Biggest payback permaculture foods... short and long term

Hi Carl,

I am an enthusiastic cook and am excited to see what you have to share with us.

My question is: What would you say are the 3 or 4 foods you'd encourage someone in Zone 4 (northern Vermont) to plant to fill cupboards with food? Both in the short term and the long term - two separate list probably.

What do you find yourself preparing the most from your permaculture plantings? (Most often OR most volume).

Leaning towards plant based because we are currently lacto-ovo vegetarian (though we very well may move towards adding some meat to our diet in the future, but currently don't have animals).

Thanks,
Kelly in Vermont

Hi Carl,

I am an enthusiastic cook and am excited to see what you have to share with us.

My question is: What would you say are the 3 or 4 foods you'd encourage someone in Zone 4 (northern Vermont) to plant to fill cupboards with food? Both in the short term and the long term - two separate list probably.

What do you find yourself preparing the most from your permaculture plantings? (Most often OR most volume).

Leaning towards plant based because we are currently lacto-ovo vegetarian (though we very well may move towards adding some meat to our diet in the future, but currently don't have animals).

Thanks,
Kelly in Vermont

Hi Kelly thanks for this great question.

I'm not an expert in Zone 4. Here in North Wales we're at Zone 9 and that's despite the fact that we're 10 degrees further north than you. The Gulf Stream does us a big favour.

With that said, here's some thoughts that I hope deal with both your points.

For the long term, I'd recommend fruit and nut trees if you have the space. A quick google search tells me that there are varieties that will withstand your climate and stockists to supply locally provenanced stock.

The most valuable crops I use the most often I'd say were the green leafy vegetables of one kind or another. Here I am moving over to grow mostly perennial varieties of kale/collard/cabbage but I'm not sure that many of these will survive your winter. However, sowings of annual varieties cropped during the growing season and with a fall final harvest would be excellent. They can be preserved easily and I favour fermentation methods for this. I wouldn't be without salad leaves and various herbs. Here I can grow them year round using a polytunnel, but for spring to fall I get a huge amount of value out of these easy to grow crops.

Also, I think a wide variety of root crops for flavour, texture and colour variation. You may need a 'clamp' or cold store to keep these over winter to use fresh. However, Eliot Coleman (Four-Season Harvest) says:

In the frigid mountains of Vermont...only five crops - spinach, scallions, mache, claytonia and carrots - will be dependably harvestable all winter from a cold frame...

so some form of protection of a cold frame or polytunnel may be helpful to you if you have space.

I think the summer and winter squashes are a must have. They are tasty, versatile and relatively easy to grow. I spent an October on an expedition in Nova Scotia and was astonished to see nearly every house with dozens of squashes curing outside. It's a similar latitude and climate (I think) to Vermont and hopefully should do well for you.

I would look to find varieties of peas and beans that would grow well for you. The green veg will be grand during the summer and can easily be preserved by canning or fermenting for over winter. If you want to grow peas/beans for drying, you'll need some space to make this worthwhile.

I see you are a forager too and I think that foraged foods make up a significant proportion of what we eat. I love the change of mindset from seeing many of them that are normally regarded as a 'problem' to being a 'resource'. They are low management and just cost the time to pick, I love 'em.

I hope that's a help

Yes thank you. I'm always interested to hear what folks find they are REALLY using from their food forests or other permaculture plantings. Sometimes I am surprised to find that something I think of as a minor food someone else uses extensively.

At this point for us the largest harvest probably are the wild edibles I forage... Wild Leeks (Ramps), greens like- stinging nettles, dandelion; Milk weed is a prolific producer here and in season we have it every other day for about 3 weeks (leaving plenty for the monarch butterflies); wild mushroom - variable but can be prolific (I also have mushroom bolts I've inoculated, a little more reliable); glean apples, from neighbors yards and wild trees (much of that preserved as Hard Cider - yum). Most of the plantings hazelberts, apples, pears, gooseberries, currants, grapes, hops, hardy kiwi, plum, blue berry are all tiny trees and plants and will move into production over the next 2 to 8 years.

We have good luck overwintering Kale here and are able to harvest from under plastic into December and January - under the snow. I usually cover at least one patch of younger plants in the fall, hoping for winter harvest... works about half the time. This year mice and moles or something moved in and beat me to most of it. Kale from the freezer is one of our mainstays and this year I dried kale for the first time. I have a gallon jar of crispy Kale leaves. I remove a few every week into a smal jar (to keep it crisp and avoid opening the main jar too often) and keep by the stove. I crush a handful into all kinds of dishes, especially a quick Asian soup I throw together for lunch. The moisture from the food usually is enough to reconstitute the greens.

I also leave all my Kale plants in the ground a the end of the season. In Vermont they die back completely to the ground but often I get a number of plants sending up sprouts in the spring from last years roots. I leave the best and most convenient of these (sometimes even transplanting to another spot) for early greens - they are out earlier than we can plant in the open and can take a frost or even a freeze in the spring. By the time the annual plantings of greens are coming along, the Kale has bolted (these 2nd year plants don't have large leaves.. they're fine for an early harvest but don't produce much volume) I let it go to seed and then as I need the space I pull the plants and shake the seeds all over the garden area. I have volunteer Kale everywhere, it picks its best spot and I let it go there or transplant to where I want them. I haven't "planted" Kale in 5 years. For me learning to leave it so it can self seed means that it is practically a perennial.

Favorite way to eat kale? Fry a little garlic in olive oil, throw in chopped kale, toss to coat with oil and then splash in enough water to steam, salt well. Ahhhh.

-Kelly

I am in NH and I am about to start my second year gardening using permaculture.

Last year I had a single volunteer butternut squash growing in the compost pile. It produced 7 squashes with zero work on my part.
I am still eating last year's green beans. Pole beans are prolific and don't take up a lot of room.
I am looking forward to asparagus next year. I love the stuff and it is pricey in the stores.
Growing your own cooking herbs and salad greens is a great ROI. They are easy to grow and cost a fortune in the stores.
Raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries are so easy to grow in the north east.
Mushrooms, honey, and nuts, are all great foods that are expensive to buy.

Judging from my experience years ago in MI, the white potato should definitely be on your list of staple crops. Though they are an annual and need well-prepared, rich soil, the yield per area planted is rewarding and they will store easily in a cool location right through your winter.

Asparagus would be right up there on my list.  I gorge myself while it's available, and then I also pickle lots. This year, I was able to donate to the food shelf and give lots to friends, too.   I am also pretty enamoured with peaches, now that my tree has produced for a few years.  I can straight peaches to use in my yogurt for breakfast or to bake with, I've made peach salsa that I use as a side dish, I've made peach wine and of course, ate plenty fresh off of the tree and gave many away to friends. My tree is a Red Haven, which ripens in mid September after the apples, which always seems odd to me, but it is a time when there is sort of a break between earlier and later fruit, so the timing is convenient! While I grow 50 different kinds of fruit, these two are my MVP's.

It is 11 years later since I posted on this thread and I have learned few things.  To sum things up 3 or 4 crops won't cut it.  Not everything has a good year every year.  Just when I think I have gotten everything figured out the garden does something new to frustrate and challenge me. .  We have bumper crops and crop failures and my garden is designed to account for that.  My cooking and food preservation skills have developed to also handle the variation.  I am at the point that my garden produces 75% to 100% of the vegetables we eat in a year.  It also produces about half the fruit we eat in a year and a tiny amount of nuts we eat in a year.  We also keep laying hens for compost production as much as the eggs.  


What the best crops you can grow is not only what will thrive in your garden but what you can preserve in format that you will be happy to eat weeks or months from now. Water bath and pressure canning, dehydrating, freezing, fermenting, and basement/root cellar storage, are all methods I use to eat what we have produced this year.  The need to preserve so much food in a two and a half month marathon every year has skewed my gardening choices over the years.   We fresh eat out of the garden May through October but leaves 6 months of figuring out how to avoid supermarket produce.  

Fruit Trees
We have lost so many to cold winters, storm damage, and disease that I now only buy them on dwarf root stock and treat them as shrubs that need periodic replacement.  With the variability of our last spring frost date we have to plan for no fruit on large percentage of our trees. I compensate by planting early, middle, and late producing plants of any type.  Pest pressure is a big issue with fruit trees here.  Woodchucks, voles, porcupines, racoons, deer, and all the endless bug damage make fruit trees hard work.  These are all real problems in my fenced in garden.  The deer are tend to jump the fence in drought years so they are not too much of a problem.  We have apples, pears, peaches that have produced fruit. We have a few other things that have not been successful yet so time will tell.

Vines.  
We have 3 grape vines and only one of the 3 does well in any given year.  We get grapes every year but it is not the same variety each year.  Also they ripen at different times so the not so good producers still give us enough for snacking.  
Our hardy kiwi just started producing last year and we picked a couple of gallons of fruit off of it this fall.  It is our lates fall fruit.  

Shrubs and Canes.
These are the big winners in my garden for fruit production.  Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, high bush cranberries, elderberries, aronia berries, currants, and gooseberries, are all easy for me to grow and hard to kill.  I can go out in the yard and snack on some kind of berry from early July to the end of September with periodic larger harvests for preserving.  The ROI is great as long as you are around the beat the birds to the harvest.  

Strawberries are fantastic as long as you propagate them and plant them in a place that you cat likes to hang out.  The patch that has the least pest pressure is right near my front door where my cat can hang out under the rhubarb leaves and chase the chipmunks and birds. It is also ground cover in my blueberry patch. Both the blueberries and strawberries enjoy wood chip mulch.   If I plant strawberries in my lower garden beds the critters get most of the berries.   I have one rhubarb plant that I neglect and it largely is a shady hang out spot for my cat in the strawberry/blueberry patch.  Rhubarb is easy to grow but I rarely use it.

Asparagus I am still trying to figure out how to keep it happy and thriving.  It is something I am finding I need to plant more of every 5 years or so.  I love it and I am hoping to get to a point where we grow enough to excess to preserve.

Bunching and walking onions. I love having these in the garden.  If you just harvest the green leaves they are some of the first and last greens to be harvested in my garden every year.

Hazelnuts.  These have just started producing and I need to figure out how to beat the chipmunks and squirrels. to the harvest.  They are burying the nuts so this year we started finding seedlings so I am not too worried about the lack of hazelnuts.   We also planted Chincapins last year and they survived but are still years away from producing anything.  

Herbs.
Creeping thyme, sage, chives, garlic chives, oregano, mints, dill, winter savory, lovage,  lemon balm, catnip and horseradish are all thriving to the point where they are becoming invasive and a weed problem in parts of my garden.  I am thrilled to have this problem.

Annual plantings beyond what we eat fresh through the season. Anything that is easy to save seeds is an easy win.  Anything that is hard to find or expensive in my local supermarkets is a priority in my garden plan.  

Easy to grow and easy to store in a New England basement include music garlic, storage onions, short season sweet potatoes, and butternut squash. We also grow Delicata squash but that is not always successful and doesn't store as long as butternut squash.  Potatoes are harder to grow due to pests and disease here so I prefer to buy them locally in the fall and store them.  

Canning vegetables.
Upstate Oxheart Tomatoes, Jalapenos, Beaver Dam Peppers, Serrano, Peppers, Cayenne peppers,  bell peppers, pickling cucumbers, onions, garlic.  This covers the tomato based sauces, salsa, relish, BBQ sauces, and chili that I put up every year.

Fermenting vegetables garlic, cucumbers, and cabbage.  

Frozen vegetables that I grew include  green beans, bell peppers, broccoli, tomatillos, Red Russian Kale, spinach, snap peas, and Perpetual Spinach Chard. Basil and garlic scapes gets made into pesto and frozen in 8 oz jelly jars.  I will also caramelize a large batch of onions that I know won't store well and freeze them in 4 oz jelly jars to use for quick meals.      If I have slightly damaged root crops that won't store I will blanch and freeze them. So I wind up with some carrots, celeriac, and parsnips in the freezer every fall.  

Root veggies like carrots, celeriac, and parsnips are currently stored in the refrigerator, frozen, or dehydrated for soup if I have had an better than expected yield.  

Excess herbs, green onions, zucchini, summer squash, garlic scapes, carrots, celeriac, fruits, berries, and peppers,  get dehydrated to use over the winter too.  

I love dual purpose veggies.  Celeriac stems and leaves get dehydrated for soups and stock.  Rattlesnake pole beans are eaten as green beans till I have enough in the freezer and the rest ripen and are harvested as pinto beans.  

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.

Shall we put soil itself on the long term list?  It’s a byproduct of many permaculture growing practices, and it improves future production, same way a fruit tree produces more with the passing years.

Kate, what a wonderful post.  Yes, you made many great points, especially that not everything will thrive every year! Last year, my concord grapes didn't do well at all.  They'd been giving me fruit for over 40 years, so I can't complain, but after reading on line, I cut them back to stumps.  I was worried for a while, because there wasn't any sign of life, but then they exploded.  Next year, I should have grapes again. Always associate with fond memories of childhood and I love their flavor.

It's amazing what permaculture forces you to learn.  I love it.  I started canning and dehydrating, making wine and medicine because of it.  Just yesterday, I harvested the quince and canned a lot.  It's lovely to can when it's cooler out; not so much fun when it's 90 out!  I even got a freeze dryer.  They just came out with a kitchen model which seems much improved from the one I have. I've learned how to prune and propagate plants.  I've learned that wood chips and leaves really are miraculous. I've learned to eat seasonally and to appreciate plants in every season. I've also learned that you have to figure in harvesting and processing to the time that this method of gardening takes.  That is the lion's share of my time.  I love the principle that talks about observation.  I ordered many aluminum benches, chairs and bistro sets that I then put together and  have around the property in strategic places. I think I have at least 15 spots on my one acre where I've placed seating areas and I use every one of them.  They provide respite when working, a place to put my tools, but mainly a place to enjoy the fruits of my labor.  I can just rest, listen to the birds, watch nature at work, and get a new perspective--usually, we look at a garden from the outside in, but my benches, etc. are in the garden looking out (easier for mowing!) It literally is a different perspective and I get some of my best ideas that way. You know that permaculture principle about "Problems are Solutions"?  So true.  I could list many such examples, but sitting and observing has always led me to finding the answers.

I just had my 20x40 inground pool removed and then filled. The top three feet are top soil.  Being it is totally fenced in, I'm hoping it will keep out some of the critters. It will become my vegetable garden, and the present vegetable garden will be my strawberry growing area. I had had them in the permaculture food forest out front, but I'm 66 and too old to play Twister every day when I'd go out to harvest. It will be nice to just have solid strawberries and not have to contort myself in order to pick.

I have learned many things since I started, too.  Originally, I'd planted asparagus out front behind some serviceberry bushes along the sidewalk.  That worked fine in the beginning, but it looks awful most of the year when the asparagus ferns out, and it's shading the plants behind it.  My plan is to dig out the 50 crowns and move them back into the pool.  There, it will be out of sight from the neighbors, it won't be growing through the serviceberries and shading out the "Grow a Little Fruit Tree" trees I have out there.  I won't have to worry about when I can cut them back to tidy it up, etc.  I had taken the idea of avoiding monoculture to an extreme and to my own detriment.  Strawberries and asparagus being the two big examples.

Anyway, I could recognize my own evolution through your post and I really enjoyed it!  ...and I'm with you about rhubarb.  I grow it to give it away!  It's a wonderful and attractive plant that fills space and helps to cover the ground, but I've just not ever been a big fan!

Paw paw, store and freeze the pulp. Any berries, all grow great up there. Typical fruits you find at the farmers market, maybe save the seeds and try grafting with your root stock. Brassicas, collards, kale, chard is easy and a good one. Chives, all the roots grow well up there in spring and summer. Depends on what you and your folks like to eat. Black walnuts are all over the creeks and parks, go out there w a bag man that's gold for the winter. Bee hives if you have the room.