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Post by gilbert on Apr 4, 2017 11:21:37 GMT -5
If you don't want to wade through theoretics, skip my first post here and read the second, about what I plan to do.
I've been putting a lot of thought into what a permanent, localized agriculture for the high plains and foothill of Colorado would look like.
Trees and shrubs, though beloved of permaculture designers, seem poorly suited to be staple crops here. Fruit and nut set is dependent on stable weather, and of late our already unpredictable weather seems to be getting wilder. As I type this, a heavy wet snow is falling on flowering crabapple and pear trees outside the window; by tomorrow morning, it will have dropped into the low 20s. And this after a March almost devoid of snow and sub freezing weather. Not only are flowers easily damaged, but trees also put a lot of energy into building aboveground infrastructure. Thus, they do not bounce back well from severe weather events. We get hail, late and early snow storms, drought, high winds, and fluctuating temperatures which play havoc with woody plants. In the end, trees are just not adaptable enough for this climate, either genetically or structurally, at least on short time scales.
Annuals are structurally and genetically adaptable. If an early planting is hailed out or snowed out, they can be replanted. Landraces can be quickly adapt to harsh climates. However, they have a reverse problem to the accumulated infrastructure of the trees. They have too little infrastructure and are thus not resilient enough; hail can wipe them out easily. Wet weather in the spring can delay planting; I'd prefer something that came back by itself dependably. On a small scale, for garden vegetables, they work well in this climate with a little extra care; on larger scales, as staple crops, they seem risky.
This "leaves" us with herbaceous perennials. They are more efficient and adaptable then trees, more resilient then annuals. They tend to require less work; many of them spread vigorously, which I consider desirable in a food plant. The ultimate herbaceous perennial is, of course, grass.
Thus, I think a permanent local food system for Colorado would contain the following components: trees and shrubs providing windbreaks, fodder, fuel, building materials, and the occasional fruit/ nut crop when the weather worked out right; animals grazing on extensive dryland silvo-pastoral systems; small scale home gardens with water catchment, microclimate modification, and intensive care growing annual and perennial vegetables; and, on an intermediate position on the scale of intensity of use, small fields growing the tuberous perennials and the most adaptable of the seed bearing annuals (buckwheat, ancient wheats, rye, possibly quinoa or amaranth.)
Why the focus on tubers as a calorie crop? They have many advantages. They are resilient to disturbances aboveground; damage to their stems and leaves will lower but not eliminate a crop. (Potatoes became popular in Ireland partially because they could stand up to trampling armies and late summer rain, both of which would devastate annual grain crops.) They have the potential to be perennial, low work, soil holding crops, and to keep well underground with no extra work. They are easier to harvest and prepare by hand then almost all the grain crops. They don't have to bloom to yield, which is an advantage in this era of dying pollinators and changing weather. They are easy to plant, even in wet, muddy weather. There is probably a reason that the Inca empire depended heavily on a range of tuber crops in an area with variable and harsh weather.
Most of the pieces described above are already in place; we know how to graze cattle; silvo-pasture systems have been worked on; adaptive annual vegetable and grain crops are available. But tuber crops with the traits I would like don't seem to be widely available, or, if they are, they are not being widely utilized in this area. Therefore I want to work on this.
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Post by gilbert on Apr 4, 2017 11:25:57 GMT -5
The traits I'd like to see in staple tuber crops for the Front Range include;
Diversity, alpha and omega. The tubers should be genetically diverse landraces, (but still capable of coming "true" from seed as far as this list of desirable traits.) At the omega level, there should be tuber crops available from as many different plant orders as possible, so that we don't have the Colorado potato famine.
Perennially. Ideally, tubers could remain in place year after year, as do Jerusalem Artichokes. If this is not possible due to virus or other pathogen buildup, a patch should last at least a few years before having to be replanted in a new location, either from seed or tubers.
Ease of growing, harvest, preparation and edibility. Scrabbling around in the soil for pea sized tubers, or levering out deep taproots, is not practical. Neither are tubers that have woody cores which need removal, or that are so contorted that they are impossible to clean. And if they have to be started early indoors, they won't work as staple crops. They shouldn't contain anti-nutrients or toxins.
Overwintering ability. They should survive our winter in soil, with at most a little mulch. This can be difficult; our winters can be too erratic for survival.
Disease resistance. They should have as few disease problems as possible.
Vigor. They should be strong enough to outcompete weeds.
Drought resistance. They might not yield well in a drought, but they should at least be able to survive a few rainless months and bounce back when rains return.
Easy to replant from seed. Seed should be produced abundantly, and germinate readily without special care. Seed should yield a high percentage of usable varieties, if not a good first year yield.
Yield. I think yield per acre in an extensive system should be at least 30,000 pounds an acre. In an intensive garden system, yields should be at least two pounds per square foot.
Calorie content. To be a staple crop, they will need to have at least 220 calories a pound, the more the better.
Taste. They had better taste fantastic, or we won't be able to stand eating them all winter.
Other traits might be helpful, but are not necessary, such as nitrogen fixation, edible leaves, resistance to pests, (particularly voles) high vitamin content, high protein content, and a large bulk of biomass for soil improvement.
I'm not sure if any crops exist with all these traits, or even most of them. I'm pretty sure that there are not five different crops that exhibit those traits. So my first order of business is to start growing as many tuber crops as I can to evaluate them. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I'll work on breeding suitable crops. I will also work on integrating them into a full food system, cooking with them and testing their suitability as a staple component of a diet.
Of course, due to a very busy life, I'm not sure how fast this project will progress!
In further posts, I will discuss the pros and cons as I see it of the various tuber crops available. If you have ideas, please chime in!
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Post by gilbert on Apr 4, 2017 18:21:59 GMT -5
Chinese Artichoke (Stachys affinis )
These reputedly vigorous and easy to grow; they are in the mint family after all, which is a good sign, so they are probably reliably perennial. The tubers have about 360 calories a pound. Online sources differ as to their digestibility; some say their cabohydrates are in the form of stachyose which is not digestible. I'm not sure if it could be made digestible as can the inulin of Jerusalem artichoke; fermentation may do so; in any case, they probably have the potential for digestive upset. The tubers are small and strangely shaped, making harvest difficult, and they do not store well. Seeds are rarely produced. There are relatives, but these have most of the same problems.
Potatoes, Solanum tuberosum
Well known, easy to grow, high yielding, high calorie content, easy to store. The main problems are disease pressure and the unpredictability and weakness of seedlings. I'd have to somehow breed a landrace which produced a preponderance of plants able to survive and produce as perennials for several years. I'm not sure if this is possible. Another drawback is that potatoes and related species are widely grown, and therefore there is more disease potential. However, the are probably at present the species which comes nearest to my goals.
Sweet Potatoes, Ipomoea batatas
Sweet potatoes are high yielding, high in calories, healthy, tasty, and fairly disease resistant. They have edible vines as well. However, they are just not hardy enough for my climate. Tubers have to be carefully kept inside overwinter and sprouted early to produce slips. Yields will never be as high as in warmer climates. Breeding work is difficult. There are wild relatives, some of which are perennial, edible, and native to the American southwest; however, from all accounts they taste bad and are slow growing. They might be worth looking into, though. I did try to grow a wild sweet potato once, but it failed to sprout.
Andean Tubers; yacon, mashu, makua, maca, ulluco, oca, etc.
Most of these have severe frost sensitivity and daylight tolerance, and most are difficult to breed. Makua looks like it would be the most useful for my project, according to Bill of Cultivariable fame. It sounds like it is tough, high yielding, perennial, fairly cold resistant ( at least to zone 8) sets viable seed, and is a high calorie staple. But it is rare, and it might be impossible to increase its tolerance to cold weather.
Achira and other cannas (canna edulis and other species) Cannas are an interesting possibility. They are tropical, but range into the Southern USA. A gardener near me overwinters some every year in the ground by mounding soil over them. They are high yielding and high calorie crops. However, they probably couldn't adapt fully to this climate; they like heat and water. They might be good ornamental edibles, though. Maybe some exploring in the Southeast USA could find the most cold hardy wild populations to cross with cultivated crop species. It sounds like breeding is difficult, though.
Jerusalem Artichoke
This would be the my ideal crop if it was not for some edibility problems. However, it sounds like a combination of cold storage, fermentation, and slow cooking convert most of the Inulin into fructose. This is still a problem however; one because it may lower the total calories, and two because a fructose based diet may be unhealthy. What I need is for all the other crops to be grow like Jerusalem Artichoke! The roots are also a little knobby. In any case, I will do some more research and start preforming some culinary experiments.
There are a lot of other species I'm interested in, such as dahlia roots, biscuit roots, and groundnuts, but I know less about them. As I do more research I will update this thread.
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Post by ilex on Apr 5, 2017 8:14:32 GMT -5
Potato onions? Perennial leeks? Not really tubers.
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Post by gilbert on Apr 5, 2017 10:45:12 GMT -5
Perennial alliums would work if they are mild enough to be a staple. Many alliums are actually quite calorie dense.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Apr 5, 2017 19:59:13 GMT -5
As i stated in the other thread i am trying Lathyrus tuberosus for the first time this year. I also may try some TPS. I'm starting with diploid first. Though i feel a bit like a chicken with my head cut off with all the things i want to do and what i may end up being able to do. I at least got the peas in the ground if nothing else.
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Post by ilex on Apr 6, 2017 2:56:59 GMT -5
Don't forget trees and shrubs. That's the first place were I would look for perennial staples.
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Post by billw on Apr 6, 2017 3:19:58 GMT -5
You might consider some perennial root crops that already have the cold tolerance that you need. Skirret would be worth a try. Lycopus uniflorus and perhaps Lycopus asper might be hardy enough. Apios americana should work. Prairie turnip, Psoralea esculenta is cold tolerant enough and wants basic soils. Yampah might be worth a look too. A lot of those are small but it is typically easier to breed for size and yield than for cold tolerance.
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Post by khoomeizhi on Apr 6, 2017 4:07:10 GMT -5
i was going to suggest Psoralea - there's another species, P. hypogaea, that may be worth checking out as well. Phlomis tuberosa is another possibility.
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Post by mskrieger on Apr 6, 2017 11:34:47 GMT -5
people have told me that scorzonera and salsify have naturalized in their gardens, at least in some places as cold as zone 7; they self-sow, and the flowers and leaves are edible in addition to the tubers.
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Post by gilbert on Apr 6, 2017 19:21:20 GMT -5
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!
Trees and shrubs don't do well here, the blossoms tend to be killed by erratic Spring and Fall weather and the early and late snowstorms and the summer thunderstorms do a lot of damage to branches. Also, the hot winter sun dries out and damages bark. The only nuts that might be worth growing here in a large way are hazelnuts, now that Thousand Cankers has wiped out the black walnuts.
Reed, if you have any success with Lathyrus tuberosus, let me know! Will you start with seeds or plants?
I have a scorzonera plant in my yard, and it is reliably perennial, though I've yet to try eating it. I've always meant to try skirrit. Does anyone know how calorie dense it is? I'd have to breed out the woody core. Of course, the woody core can be removed after cooking, but that seems like a lot of trouble. The shape of the roots is also a little problematic. Do you suppose this is something that could fixed with breeding work?
Lycopus sounds like it would be very similar to the related Chinese Artichoke. Do you have any information on its carbohydrate profile? The stachyose in Chinese Artichoke is rather a drawback. In any case, the mint family is definitely worth exploring due to its vigor.
Prairie turnip sounds like it would really be the thing! The only drawback I found in looking around online is that PFAF stated it contains furanocoumarins which can cause phototoxicity in some people. Is there a way to cook these out? Breeding toxins out of things is probably beyond me, particularly if there is no easy way to determine their presence short of eating a ton of it.
Apios are on my list to look at, particularly because they fix nitrogen. They also have a health drawback; it sounds like a certain small but significant percentage of people have strong allergic reactions to them.
Yampah really sounds useful; calorie dense, supposedly good tasting, and native to Colorado! I'll have to get some seeds.
Where could I find information about Phlomis tuberosa? Another mint!
Edited to add; scorzonera is not quite a perennial root crop, because once you eat the root it is gone, like a carrot, unlike potatoes, where smaller tubers could be replanted.
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Post by gilbert on Apr 6, 2017 19:31:35 GMT -5
Another thing I should try is Chinese yam. I tried growing some last year, but they didn't overwinter like they should have. In theory they have the hardiness, though.
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Post by gilbert on Apr 8, 2017 9:13:59 GMT -5
Here are the sub-projects and how I intend to go about them. Let me know if you think anything could be done better in some other way. It will take some time to type them all, but I have breeding plans for a good many of the species discussed above.
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Post by gilbert on Apr 8, 2017 9:15:31 GMT -5
Irish Potatoes
I'm starting seed and will divide my efforts into two pools. One pool will be selected for the ability to overwinter and produce heavily in the second year. I will start the seeds this spring, eliminate any that are particularly weak or diseased, dig them in the Fall, and them bury a few tubers of each plant in such a way that I can identify the individual lines. There will be mesh in place to keep out voles. Come spring, I will see how well they sprout back and how many of the tubers made it through without rotting. I will have saved the seed from the plants individually, so next spring I can start growing out seed gathered from the plants that overwintered well. The final check will be in the second Fall and second Spring; if production is decent and overwintering is again good, I will add the second year seed to my elite pool. Potatoes do sometimes overwinter here under mulch. However, they often go mushy as well, and I'm assuming (I've never tested it) that second year production could be hampered by disease from the rotting mass of potatoes.
The second pool will be selected solely for seedling vigor. Since this will be the only selection criteria, I hope to get two or more generations in a year. Plants will remain in small pots which will stunt their roots and hopefully make them more likely to produce abundant seed; this will also make it possible to keep the project going indoors under lights during the winter. Hopefully, after many generations of selecting for fast seedling emergence and large seed size, they will be more vigorous.
The eventual goal is to combine the two lines and select for a landrace strain of potato which can survive for at least 5 years as a perennial, with high yields starting the first year, and in which this ability "comes true" from vigorous seed, making it easy to start new patches once the old ones start picking up viruses.
(By the way, why are viruses so damaging to potatoes? I know they can afflict other plants, but they don't seem to be as pervasive of a problem in some other clonally propagated plants. )
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Post by gilbert on Apr 8, 2017 9:24:30 GMT -5
Sweet Potatoes and relatives
I'm mostly going to be focused the first year on getting a large supply of seeds to experiment with. I will be planting as many different varieties as I can get out in beds and in sweet potato towers. From them, I should be able to produce some food, test different varieties for palatable vines and decent yields under Front Range conditions, and test my potato tower ideas some more. But I will also be hoping to harvest at least some seed from the outdoor plantings. In case that does not work, I will have retained multiple cuttings of each variety indoors under my grow light system. This will give them optimum levels of heat, humidity, and daylight hours for seed production; I will manually pollinate the flowers. If optimum conditions are not enough, I will try other tricks on the indoor plants. For one thing, I think I will keep some of each variety growing in water to which I add hydroponic nutrients; I'm wondering if Reed's flowering hydroponic plant flowered so profusely due to rooting in water, since this would change how the plant grew roots. Some plants only make seeds when their clonal reproduction ability is threatened. In any case, it would be interesting to compare the two methods. I many also try notching the vines and even using gibberellin; I heard online that this can sometimes promote flowering. In later generations, plants that don't flower naturally will be eliminated, but for the first few rounds I want to maximize the number of seeds I can produce. I will keep pruning back the plants (and research how to best use this pruning to maximize the flower production) and keep them going inside till late Fall. At that point, I should have a bunch of seed. I will then start germinating and growing the plants in small pots under lights, eliminating seedlings that are weak. Once each plant produces a few small roots in the pots, I will steal two from each variety, put them in plastic bags with some damp soil, and put the bags, marked to correspond with the plants, in the refrigerator. I will use bags that fold over instead of zip up, to allow for some air exchange.
The idea is that I don't have to breed for frost resistance as such, just the ability to survive in cool wet soil without rotting. The ground does not freeze deeply here if mulch is applied in the Fall. Native Ipomoea are just as frost sensitive as the tropicals, but their deep roots keep them going until the spring.
Over the generations, I will increase the amount of time they have to spend in the fridge to be counted winners. During the summers, I will select for heavy production in a short, cool season, without using crop protection of any sort. With every generation, I will select for plants which flower profusely and seeds that germinate rapidly, like morning glory. Eventually, instead of the dreaded bindweed shoots announcing that the soil has finally warmed to Convolvulus friendly temperatures, I will have the perennial sweet potato patch bursting into new life! (Bindweed is a good case in point; it is one of the last perennial weeds to emerge, but it makes up for this by explosive growth; that is they strategy I'm going to try for with sweet potatoes. Can fat, sugary roots stand up to fungi in the soil all winter? I don't know, but I will see!)
I will also be planting wild sweet potato relatives that should survive here, or that are at least hardier then I. batatas; I. leptophylla, I. Littoralis, I. Leucantha, I. minuta, and I. Lacunosa, among others. The question is, where to track down seed? A few hours with the GRIN database shows that they have unfortunately collected most of these species from the southern rather then the northern end of their ranges. Even if a species ranges into the Carolinas, a population collected in Columbia will not do me much good. If anyone has any of these species growing wild near them, please let me know, I'd love to buy some seeds.
My goal with the wild relatives is to grow them out, evaluate their overwintering ability, success under my conditions, seed production, and taste. Once I know what their strengths and weaknesses are, I will decide if it is worth taking the trouble of crossing them into the sweet potato project. Some will cross easily, others will not. I might have to find bridge species, and it would be a lot of trouble. I'm hoping the rot resistant genetics I need are already in I. batatas. Also, if I grow all these species in close proximity, and grow out seeds each year, I'll be in a good position to spot natural interspecies crosses or valuable mutations.
If any of the wild plants actually have decent taste, I'll work on them as a breeding project in their own right.
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