Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (7 page)

To make beans more area-efficient (more calories produced in less space) you could interplant them with corn, growing pole varieties of beans up the cornstalks. Remember the stories of the Three Sisters? Corn, beans, and squash were key staples for the American Indians. That brings us to grains in your garden. Corn is easy. You’ve probably already grown sweet corn. If you are interested in getting the maximum food value from your garden you will want to grow corn all the way out to dry seed, so you would choose varieties best for grinding to cornmeal. If you aren’t ready to be grinding cornmeal, but you want to experience
growing corn out to dry seed, try popcorn. Popcorn is a good way to get acquainted with harvesting dried corn and cornstalks.

Rye and wheat are great for covering your garden through the winter. Cereal rye (not rye grass) and winter wheat are planted in the fall and harvested the following summer, in time for a crop of something else to follow. In my area in Virginia in Zone 7, I harvest these grains in mid-June. Spring wheat is planted in areas with winters too cold for fall-planted wheat. These grains are good additions to your diet and provide biomass in the form of straw for compost making. You could grow rye and wheat and learn to make your own sourdough bread. Corn, wheat, and rye are also choices as compost crops for their stalks and straw, providing food for us and food for the soil, but more about that in
Chapter 5
.

You may have read about the wonders of amaranth. I have and it sounds like a terrific crop. I even grew it to see what it was like. It has very small seeds and if you aren’t careful, it can become a weed in your garden. In fact, amaranth is related to pigweed. I can’t grow everything and decided that corn, rye, and wheat would be the grains in my garden.

I have peanuts in my garden as a soil builder, in addition to being a diet crop. We eat peanuts from the shell, often roasting them first. Making peanut butter from them is too much bother for me. The dried foliage from the peanuts — peanut hay — can be used to feed your compost pile or small livestock, such as goats or rabbits.

In my discussion here, I should mention soybeans. I avoid soy in my diet because it is high in phytates and contains enzyme inhibitors, which can lead to protein assimilation problems. Unless soy is consumed as a fermented product, such as miso, natto, or tempeh, it can be damaging to your health if you consume it regularly.
⁹
You can certainly grow soybeans in your garden as a soil builder. In that case, it would be grown as a green biomass crop for compost material, harvested when it is flowering. The conventional food industry in this country has convinced a huge population that soy is necessary to their existence. The Weston A. Price Foundation is the place to find more information about that issue. If you grow soy out to eat, learn to ferment it. Much of the soy used in the food industry is disguised to make it taste like something else. Learn to
celebrate the unique flavors of each food. Food should not have to be made to taste like something else.

Growing Calcium

Most likely, dairy products are the first things that come to mind when thinking of calcium. If a cow or goat is not in your plan, you can put calcium on your plate in the form of leafy greens. Collards are loaded with calcium, with a cup of cooked collards containing about as much calcium as a cup of cow’s or goat’s milk. Kale is also high in calcium. Parsley has as much calcium as collards, however it is also high in oxalic acid. Oxalic acid will tie up the calcium in your diet, but it can be neutralized by cooking. For that reason, you should avoid eating raw large quantities of foods that are high in oxalic acid. The spinach family crops (spinach, beet greens, and Swiss chard) are high in oxalic acid.

Growing and eating foods high in calcium is only part of the story. You have probably heard that it is important to have enough vitamin D to work with the calcium and you can get vitamin D from being in the sun. D is a fat soluble vitamin (as are A, E, and K) so you need fat as a catalyst to help things along. A bit of oil or butter on your greens and other vegetables helps with assimilating all of these fat soluble vitamins. Peanuts and hazelnuts (filberts) are sources of both calcium and fat. Hazelnuts grow on trees and can become part of your permaculture plan as you expand beyond the vegetable garden.

Oils and Sweeteners

Peanuts and hazelnuts that provide calories, calcium, and fat, as well as protein, can be pressed for oil. Sunflower and pumpkin seeds can also be pressed for oil, but you need to make sure you are growing the right
varieties for that. Growing crops just for cooking oil takes a lot of space. A sustainable diet would use limited amounts of oil for that reason. Other nut trees, such as pecan, English walnut, and black walnut might be part of your permaculture homestead. It takes time to grow them, and you have to put in some work to shell them, but the nuts can be pressed for oil.

Honey is a good product on a permaculture homestead. Once you become aware of the nectar sources for your bees, you will want to keep something blooming in your diverse plantings. Buckwheat is good as a short-term filler in your summer garden beds and the bees love it. Most of your cover crops become bee food. Keeping the bees in mind as you plan borders and companion plants will also help. Trees and shrubs provide an early nectar flow for the bees. This is outside of your annual garden beds but within your permaculture plan.

Maple syrup and sorghum syrup can be produced on your land. You have to take into account the fuel that is needed to cook the sap down to syrup to determine the ecological footprint of these products. I grew up in maple syrup country in northeast Ohio. I don’t know how many small sugar bushes are still operating, but we buy local maple syrup when we visit. Of course, you need sugar maple trees for that. Sorghum can be grown in your garden for both grain and syrup. I have had little success with the syrup part, but grow it for the grain. Considering the ecological footprint of syrups, just like cooking oil, you would be limiting the amount you use in a sustainable diet.

Other Crops

Certainly, we are going to be targeting crops that can give us the most of what we need in as small a space as we can. However, as with everything else, we have to look at the whole picture. Learn as much as you can about diet and nutrition. Sometimes it is the small addition to a dish that makes it special to the eye and to the appetite and is the key to unlocking all the nutrients. My garden wouldn’t be without onions. They have many health benefits and add much flavor to dishes. Tomatoes and peppers are also high on my list to include. I’ve mentioned collards and kale for greens to grow, but all the cabbage family is important.

Winter squash is also on my list of important crops to grow. It can go in the Three Sisters bed with the corn and beans or it can wander in your pathways. Winter squash is loaded with nutrition, and best of all, it can just keep all by itself until you want to eat it.

More Planning Tools

The Resilient Gardener
by Carol Deppe is an excellent book to read on the subject of choosing crops to sustain you. In this book she talks in depth about the need to plan a garden to grow staple crops — in particular, potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs. Deppe is a plant breeder and has developed seed varieties to suit her diet and her climate.

Ecology Action has some publications, available through Bountiful Gardens, that address planning a sustainable diet. Their Self-Teaching Mini-Series #36
An Experimental 33-Bed GROW BIOINTENSIVE® Mini-Farm: Growing Complete Fertility, Nutrition and Income
has some good information on diet crops if your food is to be limited to what is grown in your garden.

If you really like to plan things by the numbers, take a look at the Ecology Action publication #31
Designing a GROW BIOINTENSIVE® Sustainable Mini-Farm
. It has forms that are used by the Intermediate-level Ecology Action certified teachers when submitting their garden plans each year. It helps you plan crops that provide the necessary nutrients to a diet and enough cover crops to feed back to your soil. Not everyone is ready for that level of planning. Just because you plan a diet on paper doesn’t mean it is a diet that is practical to eat every day. Use these things as planning tools to help you think through the issues and develop a diet and farm plan that addresses the needs of your family.

Varieties Specific to Your Region and Your Needs

Maybe you aren’t growing all of your food and will be obtaining your staple crops from local suppliers who are growing them using ecologically sound practices. No matter what you grow, you will learn more each year. In
Chapter 5
, I will discuss cover crops and how to use them in your plan to increase soil fertility. For the vegetable crops you choose,
do some homework to discover which varieties will have a better chance of doing well in your area. The varieties of squash that do well for Carol Deppe in Oregon, or Cindy Conner in Virginia, may or may not be the ones that do well for you. That’s not to say you can’t be adventurous. I live in Virginia, an hour from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Jefferson’s adventuresome spirit with plants is well known. He tried many things and not all would be called successful. Remember, however, there are no mistakes — only learning experiences.

I already told you of my experience with pinto beans versus cowpeas. Do as much reading as you can about what is local to your area. If you can, find a seed company that caters to your region. Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is the author of
The Timber Press Guide to Vegetable Gardening in the Southeast
which will help those in the southeast region of the United States find the best crops to grow in their area and determine when and how to plant them. Watch for similar books written about your region.

Talk with other growers. My daughter had good luck with Turkey Craw beans. She raved about them and gave me some seeds. I just might give them a try. One year I tried Seminole squash because my friend Mark talked it up. I didn’t like it as well as he did and went back to my tried and true butternut.

Make sure you know what to expect in the varieties you select. If you are growing beans — how tall are they? If they are bush varieties, you just have to plant. If they are space-saving pole varieties, you need to have something for them to climb on. It could be the corn stalks, and in that case look for bean varieties that enjoy a little shade among the cornstalks. I’ve seen some beans designated as half-runners. You’re on your own to figure out what that means.

You’ll find melon and tomato varieties suitable for areas with a shorter hot season and other varieties that need every bit of heat that summer can provide. How hot (or cool) are your days? Did you know that a consistent minimum of 60°F can have an effect on your plants? From my temperature records I can tell that our nighttime lows are consistently 60°F or above from the first week in June until the first week in September. If your summer nights are consistently
below
60°F, as they
are in Willits, California, different varieties of the same crops would be thriving. You can begin now to keep temperature and precipitation records. It is so easy to forget just how wet, dry, hot, or cold it has been, even just since last month. Having a record to look back on can help you understand what is going on with your crops. Having a record for many years is even more helpful. I have developed two forms to help with that (
Figures 3.1
and
3.2
on the following pages).

Keep in mind that the more you know, the more you don’t know. One year I decided that I would put six years of precipitation records on a graph. Consistently, without a doubt, October was the driest month of the year. Until that year, that is. As soon as I established that “fact” we had the wettest October I have experienced! Keeping weather records helps you become more in-tune with your place, in spite of occasional fluctuations.

Figure 3.1. Temperatures