Failure Meant Hunger

[Nyboy]

I have a large pear tree, that produces heavy crop of pears every year. Sometimes a branch will break under the weight of the pears. I was looking at the tree, and didn't see 1 pear. I am not worried lots of people reported not having fruit on their trees this year, something about spring weather. If I want some pears I can just go buy them. That got me thinking about when people couldn't go buy their food, if crop failed, they did without or went hungery. So much can go wrong when gardening weather, insects and disease.

 

[canesisters]

Agree! I have said many times that I might get 'serious' about gardening one day but right now it's just fun for me. I enjoy opening a jar of something that I grew and preserved myself. But if was to all go away tonight, I'd not miss a meal. When I'm canning up a big pot of something I often think about the folks - not really that long ago - who did it to survive, not because it was fun and made for a really pretty display in the kitchen....

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I've had similar thought as I've done my seed searches. There are a lot of things I find that fall, cultivation wise into that nebulous area called "famine foods" Most are small, and bitter. Several are actually poisonous in large enough quantities, the classic example of this being grasspea (Lathyrus sativus) and most of the vetches (favas excluded), or require complicated leeching processes to make safe to eat, like the older or darker seeded versions of a lot of tropical crops, Lablab bean for example (most of the WHITE seeded strains have seeds that can just be boiled and eaten as is, but eating the dark seeds usually requires a system of grinding and leeching to get rid of enough cyanogenic glucosides to make them safe to eat). I've often wonder WHY ancient farmers would bother with planting such things. Why not save their field space for "easy" crops. Why not pre select for strains that require no cleaning processes? Then I realize the reason is that these things are known to keep growing when conditions turn too hard for the "easy" stuff. Grasspea was (and in some places still is) grown because it is incredibly drought tolerant, and the desire to keep being fed when the rains come late far outweighs the risks of having your spine destroyed by Lathryism (which normally only comes if grasspeas make up more than 60% of your diet for several months anyway, so theoretically can be avoided if you are smart and budget your "good" crops in such a manner that the grasspeas become a way to stretch them, not replace them.) Bitter semi poisonous strains that need leeching are worth it, if those poisons mean your crop wont be devoured by insects or other animals (or why South American natives still grow bitter cassava, even though "sweet" (cyanide free) strains have existed for millennia.
Surviving often means not just pursuing your best advantage, bug figuring out how to also pursue ALL your other advantages at the same time, so you have a cushion to fall back on.

 

[digitS']

Dad used to talk about having only potatoes and gravy during the Depression. They had a farm so I imagine that this was milk gravy. He also said that alfalfa is okay as a spring green.

The potatoes and milk suggests: "The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór) was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. It is sometimes referred to, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine because about two-fifths of the population was solely reliant on this cheap crop for a number of historical reasons. During the famine approximately 1 million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%." Wikipedia

I used to try to find an Irish ancestor from that time period, so that I could be properly upset with the English. The only Irish surname ancestor I've been able to come up with, arrived in North America before that time ... and married an American Indian! This was pre-trail of tears ... what was that about the luck of the Irish ..?

Steve

 

[baymule]

Crop failure for most of us just means an inconvenience. We just have to go to the store and buy it. We are so blessed to have so many options. Even when one part of the country is in drought, flood or other natural disaster, another part of the country is able to harvest and due to modern transportation, feed the rest of us.