A Sustainable Backyard Diet: Best Crops for Calories, Protein, and Calcium
By Cindy Conner
If you already have a garden, you already have a list of favorite crops you want to grow. In developing your plan for a sustainable diet, you will want to consider crops that will grow the most food in the least space. John Jeavons and the folks at Ecology Action in California have done much research in that area and have documented their work in Jeavon’s book How to Grow More Vegetables.
According to Jeavons, if you were to eat only what you grew in your garden, you would need to give serious attention to getting enough calories, protein, and calcium. Most likely, your diet would include other local foods; occasionally some not-so-local foods; and some animal products.
Growing Calories
With calories being the biggest limiting factor if all your nutrient needs were to come from your garden, we’ll take a look at that first. The foods on Jeavons’ list of crops producing the most calories in the least space are garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks, parsnips, potatoes, salsify, and sweet potatoes.
In my garden, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and garlic are important crops. I have not taken the time to learn the nuances of leeks, parsnips, and salsify. Jerusalem artichokes were given to me many years ago by my friend Chester. It is one of his favorite foods. Although they haven’t become a staple at our table, I cook them occasionally and use them in ferment. They are great to dig through the winter, and with Chester’s encouragement, continue to be a part of my garden.
Potatoes will give you the most calories per square foot planted of anything you will grow. Eating a diet of only potatoes could be toxic due to an excess of potassium. On the other hand, if you need potassium, eat more potatoes.
Having fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, in your diet could help with detoxification. In Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston A. Price wrote about the Quechua Indians of Peru who ate mostly potatoes dipped in a slurry of kaolin clay. The practice of eating
earthy substances, such as clay, is called geophagy. Eating certain kinds of clay with wild potatoes was a practice of the Indians in the American Southwest and in Mexico, as well as those living in the Central Andean Altiplano. The clay would have helped rid the body of toxins. Of course, today’s varieties are not necessarily the same as those early wild potatoes.
Studying indigenous diets is interesting if you want to grow all your own food, but it is important to recognize all aspects of what those earlier populations were eating and how they were eating it. Our culture has lost some of the practices that were important in bringing food to the table. Sometimes they are the keys that we need to be successful in our endeavors. I’m not advocating eating clay with your potatoes, but offering an understanding of how a culture might have subsisted on a large quantity of the varieties that were available to them.
Sweet potatoes are one of the most nutritious foods you can grow. In our area, we plant Irish potatoes in the spring and harvest them in the summer. Sweet potatoes grow in the hot months and are harvested in the fall, just before frost. They are even easier to keep than Irish potatoes since exposure to light doesn’t turn them green. They can usually sit in a box or basket in the corner of your house all through the winter until you need them. Sweet potatoes may produce a little less per 100 ft than potatoes but have a few more calories per pound.
Garlic is a good calorie producer in a small space. We don’t eat it in the quantities that we do potatoes, and for good reason, but it only takes a little garlic regularly in your diet to keep you healthy. There was a woman who visited the farmers market when I sold there. She was in her nineties at the time and told me she took no medications and she ate garlic daily. She also credited being active in her church to her secret of longevity. Over one hundred years old now, she is still kicking around and I see her picture in the paper now and again, celebrating her age and spirit.
As for leeks, parsnips, and salsify, you’ll have to look to others for guidance on those crops. One of those folks would be John Seymour, author of The New Self-Sufficient Gardener. Although he is no longer on this earth, his writings continue to guide many people along this path. Parsnips, leeks, and salsify are much bigger crops in the UK, where Seymour is from, than here in Virginia. At the end of the winter, if you still have parsnips in the ground, dig them up and make wine. (Directions are in his book.)
Even if you aren’t growing all your own food, being able to a make a filling meal occasionally, with only ingredients from your garden, is satisfying in many ways. Jeavons lists peanuts, soybeans, dry beans, cassava, and burdock as crops that can give you a lot of calories in a small amount of food eaten, but those calories take more space to produce than potatoes. I know that cassava is a staple crop in tropical areas, but I know nothing about burdock.
If you are going for a sustainable diet, where you are planted on this earth will determine what you are growing and eating.
Growing Protein
All vegetables contain some protein. If you concentrate on growing and eating the calorie crops I just mentioned, you will be getting a lot of protein. You will also be eating a lot of food per day. Beans and peanuts, good to combine with grains in your diet, have a lot of calories in a small amount of food but at the cost of space in the garden. Grains also produce lots of calories per pound of food but not so many per square foot in the garden, although they have the big advantage of producing biomass for compost making and mulching. When it comes to protein, beans do not contain all the amino acids we need, but they don’t have to. Nature has conveniently provided the amino acids that beans are lacking in grains, and vice versa.
Including both beans and grains in your diet gives you what you need. One needs only to look at traditional diets to find examples of this— tortillas and beans, beans and rice, cornbread and beans. Even good old peanut butter on whole-wheat bread is an example.
Animal products have all the amino acids. Eating only beans or only grains would leave you lacking. Eating both beans and grains, particularly with the addition of even a small amount of milk, meat, or cheese, assures you are meeting your body’s requirements for protein. Eating a varied diet allows you to gather those amino acids from many sources.
Favas are highly recommended at Ecology Action both as a diet crop (beans to eat) and as a source of green biomass for compost making. Be aware that some people are allergic to fava beans. When I tried to grow favas at my place in Zone 7, the blooms would fall off prematurely during spring hot spells and didn’t yield many beans. I tried pinto beans in my garden, but couldn’t get much of a yield of dry beans. Pintos are popular in the gardens at Ecology Action. The climate is different there in Willits, California, with hot days, cool nights, and little humidity. Here in Virginia, we have hot days, hot nights, and high humidity.
I began growing cowpeas after a number of dry years. Traditionally, cowpeas, also known as Southern peas, are a good crop for my region. According to the Master Charts in How to Grow More Vegetables, cowpeas produce less than many other varieties of beans. The charts are a good place to go for information and guidance, but ultimately, you have to try different things and find out what does best in your area. It turns out that cowpeas are in a different bean family than other dry beans and the bean beetles that bother those other beans aren’t interested in cowpeas. Furthermore, my plants yielded from 12 to 20 seeds per pod! Cowpeas have become my dry bean of choice to grow for food for our table. In my own chart of yields, cowpeas outshine pinto beans, by far.
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.
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. 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 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.
In Closing
If your goal is to sustain yourself from a backyard garden, then how to grow crops rich in protein, calories, and calcium is essential.
This blog post is excerpted from Grow a Sustainable Diet by Cindy Conner. We thank New Society, a publishing company dedicated to positive change through ecological integrity, for permission to excerpt.
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