Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

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If I was designing a two-acre farm to feed my family, I wouldn't devote much space to corn. Corn is a very useful crop but mostly once it's processed and you need a lot of it.

Here's what I think I'd grow:

Potatoes - Incredibly easy to grow. Produces a ton of food. Can be grown in trash cans on otherwise unusable land. Very versatile and useful in so many cuisines. If I had to place my bets on one staple crop, it's potatoes.

Green beans (Blue Lake variety or similar) - Also very easy to grow. You trellis them and they don't take up a lot of ground space. Incredibly bountiful crop--you'll have trash bags full from 50 sq ft of beans. Puts nutrients back in the soil--very good crop to rotate.

Kale - Nutritious, versatile crop. Easy to grow.

Tomatoes - Nutritious and so easy to grow. Can be grown vertically in raised pots for more space efficiency.

Tomatillos - Tasty, good for sauces. These grow as voraciously as the green beans.

Pumpkins, squashes, etc. - These are wandering vines so you can plant them in good soil on the edge of unusable land and let them grow out over the areas that you couldn't plant in.

Various lettuces - Not easy to grow--they're susceptible to pests and they bolt as soon as the weather gets too warm--but they grow fast and if your family likes salad, you'll eat a lot of them.

Seconding this. My dad's been trying to grow a bit of corn on our land in Texas for years, probably decades at this point. All we have to show for it is a once-a-year small ear of corn on Thanksgiving.

The potatoes, on the other hand, he grows by the bucket in piles of hay thrown into old, bald tires. I suspect the damned things will grow in anything that's been near a nutrient.

Yup. Something that I can recommend if you have children: just buy a large flower pot (15" diameter), put it on your balcony, and stick 2 potatoes in it.

Your children will see potatoes grow live, and you can eat them with them. Fun thing to do, very easy, and works so well.

For soil, just some normal soil you can dig out anywhere is enough, but you can also buy pre-fertilized soil if you wish (as said, the potatoes would even grow in garbage cans)

Most important thing I would add to that is cabbage, which I believe you can grow together with the potatoes. Entire countries survived WW2 on cabbage and potato soup, it's very nutritious.

If you're after some flavour, I'd also add onions and celery, which I guess go in normal soil with the cabbage and potatoes, and also carrots, which will want sandy soil. There's a good reason these three veggies together form the basis of lots of French and Italian cooking.

> Potatoes - Incredibly easy to grow.

I lost my entire crop to the Colorado Potato Beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle in 2016.

Note: "However, many chemicals are often unsuccessful when used against this pest because of the beetle's ability to rapidly develop insecticide resistance."

If that was my staple crop, I'd be dead of starvation right about now.

The target market for this container seems to be Africa, which does not seem to have the Colorado potato beetle.

It would be wise to consider that until 1840, the potato blight was a non-issue in Ireland, too.

Of course the idea is not to hate on potato as a crop but rather to stress the importance of genetic diversity in one's food supply.

Agreed with you list. Corn can be interesting to feed chickens, though. (I mean maize when I say corn, do you guys mean maize or wheat?) BTW, you can grow beans in the corn, it grows over it.

I would add a bit of barley/oat but that's more work than the rest.

Americans pretty universally mean maize when they say 'corn', fwiw.

And usually they mean dent corn specifically. Sweet corn, popcorn, etc. are typically said by their more detailed classification.

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