staple crop. One that it doesn't necessarily make economic sense to grow in the home garden because they are so cheap from the store- but still a very interesting crop because of their cultural acceptance hereabouts and their efficiency.