Rune Dahlgreen

Hey Matthew (and others),

It is pretty brave of you to really throw your self into radical self-sufficiency (or it sounds like it is simply out of necessity, which could also sound a bit rough)... Anyway respect to your project and the things you share here, whether it is voluntary or forced self-sufficiency. Well I would aim for complete moneyless subsistence living entirely voluntarily for a lot of reasons, so lots of supporting respect from me to your endeavour and I hope you really succeed and get a nourishing and safe supply of produce for the next many years!
I am in a more luxurious situation where I can practice more slowly, without being forced to aim for 100 % self-sufficiency right away, but I totally think in the same lines and go in that direction.


By the way I totally agree with your perspective on calorie dense crops vs the vitamin-mineral-medicinal-etc-booster-crops like leafy greens.
PERSONAL STORY ABOUT USING WEEDS FOR LEAFY GREENS
For example I have lived various places without any option of growing a garden, while working/volunteering/learning skills from place to place, but I always managed to quickly snatch loads of ground elders, chenopodium album (is it fat hen in english?), sorrels, dandelion, nettle, yarrow etc etc. always growing as weeds everywhere. This was done in the lunch break and such and tossed into my calorie rich food, fast and efficient, with weeds growing around the buildings where I was. So that part is pretty much always easy to cover in 2 seconds without growing ANY leafy greens at all year round. And yes I even tried one year to harvest incredible amounts of the leafy green 'weeds' in the late summer and pressed them frantically into jars (was in a hurry) with sour culture starters and water and fermented them for the whole winter and they lasted all the way into spring next year (and even early summer for that matter). Though I must admit it WAS a lot of work (lots of hours every day for more than 7 days and I lost sleep to get it done), fermenting all these tiny leaves because when you compress them they take up no space (but maybe this kind of ferment ends up acting a bit like a multi-vitamin + multi-mineral pill, tiny of amounts of compressed juicy goodness, so you do not need to eat much, which I did though... heh which may explain why I felt like being pumped up on energy all winter long doing more work than ever before, while eating lots of these fermented weeds haha! Maybe the source of inspiration for those vita-pills hah!.. ), so I understand why people got so excited when they first developed the mighty cabbage variety of Brassica Oleracea, the plant king of fermentation and precious vitamins for the winter! So after such an experiment of having to make fermented leafy green weeds nourish me all through winter in a cold climate then I really got the lesson why cabbage is so incredible, such bulk and efficiency in those concentrated heads of vitamins and minerals.

But yea it is an important topic and many considerations and angles are important, I also understand how the term self-sufficiency can have different meanings for different people,  but I think you have made it very clear what your angle on this topic is. I also have a document in development about this precisely, where I also research one crop after other and compares etc. I can go through it and see if I have anything to add that has not been mentioned already.
Hah, it is funny, I had already looked at calories and other info about many crops but I never knew that kale has that many calories, almost as much as rutabagas, which people have survived on, wow.
Okay so I am not giving recommendations for new crops to be added to the calculator, just ideas and numbers about self-sufficiency in general if it is of any use...

Hey it is so cool that you are making your own tempeh! I have fermented many things, I have also made natto, but never tempeh, it always seemed so challenging. Did you find or grow your starter culture locally in the natural environment without importing?
I would not eat a lot of beans/peas without serious fermentation like tempeh, if I could learn to make tempeh the primitive and natural way then I would be much more inclined to eat many more beans and other legumes!

MULCH:
In your case where we have no easy input from an industrial waste stream, making or gathering all your own mulch becomes a significant task I would say. I can tell from experience; I am estimating that at least as much space is needed for scything mulch as the area for producing all the vegetables (to keep it covered long term, during growth and post harvest). You are also creating your own mulch? Any issues, thoughts, tips? For me, I really feel like it is doable as I slowly improve sharpening and all techniques related to scything, but maybe more importantly learn to really time everything I do, JUST the right time to harvest when the grass is at the optimal stage of growth, the right weather etc... But also just because of the space required I am getting interested in the good old cover crop solutions, but I do not want to till in a cover crop next spring (since I do not want to till at all), so it should winterkill by it self or...? Also plants that create their own mulch while giving another primary food crop are golden.

POTATOES AND TURNIPS:
So I have seen numbers saying 90-ish calories per 100g of potatoes and often 22 calories per 100g of turnips. Now the reason why I mention these 2 crops is because you can most likely harvest a good deal of early or middle/normal potatoes and then still sow turnips in the same area as the potatoes you just harvested and then harvest the turnips in late autumn through winter (all depending on varieties and other factors of course). So you could get a noticeable amount of more calories (and all the other good things) out of the same growing area in this case. In this case the turnips are only bonus/extra, no need to devote area for them (same could be said about radishes for example).
Sure it would be incredibly difficult to get all your calories just from turnips, but mixed with potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets, sunchokes, rutabagas and what have you, then it all adds to the total calorie intake and then the calories in things like turnips, carrots etc. do matter, as long as you include your 'heavy feeder' food in your meals (like potatoes), then you can just eat a bit less potatoes and more of other crops that fill out the rest of the calorie-needs.

CHINESE YAMS:
Has the potential to become a major calorie dense staple crop in cold climates in the west also. People have not favored it like potatoes due to huge deep roots that are slower to harvest than potatoes, but with creative methods maybe it could even replace potatoes (tall raised beds or some containers or?). It is certainly hardier and more disease free in cold climates and fully perennial compared to potatoes. Tuber size will also increase year after year while not becoming woody, so you can leave it for say 3 years and then harvest. One of those great survival/emergency crops. But it could be more than that for sure.

PARSNIPS:
I have come to the same conclusion as many others that parsnip sounds like the very top performing staple calorie dense crop, calories per 100g are only slightly behind potatoes and I have seen average yields of 20.000 tons per hectare of parsnips. A low/average yield of potatoes could be 25.000 tons per hectare. So parsnips, not bad! And lets not forget all those other considerations, in all reports I have read parsnips seem immune to lots of pests and diseases and it is very hardy (this I can also confirm from my own experience), you can even just harvest it as you need all the way through winter and into spring without ever digging it up from your garden before the moment of eating... while all this can't be said for the potato.

GRAINS:
Ok so I have not grown grains (yet). But after looking at the numbers and some other considerations I am getting more interested in them, especially after learning about the hull-less varieties (and species). For example Avena Nuda, naked oats.
We can start to look at the calories per weight of the harvested crop and the yield in weight per land area. As far as I can see calories per 100 g of common cereals like wheat, oats, rice and barley are between 350-400 calories. So this is 4 times-ish the amount potatoes have of calories per 100 g. Of course the grains yield (most often at least) less in kilograms per cultivated area compared to potatoes, but since they are around 4 times more calorie dense than potatoes they can get a way with yielding 4 times less and still give you the same amount of calories per year per square meter. So if you have a harvest of 5 tons per hectare of oats vs 20 tons per hectare of potatoes, then they actually perform just about equally well in terms of calories you can produce on any given amount of land per year.
But there are other considerations for me. For example I like to do this lightly pressed in or no till potatoes with a deep layer of mulch and in general I like to apply a lot of mulch everywhere in garden beds. So I use a lot of land area and time and energy to just cut mulch with my scytche (though it is getting faster with practice). I started to see that grains potentially can be advantageous because they also produce mulch, which you can toss back into the field after you thresh the grains. The potatoes cannot do this so much. So I am starting to get interested in plants that both grow their own mulch AND a calorie dense harvest.
Grains can also easily store much longer and better than potatoes and if processing is too problematic you can maybe just dry them whole, toss them to chickens for fodder and then pick up the straw after the chickens have picked the grains and return the straw where needed for mulch, crafts or other things and then eat the potatoes your self instead of the grains (except for a disaster year where all potatoes perish). Processing should not be such a big deal with the hull-less varieties though, I know of barley and oats only.
I definitely know I can scythe an area much faster than I can plant or harvest potatoes (but maybe I have bad technique for potatoes...hm). And if (a BIG if) I could have a moderately perma-mulched no-till area for the grains without tilling or weeding, then broadcasting seed would also be very fast. I am just seeing potential in grain is all, I do not have the experience, maybe with skill and practice it could be a very good crop to include, just some thoughts.
Also since I am not an expert on grain (haven't grown them remember), this final note on grains is as much a question as a point: is there not a grain for any type of climate and soil condition almost? Moist, wet and cold = oats . Dry, cold and poor soil = rye . Other conditions for wheat and barley? Well I have not  researched this enough, there are surely many many more details to it, but the point/question is; do we not almost always have the option of growing SOME grain suited for our area, almost wherever we are?

THE FINAL CONSIDERATION:
Spreading out and growing many different things every year seems like the most attractive approach for me at the moment (but I am always learning and changing), because you may get hit by some pest or disease that will almost annihilate one of your important staple crops, so if you had for example 5 equally dedicated staple crops instead of 1 or 2 you would be at a much lower risk of starving when one of them would get a bad year. This is why I am thinking about both potatoes, grains, squash, parsnips, rutabagas and any other suitable staple crop in almost equal measure, instead of focusing on one superior crop above them all.
Finally there are these interesting perennial root crops with dense calories. Sunchokes, Chinese Yams, Ground nuts, chinese artichokes and there are surely others, also written in one of my documents (just not going to look it all up now)... But these kinds of crops can be planted early in any site establishment in the proper location and be left to expand and grow on their own and become a true living survival storage out in the field. If the extreme thing should happen and all your other heavy annual staple crops should fail, you go out and survive on your weedy perennial tubers (though personally I enjoy eating sunchokes and others everyday, just as a supplement, I have just eaten a handful of sunchokes from the garden just now, cooked... yummy, so I do not only see them as emergency crops, even though they fulfill that role well)

There is also this guy in Finland. He lived entirely self-sufficiently for many years. Could be interesting to have a closer look at how he did it. Lasse Nordlund. Very short growing season. I mean it was radical self-sufficiency, like you focus on, he lived virtually without money at all. He now runs a school in Finland about self-sufficiency. He also made his own clothes from scratch, tools, buildings etc. Rare to find such complete examples of self-sufficiency nowadays.

Hi,

The subject text almost says it all. A coppiced tree stump suitable for animal fodder (could be Fraxinus for example but many other good candidates could be used, also depending on animal species) sends up fresh shoots in the spring, then you very timely let your animals graze it in summer at some point and then let the stump regrow and stockpile the shoots and leaves (alive still attached to the stump) for autumn/winter grazing. The reason why I thought about grazing/cutting the stump once in the summer, before stockpiling (as opposed to stockpiling from the first shoots in spring until winter) is that maybe the tree will have fresher/greener leaves for longer this way before they start to get yellow/brown (see below for evidence for this). So it is the same approach like stockpiled grasses, where you time your grazing for regrowth late enough in the year so that the grasses can grow and hold their nutrition longer in the autumn/winter.

I came to think of this because I have been cutting back a maple tree stump in my yard multiple times this year and multiple times last year and it keeps regrowing new shoots with incredible vigour, then I could not help to think that 'if I just had a few sheep or goats then they would happily have grazed down the new shoots mutiple times per year for delicious food'.
Not only that but now we are one day away from october and this stump now sits with very lush green leaves while other maples on my property have leaves going brown/yellow.... And that's what gave me the idea, waow, now this maple tree stump does not follow the season like the other trees, because it was cut in the summer and then it maintains fresh green leaves here in the autumn... interesting so how long can these leaves stay green? That I will try to find out by observation.

Then I imagine a more managed silvopasture system, with stockpiled tall fescue and other good cool season grasses and then maybe lines or dots of coppiced tree stumps with stockpiled branches with green leaves waiting to be devoured by grazing animals during autumn and hopefully some of winter.





The 2 images above show the difference between the normal mature maple tree with leaves going yellow/brown and the maple stump and its totally green leaves at this same time of the year.

How could this work or why could this never work?

I my self can imagine deer and elk making it problematic, which may be one of the reasons why people mostly used pollarding for cutting tree hay at a height of 2-3 meters, above browsing animals, but of course maybe no tree species can be manipulated to hold its leaf-nutrition well into winter months like some cold season grasses can.

I love the concept of letting animals harvest their feed them selves and extending winter grazing as much as possible with stockpiled grasses or other crops like forage turnips (maybe broadcast sown in the area of a recently harvested crop in late summer) and cereal rye should be very good according to some studies.
The more I try to research this subject I get the impression that it a bit more complicated than I first thought (isn't it always like that, with all subjects?)... For example you can't just stockpile anything that grows, some plant species will have their nutrition deteriorate rapidly in the face of cold and frosts, while some cool season grasses may improve their nutrition for the animals when subjected to cold for a certain amount of time, but no grass will have great nutrition for your animals absolutely all months of winter even if you masterly manage the pasture and stockpile to the best of abilities if you live in very cold regions of the world. So as far as I can understand it will never be possible to kick the hay habit 100 % in colder climates, but I am still very happy with reducing the need for hay production with say 50 % or more, that would be fabulous still!

Now all this grass is great of course but historically sheep, cattle, goats and other animals really also ate a lot of forest browse and people have cut tree hay for hundreds if not thousands of years and modern studies also show many advantages and quality nutrition from specific tree species pollarded for winter hay for animals. It was really a major part of the farm work in many places in Europe and especially in Scandinavia untill around a little after the industrial revolution and studies today show that it can be very good for the animals to be fed this tree fodder in many ways and for many reasons. Just like making hay with a scythe can be hard work, so was/is making tree hay very time consuming of course, so yea that is why I thought about this idea with stockpiled coppice regrowth.

Greetings and please let me know any good reasons why I should just stop wasting time on this crazy idea if it would never work.

Anne Pratt wrote:Hello Rune, and welcome!

Tell me about growing Crambe.  I have three infinitesimal seedlings, grown from seed this spring, and adding no more than a millimeter/week.  I understand they can be reproduced easily by root cuttings!  The growing-from-seed route is a test in patience.  I only hope they get big enough to survive my USDA Zone 5 winter.  I might have to dig them up and put them on the porch or in the basement for the winter.  

I didn't know you could eat the roots, just the asparagus-like sprouts and the leaves.  I do want to get this plant going!

Any words of wisdom you can add would be welcome.

Hi Anne,

Sorry about the very late response, I was suddenly not really on forums for a while, doing other things.

I have started Seakale from seeds that I bought and I don't see much difference from this seakale compared to the wild seakale, which I have foraged in the past, so maybe it is just the wild variety.
I can tell you that first time I grew it, I just started it in pots from seeds, then transplanted the plants into their permanent position in beds and kept it mulched and that was it. No problems after that.
I then moved to another part of the country and I harvested seeds from the seakales that I had sown the year before. So I brought a lot of my own saved seeds to my new property and then I experimented with sowing the seeds directly into the soil in their permanent positions. This did not go incredible well, but not incredible bad either.
The thing is, the seeds can take a very long time to germinate, even several months or longer (and that is after I have removed the hard outer shell of the seeds, if you don't do that it could take more than a year) so many other weeds came up and challenged the seakale. Well it was also just a bad area, too wet and soil biology likely was favoring weed growth and all. Maybe it could work to sow directly in another spot.
But hey, I ended up having 20 seakale plants coming up in this area, where they were sown directly (with weeds growing like crazy all over, even though I had mulched lightly the whole area right after sowing), so it worked well enough, but they really could/can not tolerate a lot of weed competition according to my experience, they suffocated and some even died back due to weed pressure around them.
So I dug up and rescued I think around 10 big sturdy survivors from that bed and replanted them in a much better location where they are really shining and thriving now with deep mulch around them and no weed problems.
According to my experience they will dig through tough clay soil with their deep roots and do well there, but will also do well in sandy soil of course and you don't need to bring in seaweed for mulch (I am sure it is nice to do though, especially if you live close to the sea). I just cut weeds/hay with my scythe and use that as mulch and it works great, just like all the other vegetables.

Other than that then I can say that no pests really eradicate any single plant, yes they may get a leaf or two eaten by some critters, but nothing devastating. They start focusing a lot on root growth and leaves only after the deep tap root has really established. I never harvest leaves from seakale plants the first year, after that they produce lots of leaves and you can pick them before they get much to old, because they will drop their leaves (according to my experience) at some point and let them rot/mulch around its base and giving space for new leaves/shoots.

But hard frosts, that is no problem, it is super hardy and remember the very first year outside it plunges the deepest taproot you can imagine down into the soil and even if a portion of the plant closer to the surface gets damaged by hard frost it can still regrow from the deep root (as also testified by Steven Barstow).
I know about this taproot, because I dug up these plants and I had to dig very deep and even then a thin part of the taproot always broke off, just not possible to get it all up, that is how deep it is.

So once you have them established (and maintain mulch around them) then they are absolutely no work and super permanent perennials that you can just harvest from.

Right, so those were just a few things that came to mind if it helps.

Greetings

Hi,

Was interesting to read and a few plants I did not know about, so thanks for sharing. I have been working on lists like that for a while my self, so maybe I can add a few things.

It is good to see ground nut (Apios Americana) being mentioned here in the end, since I hope it could be a major staple crop even in northern climates (possibly replacing potato entirely?). There should be improved cultivars with bigger tubers and much larger yield in general.

And then some plants that I think have not been mentioned already (unless I missed them):

Actually Sea Kale (Crambe Maritima) also has edible roots. Not just edible but caloric stable according to the author of Eattheweeds.com .  He writes: "Would be a prime edible. It has a large root, particularly at the end of the growing season and is edible raw. It’s easy to find, easy to dig up. That’s energy positive. It’s a caloric staple."  And this is a VERY perennial hardy plant. I grow it and it does very well, even far away from the sea and not even in sandy soil...    Maybe the explanation why it became an endangered species in many countries is because people foraged the edible roots for survival and not just the greens? hmm...

Cirsium horridulum - Bull Thistle. This plant should have a decent edible root, though I have no experience with it yet.

Nelumbo lutea - American Water Lotus. This one has a root rich in starch according to PFAF and eattheweeds.com.

Polygonatum multiflorum - Solomon's Seal (Someone else already mentioned it briefly I think) Also this has a root rich in starch and has been used by various people through time as food and medicine and it can tolerate a lot of shade, wow, interesting for certain locations of your land with trees and all.

Potentilla anserina - silverweed. I think this plant sounds interesting, some sources I read said that it has sustained communities from time to time, maybe mostly when other crops failed, possibly an emergency, but still survival crop. Edible tubers, perennial. It should spread like weed and be very difficult to get rid of, which would be a plus in that it can safely look after it self in some remote area and you can always go harvest some if you really need it without spending time on cultivating it. I have read some other people's experience with this and they say the roots are small and it takes long time to work for the calories you get out of it, so yes maybe just a truly emergency food. But I am not sure, have anyone tried this plant for food?

Everyone knows about cattail I assume, but it should fit this category of perennial and edible starchy roots? Of course you need some water habit, but still...

Thank you all, for the replies. That is excellent, now I know more about the options for sketchup.

I just take Peter's metric measurements for the floor channel for the 6" size that you mentioned Thomas and scale up or down as needed for other sizes according to the percental difference in size. I will definately use a larger batch box rocket than a 6" (I have a big house, which can be a disadvantage sometimes).

Great tip on how to fabricate the channel with 2 pieces of steel like that, and I have also seen your pictures of that method Peter, thanks.

Also Gerry thanks, I will share any findings and future builds and experiences one way or another. I am just at the study phase, making sure I understand all concepts, meassurements and designs perfectly first. I have only started very little drawing and looked a bit at material options, prices, local building codes and stuff like that.
I also have to cut open my wooden floor, dig below frost line (at the very least 90 cm here in Denmark continental Europe) and pour a reinforced concrete foundation before I can start.

Hi all,

It has been interesting to read through the thread, especially in the beginning a lot of basic information about the floor channel and main air inlet was being spelled out with helpful details.

I am after all in the proces of understanding the basics very well as the preliminary step to building my own batch box rocket mass heater in my house.

Since you have been talking so much about the floor channel in this thread I thought it would be appropiate to ask these questions in this thread about the floor channel:

What are the precise numbers of the newest version of the floor channel found on Peter's website?    (sorry I haven't found a way to open these sketchup files on ubuntu OS yet)
("01/05/2019 A somewhat simpler construction together with a larger feed part and a higher stub, according to the latest findings.")

When I read about the numbers concerning the previous version of the floor channel I find this: "Using the steel ducts as drawn, the vertical part is 5.4% of the riser CSA and the horizontal part 8.25%. By keeping close to these percentages it is possible to calculate the dimensions for a larger or smaller batchrocket according to their larger or smaller riser CSA."

Now regarding the newest version (since Peter mentions that the the feed/horisontal part is now larger and "The feed is close to twice as large as the stub, csa-wise") is it safe for me to conclude that the horizontal part should be close to 10 % riser CSA and the vertical part of the newest floor channel should stay in the same range, close to 5 % of the riser CSA?

Also back in the days of the P-channel coming down from the 'ceiling' of the fire box Peter emphasized that the width of the P-channel should be as wide or slightly wider than the width of the port. Can we now totally disregard this rule for both the horisontal and vertical part of the newer floor channel?

Hey, thanks for sharing! Very inspiring...

Glad to hear about someone using their own homemade refractory mix for the firebox. Perhaps you could have used the same mix for the heat riser/internal chimney (with added insulation maybe), or are there any reasons not to?

I have heard about wood ash before, being an interesting choice for making your own refractory mix, but washing out some elements, especially potassium, with water, seems to be important. Unwashed wood ash is actually lowering the melting point of the mix, correct? And washing it with water makes it increasingly more refractory? So did you wash your ash before use?

Does cow dung have some properties that add to the refractory nature of the final mix or is it there as a binder and agent to minimize cracking or something?

I am very interested in learning about the ratio between wood ash, grog, cow dung and clay soil? Did you test different mixes before building? Did you make use of some existing guidelines and tested recipes?

You do not have any extra insulation around your ash-clay-dung-grog firebox, other than the insulation contained in the mix it self in the form of ash?