How to Grow More Vegetables : And Fruits, Nuts ... - Shroomery

Note
GROW BIOINTENSIVE techniques can be
used to grow important protein crops.
Experiments with wheat, soybeans,
grains, beans, and other seeds have
worked well. For information on how
to grow your own open-pollinated seeds
in the smallest area while preserving
genetic diversity, see Ecology Action’s
Self-Teaching Mini-Series Booklet
Growing to Seed.
86 SEED PROPAGATION
bibliography if you want to pursue this further. Be sure to
explore growing compost crops in between your trees to
increase the soil’s friability and its nitrogen and organic matter
content. Try medium red clover. It has beautiful red flowers.
Increasingly, more people want to grow food. One hundred
square feet of grain may yield 4, 8, 12, or more pounds of edible
seed. If you are in a cooler climate and wish to grow beans for
eating, try varieties such as the peanut, yellow-eye, and cranberry
beans available from the Vermont Bean Seed Company.
Dwarf fruit trees, if nurtured properly, can yield 50 to 100 pounds
of fruit annually at maturity. Two trees on 8-foot centers in 100
square feet can have a combined yield of up to 200 pounds, and
the average person in the United States eats only about 162
pounds of tree fruit per year. Fava beans may yield the greatest
amount of organic matter. Alfalfa and clover are also fun to raise
as nitrogen-fixing legumes to improve your soil’s fertility.
Our goal with wheat is to eventually get 2 26-pound crops in
an 8-month period. This would yield 1 1-pound loaf of bread for
every week in the year from only 100 square feet! Then we
could literally raise our own bread in our backyards. Sound
impossible? Yields close to this are already occurring in some
parts of the world. Wheat can be threshed easily with a minithresher
11 made available by a public organization in your area.
Our highest wheat yield to date is at the rate of about 21
pounds per 100-square-foot bed, using about 10 inches of water
for the whole season, with compost we grew ourselves for fertilizer
and a small amount of purchased organic fertilizer. The
Zulus in South Africa use a technique similar to the GROW
BIOINTENSIVE method and grow grains with natural rainfall.
See what you can do! Let us know if you get to 26 pounds—
and tell us how you do it!
When planning your garden, remember to look closely at all
the factors involved. For example, sesame seeds are very high
in nutrition, but they usually have low yields (compared with
other protein crops), are somewhat difficult to harvest, and
exhaust the soil. So on a per-square-foot, sustainable nutrition
yield basis, sesame seeds are not particularly superior to other
protein sources, even though they are great nutritionally and
good to eat. A large harvest of sesame seeds would also require
a very large growing area. It is important to examine each
crop’s total practicality.
When you begin to produce intermediate yields, another
factor to consider is the quantity of nutrients each crop takes
from the soil. Many “heavy givers” of nitrogen can exhaust the
soil of other nutrients over time. Soybeans are “heavy giving”
legumes, but continuous cropping of them has been demonstrated
to wear out the soil. It is important to develop and work
within natural sustainable cycles.
11. One good foot-treadle–powered mini-thresher is available from CeCe Co., P.O. Box 8,
Ibaraki City, Osaka, Japan.