Plant staples

Those two properties pull in opposite directions, so a group needs both kinds.

• Potatoes give more calories per hectare than almost anything and keep only months.
• Grain — wheat, barley, rye, oats, maize, rice — gives less per hectare and keeps for years when dry.
• Pulses — beans, peas, lentils — give protein, keep for years, and feed the rotation.

Grow a root crop for calories now, a cereal for calories later, and a pulse for protein and nitrogen. A group with only one of the three is one bad season from a crisis.

Temperate: potatoes, wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, beans, brassicas, onions, carrots, turnips, beets.

Tropical and subtropical: cassava, sweet potato, yam, maize, rice, cowpea, plantain, squash, groundnut, millet and sorghum where it is dry.

Grow what the ground and the season actually support, and prove it on a small area before committing a field. Two or three varieties of each staple, differing in when they ripen, spreads the risk of a late frost, a drought or a disease across the season instead of concentrating it on one week.

The area is sized for four demands, not one:

1. What the group eats for a full year.
2. Seed for next year — see securing seed.
3. Losses in store — rodents, damp, mould. Budget 10–20% even with good storage.
4. A reserve against a failed harvest — a third of the crop is standard practice, not pessimism.

A plot sized to this year's appetite is a plot that leaves nothing to plant and nothing to survive a bad year on.

Weeds beat crops on establishment, not at maturity. The first three weeks after emergence decide the harvest; after that the crop shades the ground and mostly looks after itself.

So lay the field out for weeding: blocks with paths you can walk and kneel in, rows spaced for whatever hoe or tool you have, not scattered plantings you cannot reach. You cannot weed what you cannot walk between, and a bed that is awkward to reach is a bed that gets weeded last and yields least.

Hoe shallow, cutting weeds off at the surface rather than turning soil over and bringing new seed up.

Seed sown into cold ground sits, rots, or is eaten before it germinates. Minimum soil temperatures: peas about 5 °C, brassicas and cereals 5–7 °C, carrots and beets 7–10 °C, maize 10 °C (better 12), beans, squash and tomatoes 15–16 °C.

Measure it 5–10 cm down in the morning. Without a thermometer, use the calendar and local phenology — the wild markers you have recorded over several years — rather than a remembered date, and record what worked each season.

The harvest is not food until it is stored. Grain below about 13% moisture or it heats, moulds and produces toxins — the salt-jar test in the preservation guide tells you roughly where you are without instruments. Roots into a cellar at the right temperature and humidity; grain into a raised, rat-proofed granary.

Rats routinely take a fifth of an unprotected store. Rat guards, raised staddles and sealed containers are cheaper than the fifth.

Not from what is left over — from the plants that did best on this ground: earliest to ripen, heaviest, healthiest, standing rather than lodged. Mark them while they are growing, before harvest mixes everything together.

Save from enough plants to avoid inbreeding: a handful for self-pollinating crops like beans, peas and wheat, but 100–200 plants for maize, which loses vigour fast when saved from a few. The seeds guide carries the isolation distances.

Within ten years of doing this you have varieties genuinely adapted to your ground — which is real wealth, and cannot be bought.

Weigh or measure the harvest by crop and by field, and compare it with what the group eats. The test is not a full barn, it is a full barn in March.

Write down: total harvested, amount set aside as seed, amount lost in store, and the date the previous year's store ran out. Those four numbers, kept for a few years, are what turn farming from hope into planning.