First of all, what are staple crops? I would define them as crops which can be major sources of carbohydrates and/or protein in our diets. Generally these are grains, including wheat, rye, oats, barley, rice and corn (maize); “pseudo-grains” like amaranth, quinoa and buckwheat; dry legumes, including dry beans, peas, lentils, soy beans and many others; and some other interesting cases, like potatoes and squash. In our climate, staples must also be easy to store through the part of the year when they can’t be grown.
Why Garden Staple Crops?
Many staples are not (yet) normal garden crops. Instead, we are used to thinking of them as crops grown in big fields with tractors and combines. I think that is to our detriment in several ways. First, by leaving these crops to mechanized agriculture, we remain dependent on a food system which depends on the linear use of non-renewable resources. That is, it depends on extracting nutrients (rock phosphate, for example) and fossil fuels and using them to produce crops in a way which can happen only once; having grown the crop, these resources become wastes. This is problematic because if we keep using them like that we will eventually run out, with catastrophic results for all of us who eat the products of this agriculture.
Mechanization has also had the effect of narrowing the range of foods we can eat, simply because if it cannot be grown or harvested efficiently by machine it cannot be produced by mechanized agriculture. Pole beans are one of my favourite examples of this; I have yet to see a combine which can harvest beans off of poles. This is a loss for us. Biodiversity has many benefits, though the decreased risk of crop failure it offers is one advantage many of us gardeners and eaters fixate on. But many crops which can’t be grown in a machine-worked field are still invaluable in certain situations, pole beans again being one of my favourite examples; if you want to grow more beans in fewer square feet, or if you have a bad back or knees and can’t kneel to pick your harvest, they’re the way to go. There is also just far more interest possible in our foods if we realize staples can be more than a bland base on which to put the interesting food. If you are already a gardener, think of the difference between a home-grown tomato and store-bought; that level of difference is also possible with the staple foods.
If you are concerned about where your food comes from, you no doubt know that it is hard to find sources of staples which are not grown in ways which fall into the problems I just described. There is a good reason for this: staples are, by definition, things which we grow and eat in quantity because it is inexpensive (both in labour and money) to do so, and they are also things where mechanization gave farmers considerably more potential to grow large quantities of them per farmer compared to the more common vegetable crops. This means that staples are priced so cheaply that it is hard for farmers to make a living growing them without maximizing their efficiency through mechanization and growing huge acreages of them. For this reason, you won’t find many Community Supported Agriculture programs which offer barley or chickpeas. So if you want them outside of industrial agriculture, you will probably have to grow them yourself. However, there is a silver lining hidden there: staples are staples because they’re easy to grow. Growing and harvesting dry peas or wheat is not as hard as growing cucumbers. In general, these crops don’t need as much pampering as vegetables; in my area, they don’t usually need watering or nearly as much weeding or tending as my vegetable crops. So you may not know how to grow them yet, but getting started isn’t that hard.
Which Staples Should I Grow First?
The easiest staples to start with are those which have big seeds: Corn, beans, squash, peas, and favas. These plants are easy to care for, and because of their large seeds (or fruit) it is possible to harvest substantial quantities by hand, without any equipment. They are also easy to prepare for cooking, since we often eat them more-or-less in the form in which they’re harvested.
Small grains like wheat and smaller-seeded legumes like lentils are more satisfying to harvest and eat if one has some simple equipment. Grains can be cut with a sickle (or even scissors if you have a very small patch), but what actually makes harvest fun, in my opinion, is having a cradle to cut with. Threshing and winnowing also require basic equipment: a flail, a tarp, some buckets or tubs and a fan (or good attention to wind strength) can be helpful. And, of course, most of us prefer to eat our grains ground into flour and baked into something, which is a bit more involved again. This does not mean that we shouldn’t grow these crops; just think ahead a bit more and collect the necessary tools before you need them!
If you’re looking for more information on the cooking side of this topic, read our article on using home-grown staples.
How Large a Garden Do I Need?
Some staples will produce all you will want to eat in a relatively small area. Many legumes fall into this category; I have harvested three cups of dry fava beans from a patch of 3×3 feet (1 square metre), for example. I would estimate that I eat ¼ cup per meal; so that is enough for 12 meals for me – and I can extrapolate to estimate my year’s supply. Other crops will require a larger area if you want to grow a year’s supply of them; if you bake all your own bread and now want to grow the grain for your flour, it’s going to take more than a normal garden to accommodate that! I have found that it is very hard for me to give you a number for how large an area is needed to grow all of one’s food, because there are so many factors at play. Some people want to eat more corn, others more wheat. Some will want a lot of dry peas; others don’t like them. In my gardens, different species have substantially different yields; common beans tend to yield more than peas, for example. But there is also substantial variation between varieties within a species; my highest-yielding pole bean produces nearly twice as much per square foot as some of my bush beans! And I have also noticed variations depending on conditions in a particular season and even placement in the garden. Plant anything north of a tall crop like corn and watch it struggle for sunlight – and its yield fall at the end of the season. So I can’t give precise numbers, though where I have noted down yields I will share them; see, for example, this article on legumes.
However you work out your ratios of carrots to chickpeas to corn, you will soon realize that it takes a moderate amount of land to feed a human; I would guess ⅛-¼ acre (500-1000 square metres). That’s not a postage-stamp patch, but it’s also not a big farm. This means that if you want to grow your own food, you may need to develop gardening practices which are somewhat different from growing vegetables (and also from conventional big-field practices). I am, for example, an inveterate mulcher of my vegetable garden. I use old hay, and try to cover all the soil by the time everything is planted. But that is not possible in my corn; it just covers too large an area for me to mulch it all. So instead, I hoe it to suppress weeds while the corn is still short (preferably two times, a couple weeks apart), and then leave it; the corn grows above the weeds and doesn’t seem much bothered by those which survive the hoeing. I am experimenting with undersowing it with clover to take care of the soil, but that has been inconclusive so far.
As you start, then, I would recommend this pattern. Grow the packet I send you, but don’t expect to feed yourself on your harvest the first year. Instead, your first season is about learning and increasing your seed. Observe the plants: note how much they yield, what conditions they like, and what weaknesses they have in your garden. At the end of the season, collect their seeds and do a bit of figuring. Try to calculate how much you want to eat and how much to save to grow the next year, and consider how you should tend your plants to make that possible. Don’t baby them! Plants are selected by their ability to weather the conditions they experience, and you want to select for plants which will require as little of your attention as possible. If, after fifteen years of tough selection like this, you feel that your plants are so hardy and independent that you don’t have enough work to keep you busy in the summer, start making watercolour paintings of them. I would love to see them. And please send me seed; I am still looking for that effortless bean myself.
The Place of Animals in Planning Staples
Animals also have a place in most of our diets and, I suspect, in our food growing. I live on a farm. Much of our land is too sloped or has soil which is too poor to garden, so we use it as pasture for livestock. However, I have doubts about feeding staple crops to animals. As you will discover, growing enough for yourself is plenty of work, and growing it only to feed an animal, which will use most of that food energy simply to live rather than produce anything for you, seems like a lot more work. If you want to do it, go ahead. Many of the staples we offer (hulled grains in particular) are well suited to livestock feed too.
But animals have also historically been used for labour when growing the Eurasian staple crops, small grains in particular. Before the tractor arrived on the scene, most farmers were not working their wheat fields by hand; they used horses or oxen or water buffalo. I don’t know that that means you have to use a horse or a tractor to grow these crops; just remember that all crops are selected under a certain set of assumed conditions, and the Eurasian crops have for thousands of years assumed the presence of draft animals. If you want to avoid possible problems of dealing with those assumptions, you can try only growing foods selected without the assumption of draft animals, that is, the food plants of the Americas: corn, potatoes, and the Phaseolus beans, most importantly (though it is worth noting that the Europeans brought their draft animals to this continent hundreds of years ago, too, and a lot of selection has happened since then). But I wouldn’t want to limit my diet to only those crops, though they are some of my favourites.
Animals have also been valuable in many cultures as sources of fertility for crops, in the form of manure. It is worth considering how to maintain the fertility of your garden if you don’t have them. Many people bypass the animals and use plants directly as mulch or compost. Some, like Joseph Jenkins, have also noted that every gardener has access to at least one animal (who, me?) and that human animals also produce usable manure, if it is treated properly…