D payne

For us in the Pacific Northwest, our biggest payback crops are dry beans, potatoes, kale, apples, winter squash, garlic, and lettuce and chard. And strawberries, kiwi berries, raspberries, and blueberries. Eggs from chickens were fun and high quality but purchasing chicken feed made them equal in cost to buying eggs, with much more effort required.

Payback can be thought of in terms of money saved or labor saved, and nutritional value.
Potatoes, winter squash, dry beans (Cherokee Trail of Tears is most productive for us), garlic, and (some varieties of) apples store with little effort. Kale is well suited to our climate and can grow pretty much year round, so doesn't require processing other than cooking. Plus it will seed itself easily. Chard doesn't grow year round, usually, but it has a very long season and will also seed itself. Lettuce does require starting seeds and transplanting, and slug protection, but it is otherwise easy and with good timing & winter protection, can be grown nearly all year. Plus lettuce seed is easy to save.

Apples require some effort, and time for trees to mature, but they store well, are easy to dry or turn into apple sauce, and hard cider, and then vinegar too.

I have thought that one could live fairly healthy on kale, potatoes, dry beans, and apples. Although that could get monotonous!

In terms of money, fruits, greens, and processed foods like salsa and pickles payback the most in dollars. This year our cucumber harvest was almost nothing, and my spouse loves pickles, so we will spend money on those. We will can enough salsa this year to not have to buy it, even buying peppers and onions to put in it.

We've had trouble with root crops other than potatoes, but onions, carrots, beets, radishes, and turnips would be excellent staple crops too. Maybe if I have another 30 years I can learn the key to those.

Hazelnuts too. We have mature hazelnut trees but the squirrels and jays seem to get most of them. I know there are viable nuts because we have them sprouting all over the garden. But only one year out of 10 have we harvested many good ones.

a couple of years ago I tried making pumpkin/squash enchilada sauce. It came out great! I checked out a cookbook from the library on Enchiladas, and learned that just about anything can be turned into enchilada sauce.
Add peppers, paprika, or chili powder, not too spicy, onions, garlic, cooked squash, and any other spices you'd like. Broth or water to make it pourable. Enchiladas made with our home grown black beans and corn tortillas (purchased) were popular with the family. I freeze it as it isn't acidic enough to can without a pressure canner.

"Living in Finland, between climate and lack of greenhouse I lack the ability to grow corn myself at this time."

Why not grow rye? We also grow rye and it is far more adapted to our wet northern climate than most varieties of corn are. Rye makes wonderful tasting bread, you must have plenty of rye breads in Finland! It also is easy to grind on our grain mill. Rye roots are very good for soil too, and it provides lots of straw as well as grain.

Check out http://theryebaker.com for wonderful rye bread recipes.

We've grown Cascade Ruby Gold, it does well in the Pacific Northwest and is beautiful. It is great for tortillas and polenta, but as a flint corn it is more difficult to grind on our bicycle grain mill. Slower! For cornmeal and growing we've had the best results with Nothstine Dent, a softer, yellow dent corn which grinds easily and is very tasty. Also very early and productive in our garden.
But there are so many varieties to try... we've also grown orange-red dent corn, (Victory Seeds) and it is very tasty, sweet, but was less productive. I'd like to try some blue/black flour or dent corns, and that beautiful lavender Mandan flour corn.

We have set up a Country Living Grain mill as bicycle powered too. They manufacture the mill so that a V-belt can easily be put on the wheel. We have an old bicycle set up on a bike trainer, purchased at a used sports supply shop. I can grind a quart of wheat, rye, or corn in ten minutes or less. That is about 700-500 grams. Dent or flour corn is much easier than flint corn, that takes a bit longer to grind. Three quarts of wheat or rye berries is enough for me to bake three large loaves of bread, just what fits in my oven and is enough for our small household for about two weeks. The ones we won't eat within a few days go into the freezer. It is more efficient with my time and the energy used by the oven to bake that much at once. The flour is fairly coarse but it makes fabulous bread. Sometimes I sift it if I want finer flour for pasta or piecrust.

One thing I've learned about whole wheat bread baking is that whole wheat requires more water than white flour, and longer ferment (rise, proof) times. I recommend looking at the Bread Lab's recipes https://breadlab.wsu.edu/recipes/.
Mark Bittman's new bread book gives very good information on no knead, long ferment whole wheat bread making. I prefer to mix (and knead) bread by hand to get a sense of what it should feel like to rise well. A classic whole grain bread book is Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book which has been around  a long time, should be easily available used. She very thoroughly goes through the basics of working with whole wheat, describing what the dough should feel like and look like (the window pane test!)

Fresh ground and home baked whole wheat or rye bread is really fabulous. Much better than most of what we can buy. And much less expensive.

I highly recommend this series of articles (now 4) on nitrogen by Ian Angus:
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/10/25/disrupting-the-nitrogen-cycle-articles-on-a-major-metabolic-rift/

(These are part of a larger series on "metabolic rifts": how humans have disrupted natural cycles.)

Joshua, your use of the term "fixed" is confusing to me. I have seen it used only in reference to the soil bacteria that take in N2, atmospheric nitrogen gas, and convert it ("nitrify") to plant available form in the soil. Basically, as I understand it, these bacteria take in the N2 and use it for their own body processes, and for those bacteria with a symbiotic plant relationship, offer it as nitrate of ammonium to the partner plant. Excess N is excreted so is then available to other plants.

The danger of excess, human applied N, is that it is leached into groundwater where it becomes a pollutant, or is released into the atmosphere as Nitrous Oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. There may be other ways excess N pollutes that I'm not yet aware of.

I've been studying soil and the Nitrogen cycle, as a Master Gardener, so that I am better able to advocate for soil care and regeneration.
My education was not science, so it has been and is a challenge for me to understand the chemistry.

Here is a link to several webinars posted by the Organic Farming Research Foundation, narrated by Dr Mark Shonbeck:
https://eorganic.org/node/27448
Dr Shonbeck has a wonderful ability to take these complex concepts and present them in a way that I can understand (or at least begin to understand) them.

I recommend scrolling down the page to "Soil Biology for the Western Region: Organic Practices to Recruit and Nurture Beneficial Biota in the Soil" and to "Breeding New Cultivars for Soil-enhancing Organic Cropping Systems in the Western Region".

Here's my primitive understanding of the N cycle in the soil:

Atmosphere is 78% N in the form of Nitrogen gas, N2. This is a very stable form of nitrogen, not easily transformed. Only lightening, certain nitrifying soil bacteria, and the Haber-Bosch process (which is very energy intensive, and polluting) can transform this form of N into plant available forms. Once in the soil, the N forms are more labile, or dynamic, and get taken up and transformed by the soil organisms, and plant roots. Soil fauna hold N in their bodies (immobilize) until their body is taken in by some other organism, which releases the N in its excretions to a plant available form (nitrate or ammonium). Anaerobic conditions are suitable for other bacteria to release it to the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, several hundred times more potent than
CO2. There are also aerobic denitrifying bacteria that convert N back to the stable gas N2, and release it back into the atmosphere.

Excess nitrogen is either released back into the atmosphere or leached through the groundwater, which leads to dead zones in our waterways. About 50% of agriculturally applied N is wasted in the US, which means it becomes a pollutant. Synthetic N is bad news for soil biology and our atmosphere and hydrosphere. It tends to create acidic soil conditions, and what seems even worse to me, excess N in the soil causes the plant–microbe mutual relationship to diminish. Plants overfed N (and other nutrients) loose the ability to partner with beneficial microbes (including fungi) in the soil.

In the webinar about breeding cultivars for organic production, Dr Shonbeck explains this.

Here's another article which is part 1 of 2 on explaining the N cycle, part 2 describes the human impact on disrupting the N cycle.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/04/18/nitrogen-crisis-a-neglected-threat-earths-life-support-systems/

One late planted cover crop that works well for me is mache (corn salad or valerianella locusta). It isn't deep rooted or high biomass producing, but it sprouts and grows quickly, and if sown thickly enough competes well with weeds. It will prevent soil erosion and at least keeps the soil microbes fed with its living roots. It can be picked all winter (at least in my climate) for delicious salad greens. There are valerianella genus native species for the North American continent too, if you can find seeds for them. High Mowing Seeds, Fedco, and probably Johnny's Seeds sell bulk quantities of the usual garden species.

Other quick growing cover seeds I like to include in my winter cover crops include the quicker salad brassicas, like arugula, broadleaf cress, and upland cress, and of course mustards. They grow fast and will feed you well too. They are faster than daikon radishes.

Fave beans are among the cover crops that can be planted very late in the Pacific NW, I don't know about CO. They sprout in cool conditions. What about red clover? It may not grow until spring but if planted now it may survive as very small seedlings. Find a variety adapted to your area.

The newest research on cover crops emphasizes planted mixes of species. You are then providing food for a wider diversity of microbes, and besides, if one species fails, something else besides weeds is likely to survive. Look up Gabe Brown, Jill Clapperton, or Ray Archuleta on you tube. There are also some great videos on building soil at LivingWebFarms.org

I love all these ideas for squash/pumpkin recipes.

When we have lots I put it into almost everything. Cornbread made with pureed squash as most of the liquid is delicious, no need to add any other sweetener to the batter. Likewise for any pancake recipe. Another use I found for winter squash is "marmellata di zucca" or pumpkin jam. Pureed squash, orange juice & zest (or lemon), cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc, a bit of honey or syrup, and then slowly cooked and evaporated like you would apple butter. I did mine in my "bake oven" which is a bread/pizza/cook oven above the firebox of the masonry heater. It can get up to 200° F just from the heat of the firebox below. A crock pot would work too, with the lid cracked open to let moisture escape. Or very low heat on the stove. Needs to be stirred occasionally. If the squash is sweet enough it doesn't require additional sugar or honey. I make it in smallish amounts with leftover puree and then freeze it. It is good used like jam or even added to morning cereal instead of fruit.

Would love a recipe for pickled pumpkin! My guess is it might be similar to pickled crab apples? kind of sweet and sour?

Hans Quistorff wrote:You may be looking for alternative flour. I raise hull less  seed pumpkins and dehydrate the flesh to make pumpkin flour. Sliced 14 inch thick or french fry shape they dry to 1/16th inch and can be whized into flour as needed in a coffee mill or blender. The slices can also be seasoned with pumpkin pie spice and eaten as chips.
Each time I open one [they average 15 pounds] I dehydrate what I don't use immediately and by spring I have that stash to eat until the next harvest.

Do you dehydrate the raw squash? Last year I dehydrated  lots of winter squash but my recipe from the Excalibur dehydrator book recommended par-boiling it. It was very time consuming as well as energy intensive. I'd prefer dehydrating it raw if it works. I don't think that my squash is quite dry enough to turn into powder/flour either.