what would you grow

[Mortblanc]

The key now, as it was in days of yore (not sure when YORE was but I see it referenced often) was and is to grow a variety of crops as insurance against failure of a one crop system.

You will need a source of large scale carbohydrate as a filler, and you will need a source or several sources of vitamin/nutrient rich foods in smaller scale.

Something to fill you up and something to keep sickness/vitamin deficiency away.

Every culture developed around those two elements of the agriculture system. Both the carb crop and the nutrient crop needed to be easily preserved with little or no technological assistance. You need crops that can be easily air dried or just put away until needed.

Here in North America, at the prehistory time frame, we had the "Three sisters", maize, squashes, beans. In its variations those three crops gave all the nutrients needed to sustain life. All can be air dried and preserved for years. They were augmented by various other cultivated and foraged crops in different climate zones such as potatoes, manioc, artichokes and acorns along with seasonal greens.

In other areas it might have been rice as filler with cabbage as a backup and the traditional veggies of the area, wheat, barley, rye, oats, turnips or any other traditional crop suited to the climate.

Cabbage has always been a big nutrient crop due to being easily stored, pickled or preserved.

The key is that you can not just pick one crop. The Irish lost 1/3 of their population through dependence on the potato, the Germans lost almost half their population during the 100 years war due to dependence on grains which were trampled/stolen/burned by roving armies.

And you will need more of the crop than you now suppose. You are talking harvest to harvest sustenance and that takes some acreage. More acreage than is shown on the little homestead diagram that is so popular. We used to put a whole acre under vegetable cultivation for a family of 7 and that did not include a subsistence grain/carb.

That might seem a lot but we ate a wide variety of vegetables in our house and were not a meat, bread and potatoes family. Almost every meal had three or four veggies on the table in green, yellow and red varieties.

Also remember that the old medieval crop system (subsistence?) had a broken up pattern with each peasant having a small patch here and another over there and a different crop in each one. If one patch were ruined, trampled, flooded the others might survive and produce. Different plots will support different foods even though only separated by a few yards due to drainage and soil.

This is one of the reasons why backyard crops are so important. A backyard garden is normally not going to support your family long term, but it will teach you what will grow in your soil, how to grow it and how much a specific area is going to produce.