Acornucopia & Nutty Buddy Collective

Worth checking out, especially for those in the Eastern US: two sites with visions of community-supported perennial agriculture:

• Acornucopia
• Nutty Buddy Collective—In nut season 2018, they paid foragers for unprocessed nuts, which the collective then bulk-processed.

They're working towards more planting and use of resilient, low-maintenance nut trees such as oaks, walnuts, and chestnuts. Establishing and learning to utilize such staples is critical in a future of unreliable industrial agriculture, so read their sites, subscribe to their updates, get involved with their work, and/or take inspiration to encourage staple perennial polycultures wherever you are!

Warning: lots of silliness and puns throughout the pages. Nuts seem to encourage that for some reason.

See also my post on Pacific Northwest nuts: Nuts about acorns...

Crop summary: Air potato, Dioscorea bulbifera

Eric Toensmeier's Perennial Vegetables first introduced me to this easy staple carbohydrate. Although it's only truly perennial in the subtropics or warmer, I brought a few back to Portland from my first Hawai'i visit. I hoped to cultivate it similarly to a dahlia, overwintering propagules in a non-freezing space to be planted in spring, and yielding crop and more planting stock before the killing frosts. Alas, my precious babies rotted away in our pseudo root cellar before I ever got to plant them, so I didn't get to really make their acquaintance until I moved to Hawai'i.

As the name hints, air potato vines form large (up to triple-fist sized) balls of starch in the air, so no soil disturbance is necessary for harvest. Fortunately, you needn't stare worriedly at the vigorous vine engulfing its 30' living trellis tree, wondering how you'll get to the crop. After the deciduous plant dies back in the fall, the ripe tubers fall to the ground (from November through February here in Puna.) You should ensure that the ground under the vine is reasonably clear of vegetation, or can be hacked down before the tubers start falling, so you can find them with reasonable ease. Once you have them, use them in any way you would potatoes. Peeling is optional.

One year yield

A yam relative, Dioscorea bulbifera is very low maintenance; I pretty much just plant them under or near a tree I don't mind having covered by the vine, weed them once or twice or maybe thrice, and pee on them now and then. The yield can be excellent. Last April (or May?), I planted three moderately sized tubers, roughly the size of the three at far right in the photo. The harvest from those three plants is collected on the table (not counting any I failed to find; I didn't follow my advice above about having clear ground for easy harvest!) So in their first year, the plantings gave back roughly thirteen-fold, and hopefully now that the perennial roots have established, they'll yield even more this year.

Stored air potatoes beginning to sprout

Planting is from any of the tubers you harvested in the previous months; the larger the propagule, the more vigorously the vine takes off. I've found that the harvested aerial tubers sprout as much as two months earlier in storage than the roots remaining in the ground.

Toensmeir writes that you can cut a tuber into smaller pieces to plant out individually, so I cut three large tubers in half to double my planting stock. While the halves which got the existing sprouts continued to grow quickly, it took the other halves 6-8 weeks to develop new sprouts, so it may be best to perform this surgery well in advance of spring.

You could also make the cuts to eat most of the tuber while planting just the portion with the sprout.

A land owner where I lived has seen pigs eating both aerial and belowground tubers, but nonetheless, many plants survive from year to year. If pigs are a threat on your land, keep an eye out. Be prepared to gather fallen tubers frequently during harvest season, or to harvest them before they fall.

Hawaiians introduced both a bitter form of air potato, and Dioscorea pentaphylla. Both grow wild but are only eaten as famine food.

If you're curious for more, check out Spencer's air potato write up at Tropical Self Sufficiency.

Blog to know: Tropical Self Sufficiency

A Puna, Hawai'i resident named Spencer has been experimenting for a couple of years with perennials in the tropics, and he's written up some excellent experience based species profiles. You'll find many of the species explored by Toensmeier's Perennial Vegetables, one of Spencer's inspirations. Some species are purely tropical, but many are familiar friends (or could become such!) of temperate permaculturists as well.

The site is loaded with information on propagation, growth, harvest, and use of perennials, in a combination of collated research and original discoveries. Multiple photos accompany each entry, usually including shots of the plants living in polycultures, with the surrounding species conveniently named as well. As the site title indicates, there's an emphasis on staple crops.

All in all, my kind of info-dense resource! Check out Spencer's site at Tropical Self Sufficiency.

Puna Hawai'i avocado bearing seasons

Wade Bauer of Malama Aina Permaculture compiled this useful list of 18 popular avocado varieties, based on info from David Frenz and Plant it Hawai'i. The bearing times should be accurate for the Puna district of the big island of Hawai'i, but may also be useful in other areas, at least to give an idea of relative order of ripening.

• Fujikawa - spring
• Linda - spring
• Murashige - spring (late spring to early summer)
• Yamagata - spring - summer (March - July)
• Hulumanu - summer
• Pohakulani - summer (June - Aug)
• Malama - fall (early fall)
• Tagawa - fall (Aug - Sept)
• Kahaluu - fall (Aug - Oct, can be alternate)
• Beardslee - fall - early winter
• San Miguel - fall - winter
• Ota - winter (late fall - winter)
• Sharwil - winter (Nov - Feb)
• Beshore - winter
• Sphinx - winter
• Green Gold - winter - spring
• Kainaliu aka Shatauer #1 - late winter - spring (Feb - April)
• Minicado - winter then all year when mature

Self Sufficiency, Five Years In - audio slideshow

In spring 2011, I gave a presentation three times on the progress, successes, failures, and lessons from five years of working towards self sufficiency with my ex-partner at our house in Portland. I advertised the event with this blurb:

In March of 2006, Tulsi and Norris purchased a small house on a .2 acre lot, and used permaculture principles to design their food forest, sun garden, and house renovation. They aimed to create a low-maintenance, truly sustainable habitat for 2-4 people plus wildlife, providing from the property all necessary food, heating & cooking fuel, water, and waste treatment. Join us for a reality check on what's worked and what hasn't, what seems theoretically possible for the future, and what all this means to the oxymoronic goal of a sustainable city.

I've finally synced up an audio recording I made of my presentation with the slide images, to make a sort-of movie. You can view the Self Sufficiency, Five Years In slideshow online (may require reasonably fast internet connection) or download a 36MB zip file for offline viewing. (Extract to anywhere on your hard drive, then open the included index.html file in your web browser.)

I've also created a video, which requires more bandwidth: Self Sufficiency, Five Years In on YouTube. (You can download the 166MB WMV movie file or watch it below)

Or you can download a 6 MB PDF of the slideshow without audio.

Notes on some small seed crops

A few years ago, I sent an email to the Portland Permaculture Guild list with these notes on various small seed crops:

Of the small seeds, fennel seed comes the closest to meeting my overall food forest goals, as a perennial insect nurturing weedy multi-use plant, with seeds providing good calorie yield per square foot. However, it misses my goal of being edible in large quantities; I'm eating about 50 calories per day of it, and don't think I would want to increase that beyond 100-200 at most. Read a more detailed write-up.

Good King Henry works well as a perennial, decently yielding low-maintenance seed crop. But it bears seeds even smaller than quinoa, which require processing to get off the chaff. My limited experiment suggested the labor time:calorie yield is good, making it worthwhile to process them if you're serious about growing your own calories, but it does take a while. GKH seed requires the same sort of soaking as does quinoa, but I don't find that at all time consuming or difficult. I find the cooked seeds hearty and delicious, and everyone else who's sampled them has liked them as well.

Sunflower seeds have a lot of potential, though we've had trouble direct seeding due to slug pressure, and we've consistently failed to harvest and/or process the seed heads in the autumn to actually eat them.

Favas and early peas also have a lot of potential for us in winter-rain Mediterranean climates, though again we've had trouble with slug pressure. Our slug problem also means we've yet to successfully grow, let alone overwinter, scarlet runner beans, but I'd love to get that going as a perennial large-seeded legume.

We tried Lupinus perennis, the perennial lupine from the east coast which native americans supposedly ate. I found that the seedpods ripened unevenly and if I waited too long to harvest, the pods ejected the seeds in the garden while if I harvested too soon, the pods never really opened up to easily release the seeds at all. As a result, I had trouble effeciently separating the small seeds from the pods. And then I had trouble with the soaking process; apparently lupines need thorough leaching to get rid of the bitter toxic alkoloids. If I recall correctly, I followed a method where I scalded the seeds first, then let them soak in cold water for a few days. Many of the seeds swelled up properly, and tasted fine, but enough of the seeds did *not* swell up that they acted as nasty little rock-hard, bitter landmines amongst the deactivated beans. I gave up on these as a human seed crop and transplanted them into the chicken yard.

We've been growing evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) as a root, leaf, flower, and seed crop, but I find the seeds pretty much unusable. They're easy enough to harvest, but they're so tiny that I can't run them through our grain grinder or just sprinkle them on food and expect to crush them up in the course of eating. I have to deliberately eat a pinchful at a time and chew them up really well. Sadly, the seeds have no flavor at all; it's like eating tiny crunchy nothingness. I don't enjoy eating tiny crunchy nothingness, so I've given up on these as a seed crop.

Temperate staple crops: plants (and critters) for a future

In my review of Carol Deppe's annual-based The Resilient Gardener, I expressed disappointment that no one has created a comparable blueprint with perennials. Now that I've moved to Hawaii with its abundance of well-documented perennial crops, I've dramatically eased my own task of synthesizing perennials, animals, and wildlife into production of a low labor, landbase supportive paleodiet. But I still want to see similar systems develop in temperate areas. I can offer some hints and glimmers of hope based on my experiments in Portland, for others to develop further. My previous post, Low-Maintenance Temperate Staple Crops, established a broad framework. This post gives more specific suggestions, heavily biased towards a Pacific Northwest climate with its winter rains and summer drought.

Livestock

Small parcels

• Most importantly, experiment with ways to integrate small animals such as ducks, chickens, rabbits, and guinea pigs into perennial gardens in such a way that the animals benefit the system, require minimal care, and produce high quality eggs & meat.
• Keep bees for honey for moderate consumption. They'll gather incredible numbers of calories for the space required.
• If you have a pond, try growing fish, even if just goldfish for slow-growing, very occasional eating by yourself or poultry.

Larger parcels

• Keep grazers such as geese, sheep, buffalo, and cattle where the land wants to grow grass.
• Keep browsers such as goats where the land wants to grow trees. Manage them carefully to ensure they don't make the land grow dead trees and sad scrub.

Tree crops

• Plant nuts. Chestnuts, acorns, english walnuts, black walnuts, filberts, and ginkgos have all proven themselves as reliable abundant croppers in the PNW.
• Plant fruits & berries. Figure out how much you can realistically eat, and how much is healthy for you.
• Grow olives if you can, for low-PUFA, oil rich food. Our olives failed to grow, but others in the Portland area have had success. We may not have given our plants good enough drainage.
• Use the seed kernels from Prunus and other fruit species as bonus seeds for your own or livestock consumption.

Herbaceous seed crops

• Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus): needs breeding work for increased seed production (larger and/or more seed.) We found it a very low maintenance and tough crop, though we didn't perfect a ground cover situation to eliminate the need for spring weeding. Seed yields never got very high for the land involved - perhaps partly from competition following our neglect in weeding, and partly from inadequate irrigation in the summer.
• Scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus): try growing them as perennials. We never succeeded in growing them well even for the first year (slug pressure?), and the few healthy plants didn't overwinter. Someone in my neighborhood grew them as perennials on the west side of his house for summer shade, so maybe giving them a similar warm microclimate and/or heavily mulching would help. Breeding for hardiness may help. Supposedly you can dig up the roots and store them in a root cellar, then replant in spring.
• Experiment with recently developed perennial grains for humans (assuming you can digest them OK) and/or animals.
• Integrate minimal maintenance legumes like overwintered favas and early spring peas (we had minimal success with these - ducks to keep down our slugs may have helped). As with the grains, humans can eat these in moderation if they don't have bad reactions, and/or they can feed livestock.
• Perennial flax (Linum perenne). We grew this on our ecoroof and got a few seeds the first year. We didn't stay long enough to know whether it produces well once fully established. If not, maybe it could benefit from breeding work. Like its annual relative, perennial flax oil is rich in omega-3, highly beneficial for us and for livestock.
• Find other perennial seed crops for minor or major production. For example, we found fennel extremely easy to grow and harvest for ourselves and for the chickens, but we could only eat a small amount of seed each day because of its strong flavor. Perhaps a variety of minor seed crops could add up to useful caloric inputs.
• Breed other perennial legumes for larger or more useful seeds for humans, or just plant them as livestock fodder - Lupinus perennis, Vicia cracca, Vicia americana, black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), pea shrubs (Caragana sp.), and ...?

Root crops

See my notes on perennial and self-seeding roots for more information on specific species: part 1 and part 2.

• Jerusalem artichokes AKA sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus): Fantastic drought tolerant, persistent, low-to-no-labor abundant yielder. Due to high inulin content, these only work well as a staple crop if you can either:
  • Digest them OK with minimal cooking (many people ferment them).
  • Cook them long enough on a wood stove running in the winter anyway.`
• Skirret (Sium sisarum): breed for increased root production. We found yields quite reasonable at 1/2 pound/year in good conditions, and 1/4 pound/year in shade or poor soil. We experienced enough variation in yields between different plants to warrant selecting for larger and more roots. Skirret also deserves experimentation with different lengths of multi-year growth before harvest to maximize its potential as a perennial; we generally found the roots larger and less woody if we let the plant grow for two or three years, but never quantified this precisely.
• Grow mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum), oca (Oxalis tuberosa), and yacon (Polymnia sonchifolia) as perennials, deep mulching as needed to overwinter them.
• Where conditions allow, try aquatic crops like cattail, water chestnut, and wapato.
• Develop and refine perennial polycultures such as my experiments with skirret/oca/potato and yellow asphodel/oca/lily.
• Cinnamon vine (Dioscorea batatas): great potential as a no-dig staple carb from its aerial bulbils. Set up on a permanent trellis such that you can lay a tarp or sheet under the vines to easily collect lots of bulbils at once.
• Creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides): summer available root with mild flavor from an aggressive ground cover. May work well under jerusalem artichoke.
• Yellow asphodel (Asphodeline lutea): summer-available root adapted to summer drought and intercropping well with many other plants. Try to breed it for larger roots (perhaps at the expense of its flowering, which though beautiful and providing tasty nibbles presumably diverts a lot of energy from the roots.)
• Scorzonera (Scorzonera hispanica): experiment with how long to leave in the ground without having to dig too deep for the taproot. I tended to dig the top foot or so of the root, but snapped it off and lost it below that point. Experiment with replanting a portion of the tops instead of needing to resow from seed. I have successfully transplanted individuals with 6-12" of root, but suspect you could plant even less, and therefore get to eat more.
• Asiatic lily (Lilium sp): I assume Asian growers bred these over thousands of years to select for larger bulbs from these gourmet crops. Seek out varieties with maximum food yield instead of showiest flower.
• Camas (Camassia sp.): Another inulin rich root, requiring experimentation in a solar cooker to evaluate as a summer staple root. Otherwise it may not be justifiable due to the large amount of fuel required to make it digestible.
• Garlic (Allium sativum): pseudo-staple (since you can only eat so much of it per day.) Super easy to grow and supposedly high in calories per pound, though I wonder whether the high inulin content means we don't actually digest all the calories.

Low-Maintenance Temperate Staple Crops

During my last two years in Portland, I began focusing on calorie crops, those which can actually provide substantial daily energy. I wanted to create a perennial polyculture analog to the annual-based system described in Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener. My criteria for a crop included being regenerative for the earth, healthy for humans to eat, low maintenance, able to be consumed in fairly large quantities, and providing decent yields. I didn't get far enough in my research and experiments to say anything conclusive, but I can share a few findings. For the purposes of my harvest logs and for my Self Sufficient Diet drafts (temperate and tropical), I organized foods into categories, presented here from most to least valuable for these purposes.

Animal Products

Ideally, we can convince chickens, bees, and other livestock to spend their copious free time eating food of low value to humans, then eat them and their eggs, meat, milk, and honey. In a well designed system, our critters self-harvest, according to their preferences: small seeds, bugs, grass & other leaves, and pollen & nectar. This maximizes our efficiency, and provides us with some of the healthiest human food possible.

Calories per pound: Eggs - 650, Meat - 525, Milk - 300, Honey - 1400

Black walnut

Nuts

Nut trees can provide easy, reliable oil-rich seeds year after year. The fact that it takes a decade to start getting big yields just means we need to plant them *now*. And of course we can underplant developing nut trees with faster growing crops to use the space in the early years. Besides the usual nuts, oaks for acorns should get some attention. Oikos Tree Crops has some interesting naturally dwarfish seedlings which could fit much more easily into urban & suburban yards.

Possible nuts include walnut (black & english), butternut, filbert, chestnut, ginkgo, acorn, almond, pistachio, pecan, hickory, and pine. Many of these can be foraged easily.

Note that paleodiet circles warn against excess consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA); most oil-rich nuts have high levels of PUFAs. I'm still trying to sort through this issue for myself.

Calories per pound: About 900 for chestnuts, 1800 for ginkgo, and 2700-3300 for the more oily nuts.

Good King Henry seed heads

Small Seeds

Though most of these work best as self-harvested livestock fodder, some may yield abundantly enough and process easily enough to be worth harvesting ourselves. Possible species include good king henry, fennel, Amaranthus sp, Chenepodium sp, perennial grains, dock, perennial flax, sunflower seeds, squash seeds, and various legumes including peas, favas, runner beans, and Carol Deppe's breeds adapted to the Willamette Valley. Not all will be palatable in large enough quantities to truly serve as staple crops: for example, fennel. But we should definitely explore those that do meet all three criteria of good yields, efficient harvest & process, and non-overwhelming flavor.

Calories per pound: around 1600

Mulberries & Serviceberries

Fruits & Berries

Everyone loves nature's candy, and the existing permaculture literature does a great job giving species options and describing how to grow them -- perhaps to an excessive extent, to the detriment of other important calorie crops. I found that I could eat about one pound of fruit per day, and half a pound of berries. Though I could probably push myself to eat more, Sébastien Noël of Paleodiet Lifestyle suggests limiting fructose intake to 50g/day, meaning no more than about 1 1/2 pounds of fruit and berries per day assuming no other sugars (including honey.)

Calories per pound: About 300 for fruits, 200 for berries

Mashua

Roots

Perennial, low maintenance root crops provide a moderately dense calorie crop. I found that I could eat about one pound per day, so they only provided a supplement to daily total calorie intake. Greatly increasing this intake may result in too many carbs for a healthy diet.

Root crops, of course, have the inherent ecological and labor drawback of requiring digging, but appropriate polycultures can mitigate some of the disadvantages.

My notes on perennial roots: part 1 and part 2

Calories per pound: around 300

Winter Squash

Though annuals, these don't require much soil disturbance considering how much space they take up at maturity, and can self-seed themselves (though we may have undesirable results from uncontrolled crossing.) While summer squash have the calorie density and uses of other vegetables, winter squash occupies a gray zone between calorie crop and vegetable. I can eat a lot of it in one sitting, but it has fewer calories than roots or fruits (but more than most other vegetables). It has more nutrients than many staple crops. It yields abundantly when happy, and stores well into the winter without processing. Unfortunately, its season of availability coincides with the primary availability of the super easy perennial roots, somewhat diminishing its staple crop value. Still, it adds diversity to the winter meal options, and can definitely provide a substantial number of calories.

Calories per pound: around 200

Goumi

Bonus Seed Kernels

We can eat the seeds from many fruits, giving us a small calorie-dense bonus. Species include all Prunus species (cherry, plum, peach, etc), Elaeagnus sp (goumi, autumn olive, silverberry), Cephalotaxus sp, and grapes. With the exception of almonds, a Prunus, no one grows any of these specifically for the seed kernels, but they're worth utilizing if we have them anyway! I used to eat some myself, and fed some to our chickens.

Calories per pound: guessing 1500-2500

Greens & Other Vegetables

Though not calorie crops, these add important nutrients to the diet. I found it very easy to meet our needs of 4 oz/day/person from perennial greens, shoots, stalks, and flowers.

Calories per pound: about 100

Nuts about acorns...

(and walnuts, and chestnuts, and ...)

Every autumn in Portland brings a great opportunity to stock up on the easiest staple foods around: nuts! Depending on the type, in an hour of gathering you can collect days or even weeks worth of calories, all free for the taking from parks, roadsides, and yards where owners find them a nuisance. Of course, you'll spend a lot more time actually extracting the nuts, but the cold dreary days of winter suit that task quite well. Roughly in order of ripening, Theressa and I used to forage:

The Nuts

Hazelnuts (aka filberts) - We never had much success with these, as squirrels and scrub jays always started harvesting early, before full ripening in late August or early September. Friends of ours have had success, so perhaps we didn't look often enough, or get the timing right, or find trees with enough nuts to have some left over after our nonhuman neighbors took their share.

English walnuts - Also very popular with squirrels and jays, but usually produced in enough abundance for us to enjoy some of the harvest as well. Easy to gather, easy to shell out, and generally liked by everyone, these formed the bulk of our nut harvests each year.
Walnuts started dropping in mid to late September and lasted into early or mid October.

Chestnuts - Delicious, sweet, reliably produced carb-rich nuts. Spiny burs protect these nuts from the squirrels until they fall, so by checking trees every day or two you can collect a lot from the ground before squirrels run off with them. (Other humans, especially asian folks who've traditionally eaten chestnuts as a staple, actively seek out the nuts, often getting to trees shortly after sunrise to check on the previous night's fallen goods.) Hurling sticks or short chunks of 2x4s into the trees encourages new nuts to drop right in front of you, allowing a much larger harvest. Look for trees at Laurelhurst Park (mostly along 39th, but also some in the interior), Fernhill Park (two massive trees), and within neighborhoods. I found a nice spot, unharvested by anyone else, off the ramp connecting NE 42nd Ave to Columbia Blvd. Be sure to understand the difference between horse chestnuts and edible chestnuts before trying to eat them.
Chestnuts have a similar start time as english walnuts, but last into late October.

Acorns - By far the easiest staple for us to collect in bulk. Their tannins discourage squirrels and other humans who prefer to hoard the easier nuts first, but once you get a routine for leaching the tannins the acorns become very usable, and probably no more time intensive for the caloric yield than most of the other nuts. Acorns make excellent poultry food, though you'll have to crush the shells a bit for the birds to access the meat.
Acorns start falling about the same time as chestnuts, but last into November or even later. The rains of October and November usually ended our harvesting due to mold attacks long before we actually ran out of nuts to harvest.

Black walnuts - After acorns, the easiest nuts for us to collect in bulk. The hand-staining hulls and thick shells slow down squirrels and other humans. I generally harvested them after the hulls started rotting, making it relatively easy to extract the shell; we then air dried them for a while before storage. I cracked them out by holding each nut on a large rock (or driveway, sidewalk, etc) with my left hand and smashing it with a hammer. I cut the shells further open as needed with wire cutters to extract all the meat. Compared to most other nuts we got much lower yields of calories per hour of extraction, but the quicker and more reliable gathering offsets that a bit, I love the unique flavor, and the caloric yield still pays off quite well.
We harvested black walnuts from early October well into November.

Ginkgos - Tasty nuts surrounded by dog-poopy flesh, borne on female trees. (Many people in cities plant males to avoid dealing with the fruit, so don't expect every ginkgo to yield nuts.) Much smaller nuts than the others, so less efficient to harvest and process in quantity, but can still yield a good supply, and they fall after we've finished harvesting the others. We noticed some Asian people foraging these, but not as avidly as with chestnuts, and we didn't see any other animals gathering them. Some people suffer rashes as allergic reactions, so use caution the first few times you experiment. (One friend got an itchy anus presumably from the nuts on the way out, another a rash on her hands from handling the fruit or the shells.) You need to cook the nuts (before or after shelling); don't worry about removing the pellicle skin.
These start falling in November and last perhaps into December.

Foraging References

Samuel Thayer wrote the best two foraging books I've found for temperate climates: The Forager's Harvest and Nature's Garden. He covers a limited number of plants, but in great detail based on direct personal experience. In Nature's Garden he tells you more or less everything you can know (from a book) about hazelnuts, black walnuts, and acorns; The Forager's Harvest describes butternuts.

Euell Gibbons has shorter sections on acorns, walnuts, butternuts, and hickory nuts in Stalking the Wild Asparagus. "Wildman" Steve Brill discusses hazelnuts, black walnuts, butternuts, chestnuts, hickories, and oaks in Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and not so wild) Places.

Credits

Thanks to Jasmine for inspiring this post's title with her email address!

Book review: The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe

I rate Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener the most important gardening book of the last few years, and simultaneously the most frustrating gardening book I've ever read. Deppe, also the author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, draws on more than three decades of experience in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to present a treasure trove of tips and tricks for Pacific Northwest (PNW) vegetable gardening. After touching on many common vegetables and devoting some space to orchards, berries, and nuts, she thoroughly covers five staples for calories, protein, and omega-3s: potatoes, eggs, squash, beans, and corn. Her distilled expertise alone makes the book a must-read for regional gardeners and highly valuable for growers in any temperate climate, and her thorough coverage of sustaining staple crops truly sets her book apart.

The Important

Yet Deppe goes far beyond the in-depth but limited scope of how to grow vegetables and these particular staples,. She provides a rough roadmap for each gardener to think through his or her unique circumstances of physical ability, available time, dietary restrictions and needs, land access, soil type, sun & water availability, local microclimate, regional climate, and regional history to design a practical plan for growing some or all of a nutritious, delicious, and balanced diet.

Complicating her task further, she doesn't work from a baseline of stable gardening conditions, but assumes any of a host of disruptions can and will strike at some point in every gardener's life: personal emergencies such as injuries or needing to care for loved ones; climate change causing more erratic and extreme weather events of heat, cold, floods, and drought; temporary or long-term electrical outages; fossil fuel shortages; transportation shutdowns; and other possible disasters. She presents many ideas for minimizing risk of crop loss in various situations, such as organizing plantings for mantainance of the most important crops with a minimum of time and water; experimenting now with learning what you can get away with in withholding water, fertilizer, and attention; and staggering plantings of multiple varieties of multiple crops over multiple sowings.

Deppe has experienced many health issues in her life, including celiac disease, lactose intolerance, difficulty digesting raw vegetables, weight problems, food cravings, sugar jags, salt sensitivity, a bad back, general aging, and restless leg syndrome. Over the years she's observed her body and its reactions to different foods and exercise, allowing her to tease apart what works for her and what doesn't. The detailed description of her process and findings helps guide your own questions about what foods work well for you and which cause subtle or obvious problems. Interestingly, Deppe's observations have pushed her in some ways towards a paleodiet: she doesn't eat gluten grains such as wheat, eats pastured animal foods rich in omega-3s, rarely eats dairy except for pastured butter, minimizes caffeine & sugar, and avoids juices & processed foods. (But she seriously diverges from the paleodiet by relying on legumes & corn loaded with anti-nutrients, and taking in the vast majority of her calories as carbs including heavy reliance on potatoes.)

Deppe has worked out an extremely effective approach to growing not just greens and nutritious vegetables for herself, but also a significant portion of her calories and protein in a scalable manner. She's experimented enough with different techniques and levels of water and fertilizer input that she could, given access to enough land, cope quite well with whatever disruptions come down the line. She's saving enough of her own seed to continue gardening if commercial seed sources shut down. And she clearly relishes the results in every meal; her multitude of uses for each staple crop and her recipes convey a deep delight in the flavors and textures of her produce.

The Frustrating

I love that Deppe has laid out such a solid plan for growing a complete diet in the PNW (and with some thought, experimentation, and adaptation, anywhere in temperate areas.) I hate that four of her five staple crops grow as labor intensive, soil and habitat disturbing annuals. And I feel uneasy with three of her five staples conflicting with the paleodiet.

But I have nothing better to offer! It took me six years of experimenting with perennial vegetables and crops in Portland to:

1. Realize that we could easily grow greens & nutritious veggies but
2. ...we couldn't possibly eat enough of them to get a substantial number of calories.
3. Identify some potential perennial herbaceous staples and
4. ...start to grow them out and eat them in greater quantity and
5. ...realize that we should select and breed for better yields and
6. ...experiment with polycultures for more efficient use of space and minimized harm from digging the root crops.
7. Realize that we had a solid base of winter root crops, but very few summer perennial roots or other staples.
8. Just begin to see yields from the nut and fruit trees.

I haven't come across perennial enthusiasts presenting anything nearly as comprehensive as Deppe's system, at least not for intensively cultivated small to medium scale systems in modern private land ownership patterns. I doubt that her level of expertise exists for a system based on diverse perennial plant crops anywhere in the temperate world. (Though I'd love to hear examples of how I'm wrong!) Hence my deep frustration: I yearn to meld the sustainability and low labor of perennial polycultures, the nutritional health of the paleodiet, and Deppe's level of experience growing resilient abundant staples into a truly permacultural blueprint for supporting ourselves and the rest of our landbase. But I don't know how.

The Future

Now that I've moved to Hawaii, I've dramatically simplified my own task of synthesizing perennials and animals and wildlife into production of a low labor, landbase healing paleodiet. But I still want to see similar systems develop in temperate areas. I have some hints and glimmers of hope based on my experimentations in Portland, which I'll post later.

In the meantime, visit www.caroldeppe.com to download free excerpts of the book. Drop her an email to be notified when she has seeds for sale; most of what she sells you can't buy anywhere else!

A Good Egg Is Hard To Buy

With our hens in low production over the winters, we regularly resort to buying in some eggs. The quality always disappoints me. Even local, pastured eggs at $6 and $7 a dozen literally pale in comparison to those of our hens! Maybe this is one of those things money can't buy--at least not in commercial quantity?

The picture shows our hen egg at left, and one each of the $6 and $7/dozen eggs at right.  (Plus other standard ingredients of my scrambles: cooking greens, acorn halves, cherry kernels, and skirret root.  Fennel seed is in there but too small to see.  Garlic to be added at the end.)

Harvest log update, February 2012

I've updated the harvest log website. I haven't posted about the harvest log since last April. Some unorganized thoughts follow:

• Our average daily calorie harvest hasn't changed much, still right about 670 calories per day. We still have perhaps 10-20 pounds of honey and maybe 3 pounds of fennel seed which we harvested but haven't weighed and entered into the database yet, which will boost the calories.
  
• We've been harvesting fewer ounces of food per day than before, but with similar total calories, meaning we're harvesting more calorie crop - mostly a result of increased honey and egg harvest.
  
• None of the fruit trees we've planted yielded last year, except the medlar in heavy shade with a little over 2 pounds of fruit. We did get twice as many cherries from our front yard seedling cherry as we did the previous year. We were a bit surprised and disappointed that the persimmon tree which gave 8 1/2 pounds in 2010 didn't yield in 2011. Our region had poor fruit harvests in general due to weather causing poor pollination. Hopefully this year the fruit trees will really start to produce, after 5 years in the ground!
  
• Great yield from our goumi, which gave 12 1/2 pounds.
  
• Much better yield from the strawberry patch, which gave 17 pounds in 2011 compared to 6 in 2010. Probably because Tulsey thinned out the plants in winter of 2010/11. The patch is about 80 square feet.
  
• Bad raspberry year (11 pounds compared to 31 in 2010), as most of the plants in our original planting died (probably from root rot or some other disease), plus we didn't water the living patches enough to get a good fall harvest.
  
• Our english walnut and two or three of our four hazels set some nuts, but all were taken by squirrels and jays. Unfortunately, we didn't eat any squirrels from the yard this year to offset that loss. We did get one tiny chestnut!
  
• Our harvest of greens dropped off a lot last year, partly because we were wrapped up in the house project, and partly because we didn't irrigate much in summer and the greens suffered a lot.
  
• Fairly large garlic harvest last year, of 18 pounds. (Shallots were a near total failure.) I'd like to see that tripled next year.
  
• Sunchoke harvest has dropped by 50% due to making fewer fires, greatly affecting the winter calorie harvest. I think I'm going to break down and just use our gas stove and a sleeping bag (to act as a "haybox") to start cooking the sunchokes.
  
• We approximately doubled our fennel seed harvest, to 5 pounds. Very successful calorie crop.
  
• More eggs this past year, as the hens we purchased in May 2010 laid heavily from December 2010 through November 2011 before slowing down. We've had a larger flock than would be at all sustainable for this yard, and have been gradually culling the flock for ongoing meat harvest.
  
• Harvesting a lot more nettles this winter season than last year. Delicious!
  
• Light skirret harvest this year. I think last year I harvested a bunch of plants that had been in the ground 2 or 3 years and got very big, then replanted those crowns. I didn't water the skirret much this past season, and many of them grew in part to full shade. I harvested almost all those plants this winter as 1 year old, relatively scrawny roots. Definitely better to get some sort of multi-year mixture going so you can always harvest older plants.
  
• Light mashua & yacon harvests this year, again because of lack of water. Almost all the mashua plants died down in the summer; I didn't expect any roots from them at all, and was pleasantly surprised at how many we did get considering how sad they were.
  
• Good oca harvest this year! Two patches did poorly (lack of water again); one patch to the north of one of our persimmon trees in polyculture with yellow asphodel & lily did very well.
  
• Nice teaser autumn olive and grape harvests! Neither huge, but larger than the few dozen berries or grapes from last year.
  
• Pretty good potato harvest, though still not as good as I'd have liked - lack of water stunted or killed many plants.
  
• We ate lots of fuki stalk, and sold or gave away several divisions, barely managing to keep the growth of the patch in check. Great vigorous perennial vegetable.
  
• So far our asparagus is a very poorly yielding crop in terms of calories per space it takes up--only 280 calories from maybe 10 plants using maybe 30 square feet? Our solomon's seal gave 2/3 the calories from a similar area but growing in heavy shade on the north wall of our house, under timber bamboo, with lungwort, lovage, and wood sorrel in there as well. And we didn't even harvest as much of the solomon's seal as we could have.
  

New Paul Wheaton video: Sustainable Food - People Per Acre

I've added this to the "Video and articles about us" perma-link:

Paul Wheaton Sustainable Food - People Per Acre video (12 minutes) with a lot of footage of me and Tulsey describing our property, our initial expectations for self sufficiency for 3-4 people, and our growing realization of the realities of how many calories we can harvest here. Shot in August 2011.

House heat update & unintended consequences

Fuel Used To Date

With the whole house almost completely insulated, we've burned about 38 cubic feet of firewood this winter, a bit less than 1/3 cord.  (One cord of wood is a pile 4' x 8' x 8', or 128 cubic feet.)  We've been keeping the sunspace between about 50-62F, with the north part of the house generally a few degrees cooler during the day, but dropping to the same temps overnight.  We've made a fire every 2 or 3 days on average.  We made at least 1/3 of those fires for guests or for house showings, not because we needed the heat for ourselves.  We're probably on track to use a total of 4/10 a cord of wood.  We scavenge all our wood for free, but market rate is around $150/cord, so we'll use about $60 worth of wood for heating.

We still have extra heat input from showers (about 3 per week) and from cooking on our gas stove (8 therms=800,000 btus since Oct. 18, or the equivalent of 1/25 cord of wood.) This winter has seemed unusually sunny, so our passive solar heat gain has been higher than in a normal winter.

Future Steps

I'm fairly pleased with our relatively low energy consumption this winter, but we're still far short of our original goal of heating the house entirely from on-site resources.  Some pieces we're still missing:

• Insulation for all house windows, especially sunspace windows, for better overnight heat retention
• Finish insulating attic
• Rocket stove instead of normal wood stove, for much greater efficiency in cooking and heating
• Install our 5 solar hot water panels and run the hot water through the radiant floor tubing
• Full growth of trees and shrubs for fuel from pruning & coppicing

Unintended Consequences

In past years, we used our daily fires through the winter to cook our jerusalem artichokes (aka sunchokes), converting the inulin to digestible sugars after 6-8 hours of pressure cooking. That worked well when we made fires daily. Now, with fires only every 2nd or 3rd day, it takes almost a week to cook the 3 pounds of sunchokes which our pressure cooker can hold. Last winter I ate twice that much per week. We could partially solve this problem with an additional and/or larger pressure cooker.

Same problem with processing acorns using our preferred hot leaching method. However, since we don't rely on a pressure cooker, we can "scale up" by using multiple pots of large size to leach the acorns, rather than relying on daily fires.

Similarly, without frequent fires, we're having a much harder time drying nuts, herbs, processed acorn meal, seeds, laundry, wet winter clothes, etc. Now I wish we hadn't sold our solar dehydrator last fall; we could have used it on our sunny winter days when we weren't making fires. If we were staying here longer, we'd probably set up the front porch or carport for initial drying of clothes, moving them inside for final drying as needed. Better yet would be a space protected from rain but exposed to the sun, such as my recent idea of an enclosed greenhouse to the south of our sunspace.

Neat seeds from Adaptive Seeds

Since we're trying to sell our house and move to Hawaii any month now, I'm not planning new experimental plantings. But that doesn't stop me from dreaming, and I might as well share that here.

I just received the 2012 seed catalog from Adaptive Seeds. They have a few interesting perennials and Pacific Northwest (PNW) adapted calorie crops:

• "Western Front" perennial kale - newly available after last year's unavailability. I bought seeds of this in 2010, but didn't get very many plants well established. Chickens ate the best plants and none wound up overwintering successfully. So I can't vouch for their perennial nature, but they seem to have potential.
  
• Withner's White Cornfield Pole Snap Bean - according to Carol Deppe (author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and The Resilient Gardener), this variety is the best for the PNW and for growing in the cornfield (or in partly shady conditions).
  
• Corn varieties recommended by Carol Deppe for the PNW: Abenaki & Mandan Parching Lavender.
  
• Amaranth seed varieties: Copperhead (A. cruentus) and Rodale Red Leaf Grain. I still have hopes of getting seed amaranths growing in the yard as self-seeding "grains."
  
• Japanese buckwheat - supposed to have larger seeds than the usual cover crop varieties. They say they've planted as late as mid-July and still harvested a crop; maybe this could work as a follow-up to garlic or favas?
  
• Elka White Poppy - large seed pods stay sealed instead of scattering their seed. I've always liked the idea of poppies as a staple seed source, with their ability to grow a bit over the winter, but have had no success growing them.
  
• Millwright Perennial Rye - bred by Tim Peters.
  
• Douglas Triticale - from Tim Peters, shows some perennial regrowth when plants are spaced out well. May not work well with our system of dense plant growth everywhere.
  
• Silene inflata - perennial herb with winter-available greens.
  
• Oregon Homestead Sweet Meat squash - selected by Carol Deppe for the PNW.
  

Press & videos including or about me

I plan to maintain this post with a permalink from the blog's sidebar. If I/we appear in future videos, articles, etc, I'll add them to this post and make a temporary one-off post to let people know about the new addition.

You can watch a presentation I gave in 2011, via youtube below, or visit Self Sufficiency, Five Years In for other download options.

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Paul Wheaton Sustainable Food - People Per Acre video (12 minutes) with a lot of footage of me and Tulsey describing our property, our initial expectations for self sufficiency for 3-4 people, and our growing realization of the realities of how many calories we can harvest here. Shot in August 2011.

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Podcast (1 hour 11 minutes) with Paul Wheaton interviewing me. We discussed our transformation of the lot into a food forest, our house sale, chicken paddocks, sunchokes, and our reality check with hopes vs actual yields on our urban homestead. Recorded in October 2011.

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Paul Wheaton Dandelions in permaculture video

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Paul Wheaton Mullein video

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Paul Wheaton Comfrey video

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Paul Wheaton Jerusalem artichoke video (11 1/2 minutes) including some footage of me and Tulsey starting at 1:30. Shot in July 2010 and October 2011.

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Paul Wheaton Slug moat video (4 minutes) showing our slug moat with Tulsey & me describing it a bit. Shot in August 2011.

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Paul Wheaton Currant sawfly video (less than 2 minutes) of me describing how I trained our chickens to eat currant sawfly caterpillars. Shot in July 2010.

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Perennial Vegetables article from Portland Tribune, July 9 2009.

Fennel seed as a calorie crop

We harvested and have begun eating fennel seed this year, and I think it can play a small but useful part in providing a low-maintenance calorie-dense crop in the perennial food system. We didn't do a great job of measuring how much space our fennel seed sources took up, but we have some estimates. We think we harvested from about 15 plants, and figure they take up a combined total of about 40 square feet. (This gets especially fuzzy when you try to distinguish between space at the base vs space at the top after the stalks have branched out a lot. We interplant a lot of shorter plants with the fennel, so we're estimating more of the base/root exclusion area.) We harvested a total of 35.5 ounces (3600 calories), but we estimate we only harvested about 2/3 of the available seed. So we could have gotten about 5400 calories from 40 square feet, which means 135 calories per square foot...right on par with good yields from greens and roots.

We also harvested an unknown but sizeable bunch of greens from the fennel plants through the season. I also harvested many flowers (perhaps 5% of the total?) for salads, believing mistakenly from my early experiments with eating the fennel seed that the strong flavor meant we wouldn't actually be able to use it in much bulk, so I might as well eat up the flowers.

I can't eat much fennel seed raw; I use it in small amounts as a strong spice or nibble. But I can eat at least a tablespoon (quarter ounce, about 25 calories) in my omelette each day, as long as I put the fennel seed in early so it cooks well. That knocks the strong flavor back a lot. I can sprinkle fennel seed on beef patties before cooking them, or add it in bulk to soups and stews. (Haven't measured exactly how much I've used in these situations, but I'd guess at least half a tablespoon with 1/3 pound of beef.) I've also soaked fennel seed overnight with nuts (hazelnuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds) and eaten them all together with dried fruit the next day. (Again, maybe half a tablespoon at a time with a quarter cup of other nuts.) All in all, I think I can easily average 25 calories a day year round, and if I wanted to push it maybe 50 per day. Not a staple food by any means, but an easy concentrated source of calories. I'm learning the value of that as I find my limits of how many greens or bulky roots I can eat per day. A tablespoon of fennel seed providing the same calories as three cups of greens has a lot of value.

Growing fennel takes no work at all once it gets established. It comes back from a taproot year after year, probably mining some nutrients from deep below, and definitely feeding beneficial insects with its carrot family flowers. You can eat the roots of excess seedlings, though I've had trouble finding a good time to harvest them--young plants have nice enough roots (though very strong tasting, benefiting from cooking) but weigh almost nothing, while older sizable roots have become too tough for me to enjoy. So I'll probably just adopt an approach of over-harvesting to death the greens from unwanted seedlings, leaving more greens on our main plants to maximize seed production.

Our chickens love eating the seed! We had never tried feeding them fennel seeds until this winter, and I wish I'd figured it out sooner. Definitely worth growing a bunch of fennel plants in the chicken yard, then cutting down the heads throughout the fall and winter for the chickens to access.

It took me a while to process the fennel seed. Tulsi had already harvested the seed heads, by cutting them from the stalk and filling a four gallon bucket packed fairly tight. (It maybe took her 15-30 minutes to harvest it all??) I spent about 4 hours total watching movies and stripping the seeds from the seed heads. So I processed about 900 calories per hour. In general, I take much longer to do manual hand-processing work than Tulsi and many other people, so take that figure as an upper end of expected time required. Also, it took me a little time to figure out the most efficient strategy, and even once I did, I had a hard time making myself follow it.

You'll get the quickest results by accepting some losses--strip as much seed as comes off the seed head easily in one or two passes, then move on to the next seed head. The fennel seed you miss will feed the chickens. However, I tend to demand too much perfection in these matters--spending a long time picking the last bit of walnut out from the deep groove, carefully cutting off bad spots from jerusalem artichokes so as to preserve as much good flesh as possible (despite still having 100 pounds out in the yard to work through, more than we'll be able to eat!), and spending 4 times as much time to get the last 4 fennel seeds as I spent getting the first 16 seeds from the seed head. I need to cultivate an attitude of strategic waste; accept that I don't need to extract every last morsel of food from the project at hand, when there's plenty more where that came from, and the chickens have much more combined time on their hands (er, beaks and claws) than I.

I don't know whether fennel seeds contain anti-nutrients, which of course eliminate many seeds (especially grains) from the paleodiet. I would guess fennel seeds rely more on their intense flavor to keep mammals from eating very many of them, so maybe cooking them to mellow the flavor deactivates their main line of defense? And if they do contain anti-nutrients, I would guess that a quarter ounce per day won't constitute enough consumption to really cause problems. But I'd love to see more definitive information on this question.

Mysteries of Prunus REVEALED!!!

My own thought a day

Inspired by my old high school friend Ben (WARNING: no rewilding content!), I embark on an attempt to post once a day with some tidbit concerning permaculture, rewilding, the collapse of civilization, or some such important piece of my life. I have never posted as often to this blog as I would like, nor have I ever emailed or called friends and family as often as I intended, so I don't feel particularly hopeful about my commitment to daily posting. (I don't recommend that you put any money down on it!) But I'll try to give it a good shot, and if it means I wind up posting once a week, at least I'll be posting more often than the once a month I've managed thus far! So...

Prunus presents

I now reveal the secrets of Prunus! Learn how to double the value of your prunes! Meet the mystery fruit, once hated as a useless pain in the ass, now my beloved companion!

Kernel of wisdom

As you know, botanists classify almonds in the genus Prunus, along with many of our common fruits including plums, cherries, peaches, and apricots. People grow almonds for their extra-large seed enclosed in (if I understand correctly) a thin layer of flesh which pretty much dries up and withers away once the almond ripens. The seed, when cracked open, reveals an...almond...a nice large package of nut!

According to Plants for a Future, you can eat the kernels of the seeds of just about all other Prunus species in the same way as almonds. Some cautions apply: "sweet" almonds cultivated for eating come from a type of almond species selected for low content of the glycoside amygdalin, "which becomes transformed into deadly Prussic acid (Hydrogen cyanide) after crushing, chewing, or any other injury to the seed." (Wikipedia) Wild, or bitter almonds, contain relatively high amounts of amygdalin and thus pose more danger of cyanide poisoning upon ingestion. Other Prunus species have varying levels of amygdalin, and content may even vary across individuals within a species. The more amygdalin, the more bitter the taste. So if a kernel tastes "too bitter" (PFAF's phrase--I'm not quite sure how to judge that!), avoid it! Again according to PFAF, "[amygdalin leading to hydrogen cyanide] is usually present in too small a quantity to do any harm but any very bitter seed or fruit should not be eaten. In small quantities, hydrogen cyanide has been shown to stimulate respiration and improve digestion, it is also claimed to be of benefit in the treatment of cancer. In excess, however, it can cause respiratory failure and even death."

I have heard second-hand (and therefore pass it along merely as rumour for you to evaluate yourself), that John Kallas (whom I perceive as responsibly anal when it comes to researching and making statements about foods with potential toxicity) says that since hydrogen cyanide is a gas at room temperature, that by crushing or cutting up kernels you can convert the amygdalin into hydrogen cyanide which evaporates off, therefore reducing or eliminating the dangers of eating kernels. I don't know how long you have to wait for the gas to evaporate, or how thoroughly you should crush or cut the kernels. Note that wikipedia seems to describe hydrogen cyanide as a gas only above 78.8°F, although other sources I found with a random web search state it a gas at "room temperature."

This seems consistent with citations I've seen in Daniel Moerman's Native American Ethnobotany and in Samuel Thayer's The Forager's Harvest that Native Americans pounded up various small Prunus fruits, fruit shell and kernel, then dried them as cakes for later consumption. I believe Moerman's book also mentions roasting or leaching as methods used to process Prunus kernels (or maybe I saw that in another source, or maybe I made it up). I generally figure indigenous people knew what they were doing, so this seems like good confirmation to me of the safety of consuming kernels in moderation, especially if processed in any of those ways. (Though I have to say that eating dried fruit with little bits of shell mixed in does not sound appealing to me.)

For the last month or two I have been eating kernels from cherries, plums, and a few peaches. I have eaten maybe 12 kernels per day on average, probably eating no more than 40 kernels on any given day. I have felt no ill effects, aside from mild frustration at the low yield! Cracking peach pits seems to give an equivalent yield for time invested to other nuts, but since cherry and plum pits give much less nut meat per seed, it takes a lot of hammer whacks and (most time-consuming) fiddling with the cracked seed to extract enough kernels to equal, say, one walnut. (I think I'll post a fuller comparison of nuts yields and so on at some point). Given that I do not have access to foraged almonds, I don't mind spending a little extra time (which can feel meditative--I like hitting things with hammers) to add variety to my usual walnuts & cashews with almond-tasting morsels. And I really enjoy the way this discovery extends the caloric and nutritional value of all these fruits we've foraged...I misled you above by saying you could double the value of your Prunus, but as a wild-ass-guess the kernels may yield 25% again of the calories of the fruit flesh, well worth capturing and eating if you have time to spare.

Enough for tonight...you'll have to tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to our unique expose on PRUNUS!!!