A few weeks ago I led a workshop here on the farm, all about how to grow “tropical staple foods.” I geared it towards small-scale methods and backyard-type situations, with the goal of encouraging more people locally to grow food. My thinking went something like this:
Lots of food gardeners grow greens, vegetables, and fruits in their backyards, but it seems to me often less emphasis is given to the staples, the core basics of the diet. Perhaps people think that growing these things is boring, at least compared to more glamorous, eye-catching, or fast-growing veggies. Perhaps they think it’s not worth attempting on a small scale, that it’s easier to just buy a big bag of rice at Costco. But if we’re going to start seriously tackling food security, and over-all sustainability, on this rock in the middle of the world’s biggest ocean, we have to start taking staple foods seriously, and looking at what grows well here, how to grow it, and how to eat it. We can’t have only vegetables and fruits in our diet, we also need ample amounts of fats, proteins, and starches too (at least we mere mortals do–all these crystal-head vegan goddesses don’t have to worry about that). In fact, staple foods as a whole tend to be the easiest of all crops to grow, and there are many tropical staple foods that can be grown quite efficiently even on a small scale–perhaps especially on a small scale.
I featured three starchy “root” crops as the core of the workshop: taro (“Polynesian king of staples,” revered so highly the Kanaka claim kinship); sweetpotatoes (another Polynesian stand-by, wins the “all-around” title, producing quick and abundant yields of roots and greens, and valued from Kentucky to Kenya for both human food and animal fodder); and cassava (the ultimate miracle root crop, out-producing all others, taking the title of “third most important source of carbohydrates in the world,” and contending hard for “easiest freaking thing in the world to grow”). (For an earlier post of mine about the joys of cassava, click here.)
I also featured three grain legumes: cowpeas, lima beans, and pigeon peas. All of these, for different reasons, I believe worth considering for a small-scale garden (or a big one). Cowpeas are grown all over the world in warm regions for their little edible beans, which are quite delicious either fresh or dried (the Black-eyed Pea, a cultivar familiar to most Americans, belongs in this group). The pods of most varieties are long, loaded with seeds, and easy to shell out, making them more gratifying to harvest and process by hand than many beans. And like all legumes, they are useful grown in rotation with other crops as a nitrogen-fixer. Pigeon peas are drought-hardy perennials requiring little care or maintenance that produce repeatedly for at least several years and can also make a great windbreak or hedge. Their green trimmings are also a fine mulch, or high-protein feed for ruminant livestock. As woody bushes, they could even serve double duty as a trellis for something else (I grew some bitter melon on pigeon pea bushes once). Pole limas, with their long vines and large seeds, give huge yields even in tiny plantings, and I think that they are the most delicious beans around (at least, the ones we grow are).
As part of the workshop, I also offered a mini seed give-away to participants, consisting of eight different varieties, representing all of the crops covered in the class–all grown right here on our farm. I think that sharing locally-adapted seed freely, with those who will nurture it in turn, is an important part of community food-security–as well as an important statement of democratic activism in a world where the right to seed is increasingly proprietary and exclusive. Seed can never be the exclusive property of any one company or individual, because it contains the imprint and the spirit of thousands of people who cared for the seed since prehistory, in addition to the spirit of countless generations of the plant itself. No one can own that. Seed is part of humanity’s common heritage, a sacred legacy that belongs to everyone who wishes to grow food, and it should always be treated as such.
So on that note, I was delighted to receive an update from one of my attendees a few days ago. She sent me some pictures (shown below) of her newly sprouted plants from the workshop, thriving in their new home.
Cassava:
Taro:
Cowpeas:
Happy growing!
Growing Food and Such 