Thanks to everyone for the wishes for a speedy recovery and suggested remedies. Rest and good food (with some light house tidying to stave off boredom) seems to be working for now and I suspect I will be back to full power within a month or two, which will be good timing to get back into preparing growing spaces for the coming warm season.
This period of enforced inactivity reminded me of the years we spent in the city, working full time to pay off the farm. During those days I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching and listing all the possible crops I could trial and how they might fit together into a cohesive system. The last few days has seen me returning to this habit, and I decided to start this week’s post by focusing on the vital staple crops. I picked a dozen species as a nice solid number to keep the list for growing out of control. I have about a dozen seasons of intensive crop breeding left in me before age catches up with me, so it is important to focus my remaining time and energy. I’ll now briefly go over each species on the short list, my progress so far and the next planned steps in its evolution.
The first big focus is the inga alley system. The first of these is well established, and a second one in a less flood prone spot has been direct sowed with Inga seed (though it will take a while to determine if the success rate was high- I’ll grow a half dozen trays of Inga seedlings in pots as a back up approach). These spaces ideally need two complementary staple crops for the summer, and another pair for the winter, and I will outline these first.
1. Maize has proven itself to be well adapted to our conditions, and the parrot proof grex population is an irreplaceable genetic foundation. This population needs more active selection for plant quality in future seasons. I also wish to explore crossing with ancestral teosinte in my isolated vegetable garden then carefully back crossing into the main population. This could further increase the hardiness of the crop. Failing that mixing in a little diversity of other flour corn varieties every few years is a lower risk option. I also need to learn to prepare flour corn for the table in a routine manner.
2. Chia has blown me away with its performance this year, and this was based on one roughly mixed population. The tiny 3 square meter patch in the corner of the vegetable garden produced 250 g of cleaned seed, knocking grain amaranth off its perch. It flowers and yields long after maize is finished, so could be interplanted at sowing time then take over the space for the second half of the season (cutting down the old maize stems might be helpful to reduce shading). I have a handful of more diverse strains to try this season. More exciting, preliminary attempts at crossing chia (Salvia hispanica) with other species seems to be yielding viable seeds and seedlings. These random wide crosses present a much richer opportunity to develop a new summer grain crop Salvia species that incorporates even better into the inga alley system.
3. The cool season in the inga alleys represents the biggest untapped opportunity on the farm. The front runner for this niche is quinoa, given enough of a genetic boost to locally adapt through crossing with its sister species huauzontle. This year I grew a half dozen strains of both, staggered sowings in small pots so I could attempt controlled crossing of the two species. This seems to have worked, so I will grow out some of the hybrid seed this winter, in pots, to bulk it up and push forward into the more variable F2 generation for field trials in the vegetable garden next year. The sooner I can get bulk diverse Chenopodium seed into the inga alleys so it can be selected under the intended final growing conditions the better.
4. Traditional cool season grass grains grow pretty well here but get stripped by clouds of hungry little birds in the milk stage, long before they can be harvested. Rescue grass (Bromus catharticus) is an introduced weedy annual we used to call wild oats and it is mostly ignored by the birds since it has a tight glume wrapping the seed like common oats. This species was used extensively as a staple crop by the indigenous people of Uruguay. I have a big bucket of dried seed I collected last year that I need to experiment with in the kitchen, but I am confident this species would make a functional companion to quinoa in the winter inga alleys. It grows shorter and ripens later than quinoa, so could carry on after that crop is harvested.
5. The next major area is my low bank of silt, nestled in a loop in the creek. This is the only place where yams can develop properly (and grow deeply enough to put off the bandicoots digging them up). As such I want to resume my efforts to sexually reproduce yams here. This means building bamboo trellises every spring (yams sprout as late as November most years) to help them dominate the weeds and grow without further assistance. My female clone of D. alata should be intermixed with male clones of my highly fertile D. hamiltonii, so I need to find a way to make that happen (I have a batch of hamiltonii seedlings in a pot that I can use as a starting point- maybe planting them spaced out on individual trellises then propagating the males closer to the alata). I also have a male bulbifera and a cayennensis of unknown gender that could be added to the mix. Larger, higher quality winged yam tubers need to be reincorporated into my winter diet. I quite enjoyed eating them last time I made the effort.
6. The other major species to incorporate into the lower quality soil patches in the silt bank are Cannas. I have already moved some of my best original species with large tubers into this area as a backup to the small populations near the house. So far I have only had a single successful season crossing Queensland arrowroot with C. discolor. The resulting seedlings are promising and have been put through their paces, but no further breeding work has taken place in years (mostly because I lost my flowering clumps of Queensland arrowroot in my vegetable garden due to poor decisions). I have since reestablished that vital resource and hope to backcross select hybrids to Queensland arrowroot at the first opportunity to push this project further. Selecting hybrids based on the yield of extractable starch and not just tuber size is a priority that needs to be pushed. Once I start producing higher quality second generation hybrids I can plant a larger area for production on the silty creek flat area. Then I will have to develop a mobile starch processing unit to avoid carrying the 95% of the tuber mass up the hill.
7. I have a lot of wasted weedy ground not far from the house which has untapped potential, provided I can figure out a low maintenance way to use it. Cutting shrubs and burning them in piles creates mineral rich openings in the cover which are perfect for staple cucurbits like Seminole pumpkins. More biomass can be piled on the spaces to slow down the return of weed pressure. Seminole pumpkins are particularly good at scrambling over debris piles. Further breeding work selecting larger fruit while maintaining good storage qualities and high yield of good quality pumpkin seed is a priority here. Egusi watermelons (an ancient strain bred for oilseed production) just entered my collection, and I hope to cross my strain with a different one that a friend is growing. Citron melon genetics might also be worth adding to the mix (though their seeds are rock hard). Watermelons are a bit less tolerant of weed competition, so I need to find a technique to grow them well. We hope to return to raising a few dozen geese in the future, so creating day pens for the flock to eat the weeds down to the dirt may be another way to create suitable cucurbit habitat. The creation of mounds of silty soil to replant each year, as the Hidatsa Indians did, may be another way to direct concentrated nutrient wastes to the crops (perhaps using humanure during the absence of goat manure). I realise I am cheating a bit here listing two distinct species with one overlapping end use. Maybe one of them will push out the other in the long run. I suspect egusi melons might lose if their weed intolerance proves problematic.
8. I was very lucky to get a sample of true sweet potato seeds, from a strain that reliably produces good quality tubers from seed. These have languished for want of attention and motivation, since this crop requires more careful bed preparation and irrigation through dry spells to perform well for me. Despite its demands and weaknesses, I feel like this crop is worth investing my time and energy into. It is the only local staple crop which can be mass propagated rapidly from vines in a single season, and can grow and produce just about any time of year if given what it needs. In the event of a sudden interruption of industrial supply chains it is the only crop which can quickly fill in calorie demands at scale. Add in the ability to save seed to bounce back from disasters, and a fertile population capable of local adaptation, and you have something that is worth carrying water on your back for. I will need to carry a few cubic meters of silt from the gully and dams into my vegetable garden to create suitable growing beds, but I only need enough to do some basic grow outs for tuber quality assessment, followed by cycles of seed production from the superior clones. And as a bonus I will get plenty of sweet potatoes for the kitchen (which I know how to roast to perfection with goat tallow and cumin). All the work I had hoped to do years ago crossing various semi-edible Ipomoea species will not be resumed, but mentor grafting sweet potato seedlings onto a wide variety of other species to potentially inject a little wild card vigour could be worth considering.
9. Next are the staple legumes. I have a feeling these will be more important than expected. The biggest mover on this front are the sword beans (Canavalia). The hybrids I hand pollinated last year between gladiata, ensiformis and papuana are podding heavily right now and should be ripe in another month or two. Hopefully the trellises don’t completely collapse before then. I planted the seed in three rows based on seed parent, but they ended up in a tangled mess so I will be evaluating the seed from the F1 based on visual traits. Next season I will build a much bigger set of trellises over roughly slashed weedy beds in the old vegetable garden. It only takes a few follow up slashings of the weedy regrowth to let the sword beans climb and start shading them out, so the total labour is relatively low. I will probably favour large hybrid seeds for replanting and starting drifting away from the weedy papuana influence, though the smaller seeds with more of this parentage should be sowed in my Tithonia thickets to see if any of them can grow and produce without any weed management. The biggest investment needed with this species is practice turning it into tempeh and other detoxification methods. Time experimenting in the kitchen is just as vital as time in the garden when you are developing a novel crop. Planting cotton trees that host wild tempeh microbes is also a top priority to see if I can wean myself off purchasing starter cultures.
10. The other major staple legume is the lima bean. My first attempt to cross the large seeded and small seeded strains failed due to sword beans and cucamelons swamping the plants. The small seeded limas are podding nicely now at least. Getting the timing right sowing these crops is a priority since early sowings result in months of flowering energy wasted as the pod sucking bugs feast. Hand pollination of this species is tricky for a bunch of fiddly technical reasons, but I am confident I can overcome them with a better set up in terms of plantings, and plain old persistence. Once I have that key wide cross in my hands then life should get a lot simpler. Combining the vegetative vigour of the large seed form with the productivity of the small seeders should result in a much more useful strain.
11. Oilseed staple crops are absolutely vital. Humans are highly adapted to starch, but even our metabolism has limits and some reliable amount of fat in the diet makes a big difference. Reading how the Hidatsa grew sunflowers for this purpose made me revisit the potential of an Asteraceae in my system. Even the Hidatsa need to carefully time their harvest to dodge bird pressure (but also intriguingly relied on semiwild forms of sunflower to produce much of their oil crop). Recently I read of an Eastern European breeding project which tested the limits of sunflower wide hybridisation, which found pretty much anything could cross. What jumped out was the appearance of Tithonia diversifolia on the list of sunflower hybrids. So I have pledged my determination to cross sunflower with the weedy perennial Mexican sunflower Tithonia that dot my farm. This species has highly seasonal flowering, with a peak in May every year. This just means I need to stagger sow a diversity of crop forms of sunflower leading up to this event, then do the fiddly work of controlled hand crossing to kick off the process. The ultimate aim would be a perennial shrubby species which grows with minimal assistance in my fields and orchards, which produces a large enough crop of oilseeds to be worth harvesting. Interestingly, I have already harvested bulk Tithonia seed with careful timing. This year I plan to assess Tithonia seed edibility with yet more experiments in the kitchen.
12. The final slot in my dozen crops took me a while to fill. I considered trying to develop Leucaena into a shrubby staple legume (it is used for tempeh in Indonesia, but sword beans do this better). I feel this final slot needs to be something truly ambitious, unique to my situation and with the greatest potential for transforming future agricultural systems. So I will list the humble Lomandra here as a potential future perennial grain crop. This grassy asparagus relative is a common site in school gardens and parking lots due to its incredible hardiness. The most common species (L. longifolia) comes from rainforest creeks where it forms extensive root mats to resist seasonal erosion and they are native to my remnant creek rainforest. They produce spikes of spiny flowers followed by decent amounts of very hard seed, which were somehow eaten by the aborigines. The genus features a lot of smaller species from drier habitats, but there is a handful of larger rainforest species that have proven interfertile for breeding new ornamental varieties. I can reproduce this work and take it in a different direction- the selection of strains which produce large amounts of edible seed. The hard seed could be an asset if it makes long term storage easier. I already have a second species in the mix (L. hystrix). Field trips to collect wider diversity is an option.
One final bonus species sneaks onto the end of the list, like the black fairy crashing sleeping beauty’s party. The Madeira vine (Anredera) is a weedy species that produces slimy edible tubers as well as prolific amounts of aerial tubers. This species is in the same family as the leaf vegetable Malabar spinach (Basella alba) and the fussy Andean tuber crop ulluco. I found a little patch of Madeira vine near the creek, washed downstream during a flood. I’m tempted to see what I can do with this species through intergeneric hybridisation with Basella, and mentor grafting onto anything and everything to see if I can induce useful variations. Madeira vine was a major candidate for animal feed production on poor soils in the 1800s, but fell out of favour as industrialisation took off. Perhaps it could be useful for growing my own goose and chicken feed, the minimal amount of concentrated carbohydrates these animals need to free range efficiently. Developing a strain that produces better edible aerial tubers will be the main priority here, for easy continuous harvests and/or simple storability.
So that is my short list of staple crops which will be absorbing my attention for the next decade or so. In aggregate I feel like they have the potential to combine into a viable foundation for a subsistence agricultural economy, with sufficient diversity and storability to sustain the local population through the inevitable ups and downs of our volatile climate. In coming weeks, I will go through the same thought process to cover the best dozen tree species and vegetables to round out the plant that I believe will form the future core of my local agroecology.
How does canna do as a wild species on your farm? If you plant it out on your hillside, will it remain competitive or lose out to the weeds (assuming you keep back the woody species)?
Also, I know that tree breeding is a much more involved process, but have you considered growing pecans? They are a great source of fat and are grown in mexico and Texas, which is similar to your climate. They might be hard to get there but could be a worthwhile species.
Also, have you tried peanuts? I don’t remember if you mentioned that in a prior post.
For sunflowers, there’s a lot of diversity in the Silphium family and some of them have moderately sized seeds. They grow all over the U.S. from Florida to the north.
I’m also wondering if the scale at which you grow a crop will affect its resistance to pests. I am trying to grow a lot of wild edible plants in my garden and experience a lot of herbivore pressure, but I suspect if I scale up a plant to be relatively abundant, that the pests will be satisfied to some extent. In this case, it is mostly rabbits and chipmunks that are the culprits, but birds too.
Hi mate, hope you’re getting better.
Can you share any more about the cotton tree and tempeh spores? Any techniques?