The Most Food for the Time & Space

The source I am familiar with is the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. They are a wonderful, ethical business, but I see that they do not ship slips internationally. There are probably tutorials online somewhere on making your own. I don't know if you would have time this year or not. I've reached the end of my knowledge about this....but the folks at Southern exposure or the extension service for one of the southern states might be a good place to look for information.

Lisa Brunette wrote:

I met a fellow garden blogger who's interested in permaculture and local to me, and we discussed a wide range of topics over the course of two in-person visits and many back-and-forth email conversations between spring 2020 and spring 2021. The result is a three-part Q&A series I wrote for Cat in the Flock that covers the topics voluntary simplicity, suburban homesteading, and getting the most food for the time and space in your garden.

Claire Schosser writes Living Low in the Lou, a blog chronicling her and her husband Mike's journey of reduced energy consumption and self-sufficiency. She opted for early retirement back in the mid-1990s (with Mike following in 2001) by reducing their expenses through living simply, growing much of their own food, and forgoing many of the shiny new conveniences that the rest of us take as givens. For those outside the area, "the Lou" is a popular nickname for St. Louis, Missouri. The Schosser/Gaillard homestead is located on a one-acre plot in suburban St. Louis and includes many mature, productive nut and fruit trees, an extensive annual garden, an herb garden, and a glassed-in front porch that functions as a greenhouse.

The last post in the series focuses on Claire's strategy for becoming as self-sufficient as possible by making gardening decisions based on "the most food in the time and space."



Claire and Mike's gardening highlights:

- A very productive strawberry patch
- Perennial leeks and 'Profusion' sorrel
- Eschewing high-space hoggers like peas
- Dent corn as the primary grain
- A traditional cellar storage system



Curious to know how others of you have edited your gardening plans for maximum yield as well as practice and personal taste. Note Claire started out with a huge asparagus bed but then discovered she and her husband just weren't going to make use of it the way she'd envisioned. While certain grains might sound fun to grow, perhaps Claire's realization that grinding dent corn is the best option for her resonates with other permies out there? What are your thoughts on all of this?

UPDATE: We've migrated the blog to a new URL, and this post (as well as the other 2 in the series) is now over there: The Most Food for the Time and Space

The most food in the least amount of space?  Sweet potato (leaves while growing and roots when done), true yam, and peanuts for roots.  Dewberry, blueberries and grapes for fruit.  Broccoli (leaves, heads, shoots for months), kale( dies back during hot weather so you can plant around it but then comes back in fall), field peas : they just grow right up my ornamental trees, and when I harvest them I make sure to drop a few for next year.
Things that take up too much space for the output but are worth it; peas!  They rarely even make it into the house because they taste so good!  Tomatoes; really have to work hard for tomatoes here but they taste so good that I spend a lot of time knocking leaf footed bugs and stinkbugs into a glass of soapy water and cackling madly!

Cherry/current/grape sized tomatoes.
It snowed here yesterday,  my wife harvested a basket of tomatoes the day before that.
I planted a lot of them , but many of them were volunteers.
I expect many more volunteers year.
That same space grew volunteer squash and lots of cucumbers.

Squash is our future, because it has proven to be easy to grow and store.

Someone mentioned they grow soup peas instead of beans, and others have mentioned the space peas take up.
I'm thinking the peas could occupy a space that will grow sweet potatoes once things got warmer, since one of these plants wilts in the heat and the other shrinks from the cold.
Both provide greens in addition to the storable harvest, so this could be a very thematic bed.

It's been a few says since it snowed and we are still harvesting.
I've been baking the tomatoes in a casserole dish along with a stick of  butter and 2 to 3 onions.

If you are serious about growing the most calories in the smallest space and in a closed loop sustainable way, you should read John Jeavons book "How to Grow More Vegetables". He has been working on this for 50 years, conducting trials in California and several other countries where food security is critical.

You might also want to read some of the ebooklets they have put out. They go into a lot more detail in the design process in booklet 31. I wouldn't start there. I would start with his regular book, which I mentioned above.  I also really recommend the newest booklet 38.

http://growbiointensive.org/ePubs/index.html

In summary Jeavons recommends allotting  30% of diet crop area to high calorie root crops. There are only a handful of them... potatoes, sweet potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, garlic, leeks, satisfy, parsnips.

Then, in order to grow your own compost, allot 60% of area to cereal grains like corn, sorghum, Amaranth, quinoa, wheat, rye, millet, etc.

The remaining 10% are for veggies. Beans would be considered a part of this area. Also peanuts. Even Cassava would be in this group. It is high calorie, but takes more space than potatoes, for example.

To answer your question in the shortest way possible, the 30% special root crops will produce the most calories per area. However they don't have enough carbon material to create compost. Nor do they make a complete diet. That's the reason for the other 60% and 10% areas. Jeavons has found that the smallest area needed to do all this is between 1000-4000 sf per person.

BTW, I was shocked when I went through all the charts recently and found that not even nut trees can produce as many calories as these root crops on a per square foot basis

Potatoes! You get a lot of calories out of them, and you just need to keep adding mulch or dirt over the plants. No weeding is usually required, and potatoes are full of calories and nutrients.

Of course, potatoes are pretty cheap to buy. I like to grow mine in the less desirable (shadier) places in my garden. They don't produce as much, but they do produce and don't take much work, and I can grow more valuable crops in the sunnier areas.