Carbohydrates

General Gardening
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I’m striving for 30 sources of carbohydrates. Some I’m growing. Some are hunted/foraged. Some are plant. Some animal. I’m growing a lot more fruit than I’ve listed. Figured it might not be heathly to depend too much on fruit. I have a lot of wild food books and it seems a lot of what they list is more of a snack.

Anything you would add?

1 - acorns - have trees. Forage also

2 - chestnuts - - have trees (not big enough to produce yet). Forage also

3 - hazelnuts - first year production

4 - pecans - have. forage.

5 - black walnut - have. forage.

6 - daylilies - have. not eaten .

7 - canna lily - have. eaten.

8 - crosnes - have. not eaten.

9 - groundnuts - have. eaten.

10 - sunchokes - have. eaten.

11 - peanuts - not growing yet.

12 - burdock - have. forage. eaten.

13 - Siberian peashrub - have. not eaten.

14 - plums - have. eaten.

15 - persimmon - have. eaten.

16 - mulberry - have. eaten

17 - honey locust - have. not eaten.

18 - Taro - have. eaten.

19 - yellowhorn - have but small still.

20 - Air potato have. eaten.

21 -

22 -

23 -

24 -

25 -

26 - eggs

27 - squirrel

28 - groundhog

29 - deer

30 - rabbit

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How about quince? They’re not overly sugary and are very high in dietary fiber which makes them good for your gut, but also very filling to eat.

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Maybe consider “weeds” like spring beauty

Also Cat tail too. Maybe look up a foraging book in your local library. It is bound to have a few options

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The list shows mostly what settlers thought that they could live on… but they starved mostly to death.

Add Potatoes, Corn and Beans and possibly Rice and Wheat Oats and you will see more Thanksgivings than not.

Eating wild animals as a society of 300M wouldnt last more than a week before we ended up eating the dogs and cats which would feed us another week or so. Then we move on to the rats.

I have 100 acres and access to another few hundred. I doubt i could feed a family of 3 via hunting for more than a few months. We would be skinny though.

Carbs are needed if you dont have access to a grocery store or dont farm animals.

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I probably have at least a dozen wild food books. Spring Beauty is one of those things i was saying looks more like a snack. Do you have experience with it?

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Perennial Thicket Bean and Scarlet runner. Cattails are super versatile. All acorns are not created equal for food. White oaks rule.

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They don’t taste as good as some books make it sound, but they’re edible!

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A great guide to wild twigs and sticks based diets and foraging are books by Euell Gibbons. He was foraging and writing long before it was popularized.

Nice also because he often offered recipe ideas they knew.

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I’ll add three more: Marsh mallow root and lotus root and seeds and pawpaw

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Perhaps you get some ideas from this…

Foods of Plains Tribes

Arikaras, Assiniboines, Blackfeet, Cheyennes, Comanches, Crees, Crows, Dakotas, Gros Ventres, Hidatsas, Ioways, Kiowas, Lakotas, Mandans, Missourias, Nakotas, Ojibwas, Omahas, Osages, Otoes, Pawnees, Poncas, Quapaws, Tonkawas, Wichitas consumed plants such as beans (some taken from mice nests), buffalo berries, Camas bulbs, chokecherries, currants, plums, turnips, and animals such as antelopes, beavers, buffalo, deer, ducks, elk, hackberries, muskrats, prairie dogs, rabbits, raccoons, porcupines, prairie chickens, skunks, wolf pups. Bison supplied a variety of dishes: boiled meat, tripe soup perhaps thickened with brains, roasted intestines, jerked/smoked meat, and raw kidneys, liver, tongue sprinkled with gall or bile were eaten immediately after a kill. One version of Plains pemmican consisted of thin strips of meat, marrow fat and chokecherries pounded together.

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11

You might also add some fish to your list.

Bass, Crappie, catfish, shell cracker, brem, rock bass, trout,

To maximize nutrition intake… every chance you get eat the roe and fish livers too. They are true super foods.

Most nuts contain plant toxins… oxilates, phytic acid and others… that can be reduced by proper processing… soaking, sprouting, fermenting, lightly roasting.

If you want to get the most nutrition wise from them make sure you know how to process them for maximizing nutrition intake.

There are lots of carnivores on youtube showing how to make pemmican.

TNHunter

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12

Are you looking at mostly food you can forage? Is this just for a survival situation? I feel like there is a bunch of things you are missing if you are interested in backyard gardening. Also a lot of yours seem to be predominantly proteins/fats with lower carbohydrates. I guess I just don’t understand what you are looking for…

If I were looking to grow carbs, I would mostly be considering these first…

Sweet Potatoes - Always have better yields for me in the mid Atlantic than traditional potatoes, and you can eat the greens as they grow.

Corn - I’ve only grown it once but the squirrels got to them before I did. flour, dent and flint may be preferable to sweet types for their ability to be stored long term and utilizing nixtamalization to process them and prevent b3 deficiency

Squash - I prefer squash in the species moschata as they have a solid stem making them more resistant to vine borers.

Beans - can’t go wrong with beans for eating fresh or storage

Tomatoes - who doesn’t love fresh tomatoes, or homemade canned sauce

Amaranth is a good pseudo cereal that is fairly easy to process.

Onions, Peas, and carrots are fairly easy options too. I’ve never spent a lot of time growing peas or onions, but I’ve grown a few oxheart carrots before.

if you are interested in nuts I would go with heartnut over black walnut.

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A lot of people are going to say potatoes and corn, but these are disease and pest prone. They also generally need irrigation of some sort. I would suggest amaranth or quinoa depending on where you are.

I have grown amaranth for the past couple of years as an ornamental, but i can vouch for its hardiness. All parts of the plant are edible, but the seed is the most nutrient dense. It requires no irrogation, it can store for over a year, it readily self seeds, it is highly climate adaptable and nothing really bothers it. As a bonus, it attracts birds which you can also eat. These are calorie dense, which is a major consideration to anything you are growing to live on. Sure, you can eat wood sorrel or cattails. Do the math on how many pounds you need to eat for 2,500 calories.

You might say “I dont need that many calories. I would be smaller!” Yeah sure, but you would also be doing a ton of activity in order to get your food. Also, you want enough calories to get fat on so you can have a buffer from starvation if things go wrong.

Another I would consider is bamboo. The shoots are edible, which is ok. The materials that you get from bamboo are very valuable. It can be used for tools, stakes, building materials, water storage etc. It is a very easy timber to process and grows like a weed.

Trees, once established, require minimal input. Unless you are irrigating, fertilizing, weeding and protecting your other crops, trees will outproduce them calorie per acre, without nearly as much labor.

Squash can be resiliant as well, particularly winter squash. Get ones with tons of seeds as they are more calorie dense. They store well and can grow woth minimal input of they are the right kind.

Of course, try your hand with sweet potatoes and other tubers. One bad season of blight will kill them and most of your stock.

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hazelnuts start to give nuts in 3 years from seed. id grow many patches of jerusalem artichoke. they are equally nutritionally dense as potatoes and bulletproof to grow. most people will only see a flower and not even see them as a food source. we also have alot of wild ones in old fields that i keep a mental note of their locations. dont forget to research medicinal plants. most are perennial or reseed them selves and should medicine supplies run out, you will have to rely on them to keep your health. i have several books on them and how to use them to reference, if needed.

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I don’t think I understand the purpose of this post. Are you interested in just carbs as a calorie source and want a diverse mix of sources but aren’t concerned about quality?

If so, I’ll be honest with you, forging quasi-edible stuff from the woods and growing minor vegetables is pretty much the worst way of achieving that goal. How much can you forage or grow in a day worth of work? Just making, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, and processing one bed is way more than 8 hours of work. And forging is even less efficient.

Whereas 8 hours at minimum wage is like $50.

That’ll get you 22 lb of corn ($20)
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Maseca-Gluten-Free-Instant-Corn-Masa-Flour-352-oz/10790737
25 lb of wheat flour ($10)
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-All-Purpose-Enriched-Flour-25LB-Bag/
10 lb of chickpeas ($14)
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Chick-Peas-Garbanzos-1-lb/2569123724
And 3 lb of oatmeal ($5)
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Instant-100-Whole-Grain-Old-Fashioned-Oats-Cup-42-oz/10314925

That’s several weeks worth of calories. And all in stable forms that aren’t perishable and won’t spoil and make you sick, and fully processed and ready to eat, and are all very carb rich while also having, between them, complete protein content and a variety of vitamins and minerals and sufficient fiber content.

You will never ever, beat that. The System™ is more efficient than you and more reliable than you. Worried about a big catastrophe that wipes out the grocery stores? Ok, I’ll make you a bet, I’ll buy basic foods at the grocery store and you grow them, we’ll see which one of us has their food supply wiped out by the weather or invaders (either human or animal) or whose food supply all spoils because of a power outage. Think you can grow food more efficiently than the System? Ok, compete with it on the marketplace, if you’re actually more efficient, you’ll eat Walmart’s lunch and you’ll be able to undercut their prices.

Good luck.

You aren’t worried about the steel mills and neem plantations getting wiped out and cutting off your supply of garden tools and neem oil and leaving you incapable of growing food, so why are you worried about the grain mills and banana plantations leaving you incapable of buying food? And the foods at the store with the highest traces of pesticides are fresh produce and berries, exactly the things you should be growing yourself, not the corn and beans and rice. And let’s be honest, UV light exposure from working a garden and forging all day, every day, is way more carcinogenic than traces of herbicides. To say nothing of how wild and partially domesticated plants have much higher levels of alkaloids, cyanogenic glucosides, oxalates, condensed tannins, and other problematic chemicals, nor to say anything of the toxic molds that will probably grow on your food because of poor, unscientific storage conditions, nor the parasites and ticks and tick-bourn illnesses you’d be exposed to. And the damage to your joints from doing hundreds of hours of repetitive motions that machines relieved humans of the need to perform a hundred years ago. Etc.

If you’re honest with yourself, it’s obviously and clearly not worth it if you just want calories. Calories are a commodity, let the commodities market do what it does best.

So, if you enjoy gardening, grow the things the grocery store isn’t good at providing. Use your time and effort to enrich your life, not substitute one poverty for an even harder, poorer one. Grow brightly colored and succulent veggies that are best picked and immediately eaten. Grow soft, juicy fruits and berries that can’t be shipped. Grow special varieties that are too low productivity for commercial operations, but have the absolute best flavor. Grow the interesting and unusual herbs of Georgian or Malay or Mexican cuisine and enjoy dishes you’d have to buy a plane ticket to taste otherwise. Make your life more rich and interesting, don’t sit around wasting time, water, and expensive energy boiling acorns until they’re “palatable” enough they won’t make you reflexively vomit immediately after swallowing.

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Ugh…Not doing Fartichoke here{or other high inulin crops}…lol

Potatoes are oddly care free here apart for light watering. We get plenty of rain for corn here as well. So it depends what works in your locale really.

Cooking renders out a lot of bad/rough compounds.

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Lol, I’m gonna have to steal that, fartichoke…

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Sweet potatoes are a great paleo carb that are very nutrient dense.

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How are numbers 26-30 a meaningful carbohydrate source?

Depends on where you are. Amaranth needs just as much irrigation as corn where I am, and I can grow 2, sometimes three crops of potatoes a year in my climate.

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I think your view of The System is highly optimistic and reminds me of the view of someone sitting in a boardroom. If you live and work in it, then you’re not quite as impressed. It’s just people. The AI and Robots stuff is all BS. There is just enough of that happening to make flashy marketing videos. The System doesn’t run without people and its people barely hanging on. Instead of reading the hype instead go work in a slaughter house, or tour a grain mill. You won’t walk away feeling as good about the quality of your food and the “scientific” methods The System is using after that.

Toxic mold is common in system produced food. That’s why the US has acceptable levels of aflatoxins and why those acceptable levels are significantly higher than other countries. And that’s nothing to say about the cumulative effect of all the toxins in each of those foods you eat every day. They keep it low enough to prevent acute poising outbreaks but that’s about as good as it will ever get with the mass scale storage of grains.

You absolutely can produce safer, healthier food at home because The System hasn’t set the bar very high. The scale alone makes it easier. You can tend to your crops and inspect them regularly to know when there is a problem and address it. Not to mention it’s your food so you have a vested interest in the quality. The System model of fewer people managing larger areas of land all for strangers makes that impossible and technology will never fix that despite the empty promises. If you take the time to learn the basics of food safety you will be fine. It’s not rocket science and food safety is easier to accomplish the smaller the scale.

Growing as much food as possible is absolutely enriching. You get a better variety of food and you stay active. The benefits of being outside and active far outweigh the risks.

But to each their own.

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