Technically fruits, in the kitchen usually used as vegetables – those are the things that I choose to call fruigetables, to avoid any “whell, akshually…”. This post is going to be mostly about tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and similar.
As you can see, there are three greenhouses in the map. There is a reason for that – in a self-sustainable setting, reliance on outside inputs should be reduced, including various -icides and fertilizers. And three greenhouses would allow a three-year rotation between these:
Soybeans, beans, peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, and, eventually, also radishes and peas as pre-crops. I think with greenhouses this size, it should be easy to grow about 50 kg of these crops together, adding about 16 Mcal to our tally. But more importantly than calories, these would add other nutrients and, most importantly, flavors. With two-three varieties of tomato and pepper, a wide span of variously flavored sauces and chutneys can be made, all the way from sweet, across savoury, to hot. The soybeans would take care of fixing nitrogen and breaking the cycles of nightshade family-specific diseases and pests.
The rodent-proof raised beds could further provide, in my estimate, 20 kg of green peas (as a pre-crop), 15 kg of carrots, 15 kg of onions+garlic, and about 50 kg of various pumpkins and squash, providing an additional 42 Mcal and more nutrients and flavors.
I think these are conservative estimates, averages, that account for occasional glut and occasional crop failure. Most of these crops can be preserved in various ways – pickled, dehydrated, in compotes – and some can keep fresh for several months over winter (winter squash).
With this, we are almost there as far as plant-based foodstuffs go. The next thing to look at will be fruits from our orchard and fruit shrubbery.
Charly I’m not sure what a ‘pre-crop’ is.
I would like a green house, but with all the neighbours’ trees on the property line there isn’t really a good place to put one. We get branches of varying sizes down most storms, and while they generally haven’t been huge the are often plenty big enough to smash glass or pierce a poly tunnel.
@Jazzlet, pre-crop is one of those instances where the Czech word “předplodina” does not have an English equivalent, so I did my best at translating it directly. It is a crop with short growth, which can be grown as a cover as well as a crop in a given space before the main crop is planted there. Like peas and radishes, which can be sown in February and will be ripe before mid-May, when the Pumpkins etc can be planted after them.
In English předplodina would be called double-cropping; the practice of planting and harvesting two crops on the same field in the same year. However, double-cropping does not carry the implication that the first crop is used to protect the field prior to a main crop being planted. So it’s probably not precisely the same. In our area it’s somewhat common to double-crop winter wheat then soybeans.
I don’t have a lot of knowledge, but I’m following this series with a great amount of interest.
Thanks Charly! From the context I thought it must mean something like that, but I wasn’t sure whether the first crop was grown to a harvestable state.