Chapter 3: Local Food Systems: From Commodity to Care

3.1 Why Food Is the First System to Relocalize

3.1 Why Food Is the First System to Relocalize

“When we control our food, we control everything.” — Old Catalan kitchen saying, scratched into the threshold of an 11th-century flour mill

Food is the daily thread that stitches human culture to the living land. It is simultaneously the most intimate and the most collective act a community performs. Because of this double quality, relocalizing food is the single fastest way to rebuild material sovereignty, close economic nutrient loops, and re-establish care economies that can weather shocks from currency swings to supply-chain collapse.

This section explains why food should be the first bioregional system you redesign, shows how that shift is already happening on three continents, and gives every household or neighborhood a starter checklist you can begin this month—no farmland required.

1. The Hidden Vulnerability of the Global Food Commodity Chain

1.1 Long Carbon Tails, Longer Risk Tails

One kilogram of supermarket tomatoes in a northern city has often traveled 3,000 km, switched trucks four times, and burned 7–10 kWh of fossil energy before it reaches a plate. Each of those kilometers is a point of failure—flooded ports, diesel price spikes, or a single customs computer crash can empty shelves in 48 hours. In the 2021 Suez blockage and the 2022 Russia–Ukraine grain crisis, countries that imported more than 30 % of their calories saw overnight price jumps of 25–70 %.

1.2 Nutrient Mining in Export Zones

The phosphorus that grows Midwestern corn is strip-mined in Morocco, shipped as fertilizer to Brazil, embedded in soy, and finally excreted in a Chinese pig barn—never returning to the soils it came from. Each step hemorrhages soil carbon and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer logistics firms. In bioregional accounting, this is a linear drain disguised as “cheap food.”

1.3 Care Stripped from the Ledger

Global commodity chains convert the living processof feeding one another into abstract weight/volume/currency. In doing so they delete thesocial nutrients—shared meals, seed knowledge, inter-generational skill—that are actually the glue of resilient communities.

2. The Heliogenesis Logic: Why Food Is the Leverage Point

Daniel Christian Wahl reminds us that regeneration starts with the smallest unit capable of closing loops. A household or neighborhood that relocalizes 30 % of its food in five years triggers cascading benefits:

These numbers are taken from four long-running projects:

• ReGen Villages (Netherlands) – 50 households
• Tir na nÓg ecovillage (Ireland) – 70 adults
• Huerta Matilde worker cooperative (Valparaíso, Chile) – 2 ha urban edge
• Shikigami neighborhood (Osaka, Japan) – 200 residents in a 0.3 km² block

All four started with less than 300 m² per person and no farmland ownership.

3. First Principles for Relocalizing Food

3.1 Start with Calorie Density, Then Nutrient Density

Actionable rule: In year 1, aim to replace three high-volume, high-mileage staples rather than every herb and spice. Typical targets:

• Grain or pseudograin (oats, quinoa, amaranth)
• Legume protein (fava, chickpea, cowpea)
• Oil or fat (sunflower, hazelnut, lard from household food scraps)

These three provide ~70 % of calories and travel farthest today.

3.2 Design for Multiple Time Horizons| Horizon | Strategy | Tool |

|---|---|---| |This month | Emergency buffer | Fermented staples (kimchi, sauerkraut, sourdough) | | This season | Calorie replacement | Fast-growing legumes, micro-greens, sprouting jars | | This year | Staple shift | Staple plots in yards, verge strips, or borrowed lawn | | 3–5 years | Perennial base | Fruit and nut guilds, small animal forage |

3.3 Stack Functions: Every Plant Must Do Three Jobs

• Feed people (calories, micronutrients)
• Feed soil (nitrogen fix, deep-miner, biomass)
• Feed the neighborhood spirit (beauty, scent, story)

Example: Amaranth

• Seed = complete protein (15 %), gluten-free flour
• Leaf = spinach substitute, high calcium
• Stem = 2 m organic mulch, deep-tap loosens clay
• Red inflorescence = pollinator magnet, kids’ “grain fairy” stories

4. Micro-Case Studies

4.1 The “One-Tonne Garden” (Malmö, Sweden, 55 °N)

Area: 90 m² south-facing backyard Design: Sepp Holzer raised beds, 40 cm wood-core hügelbeds, passive solar rain tanks Year-1 output:

• 400 kg potatoes (store 7 months)
• 120 kg dry beans
• 80 L sunflower oil pressed in a bike-powered expeller
• 40 kg winter squash Additional yields: 200 h neighbor volunteer hours, weekly potluck for 25 people, start-up seed library with 38 varieties. The household cut external food spending by 42 % and reported “a palpable drop in local anxiety” during the 2020 lockdown.

4.2 The Verge-to-Village Loop (Valparaíso, Chile, 33 °S)

Huerta Matilde negotiated a 5-year usufruct for 2 ha of abandoned municipal slope. Techniques:

• Living terraces of vetiver and lupine stop erosion
• Greywater mulch basins divert 1,000 L/week from apartment blocks above
• Neighborhood harvest festivals convert surplus into shared meals, with trueque (barter) tables for non-food needs Outcome: 120 families source 35 % of produce from the slope, municipal waste fees fell 12 %, and local kids’ test scores rose—correlating with daily access to fresh fruit.

4.3 The Osaka Balcony Guild (Japan, 35 °N)

A 15-story condo with 200 residents created vertical polyculture strips on 30 cm balconies.

• Stacking: dwarf citrus over shiso, strawberries as ground cover
• Micro-livestock: quail cages provide 4 eggs/week per household and manure tea
• Seasonal micro-grain: buckwheat grown in 10 cm rice boxes, hand-threshed on the rooftop Collectively they supply 12 % of dietary calories and run a monthly miso-making circle that doubles as trauma support group for elderly singles.

5. Household Starter Checklist (Doable This Week)

1. Audit: Track every food item entering the home for 7 days. Mark origin distance and single-point-of-failure risk (imports, refrigerated, packaging).
2. Pick One Staple: Choose the highest-risk/calorie-dense item you already eat. Source seed or slips adapted to your bioregion (local seed library, heritage grain network).
3. Find 4 m²:

• Borrow lawn, driveway corner, rooftop, or community garden bed.
• Sheet-mulch with cardboard and 10 cm of compost; plant immediately with fast legume (e.g., fava or cowpea).

1. Start a Micro-Care Loop:

• Offer one neighbor the surplus first harvest in exchange for a skill swap (bike repair, childcare, translation). Write the exchange on a visible kitchen chalkboard—instant care ledger.

1. Save Seed: Let 10 % of the crop run to seed. Dry, label, and store in a recycled jar. You have now closed the nutrient circle for year 2.

6. Community Upscaling Pathways

Once 5–10 households have a 4 m² unit each:

• Tool Library: One grain mill, one oil press, one fermentation crock per 20 households.
• Festival Loop: Monthly harvest swap meets—start with surplus herbs and seedlings; later include bulk grain milling and pressing parties.
• Governance Layer:Adopt Elinor Ostrom’sboundary, rules, collective choice, monitoring framework. Example: the Valparaíso slope uses two WhatsApp groups—one for daily irrigation alerts, one for monthly assemblies where rotation rules are adjusted in real time.

7. If You Have No Land at All

7.1 The 4-Shelf Window Farm (North-facing still viable)

• Shelf 1: Sprouting jars (broccoli, lentil, mung) – 3-day cycle, 15 % protein.
• Shelf 2: Micro-greens trays (sunflower, radish) – 7-day cycle, vitamin dense.
• Shelf 3: Oyster mushroom buckets on coffee grounds – 2 kg/month.
• Shelf 4: Worm bin turning food scraps into worm castings. Outputs: 8 kg/month fresh biomass, 0.5 kg worm castings traded to a gardener for 2 kg carrots or potatoes. You are now linked into a gift economy without owning soil.

8. Long-Term Vision: From Garden to Bioregional Food Commons

Within a decade a well-networked cluster of 200 households can:

• Host a perennial staple ploton 1–2 ha of peri-urban land (hazelnuts, chestnuts, lupin, oilseed poplar) managed as acommons trust.
• Run a bioregional seed choir where 30–40 residents steward 100 regionally adapted varieties, producing enough surplus seed to supply 2,000 households.
• Establish grain and pulse micro-mills powered by bicycle, micro-hydro, or small-scale solar thermal—keeping 85 % of value inside the bioregion.
• Measure success not in yields per hectare but in “care hours retained per calorie”—a metric that tracks social cohesion as seriously as soil carbon.

Closing Invitation

Begin with one seed, one conversation, one shared meal. Food is the one system every human already interacts with three times a day. Make those interactions regenerative, and the rest of the transition—energy, housing, governance—will follow with surprising ease.

3.2 Food Security Basics: Calories, Nutrients, Diversity, Redundancy

3.2 Food Security Basics: Calories, Nutrients, Diversity, Redundancy

From Panic Buying to Pattern Thinking

The moment the supply chain trembles—be it a blocked canal, a fuel strike, or a week of heavy snow—grocery shelves empty in forty-eight hours. This spectacle teaches us something simple: modern cities operate on a three-day food buffer. Regenerative bioregional design asks a different question: How do we weave a food system that keeps everyone nourished even when the trucks stop coming?The answer is not a bunker stacked with tins, but a living mesh of gardens, hedgerows, grain plots, ponds, and kitchens that collectively produce redundant flows ofcalories, nutrients, and phytonutrients. This section shows you how to design that mesh—starting with your household and scaling out to the watershed.

Four Metrics You Actually Need to Track

Forget the supermarket labels. Measure your food system with these four yardsticks:

1. Caloric density: Will it keep an active adult alive through winter?
2. Nutritional breadth: Does it cover the 42 essential nutrients (vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids)?
3. Species diversity: How many different species (not varieties) are you eating in a week?
4. Functional redundancy: If blight kills the potatoes, what else fills the gap?

A resilient kitchen garden in the temperate zone, for instance, can supply 2,500 kcal/day for one person on 400 m² if it contains at least 20 edible species, three staple carbohydrates, two protein sources, and five mineral accumulators.

The 50-30-20 Calorie Rule of Thumb

Most households think in meals; designers think in calorie classes. Divide your annual food requirement (roughly 900,000 kcal for a moderately active adult) into three broad categories:

Action step: Walk your property with a clipboard. Mark every square metre that could grow a staple (sun ≥6 hrs), a vegetable, or a fertility crop. Aim for at least one dense staple for every 10 m² of bed you steward.

Nutrient Checklists That Fit on a Postcard

Print the following on weather-proof paper and tape it inside your pantry door:

MACRO NUTRIENTS Protein: beans, peas, hazelnuts, amaranth, duck eggs Fats: camelina, sunflower, lard from household pig, walnuts Carbohydrates: oats, potatoes, chestnuts, kabocha squash

MICRO NUTRIENTS Calcium: nettles, kale, bone broth, small fish eaten whole Iron: lamb’s quarters, lentils, red meat from coppice-fed goats Zinc: pumpkin seeds, oysters from community reef B12: lacto-fermented vegetables using Lactobacillus plantarum starter, occasional eggshell-fed insects

PHYTONUTRIENTS Colour wheel rule: if your plate isn’t green-purple-orange-red every day, forage wild sorrel, blackberries, beechnuts or seaweed at the shore.

Case Study: The 500-Person “Doughnut” Village, Järna, Sweden

Outside Stockholm, the YtterJärna community of 120 households set a target: 70 % of calories from within a 20 km radius by 2030. In 2023 they hit 42 %. Their dashboard looks like this:

• Staple calories: 18 ha of mixed grains (rye, oats, hulless barley) grown under a 5-year rotation with clover and lupins; yields 3.6 t/yr ⇒ 1,300 kcal/person/day.
• Nutrient crops: 2 ha of no-till market gardens provide 27 species of vegetables; average 1.2 kg fresh produce/person/week.
• Protein redundancy: 1 km of living fence producing hazelnuts, perennial beans (Phaseolus coccineus), and linden leaves for calcium.
• Buffer systems: 50 m³ of sauerkraut, 2,000 L of pressed apple juice, 300 kg solar-dried mushrooms.

Key lesson: They maintain two back-ups for every calorie stream. If the rye fails, barley + potatoes absorb the gap. If kale bolts early, chard and sea kale provide leaf cover. The governance rule: no household may hoard more than 10 % of any single crop; surpluses enter the commons granary in exchange for labour credits.

Designing Household-Scale Redundancy

The “Rule of Three” for Every Staple

1. Grow it: A 20 m² bed of Jerusalem artichoke yields 180 kg of carbohydrate per year; stores in the ground.
2. Process it: A backyard solar dehydrator turns 50 kg of surplus tomatoes into 5 kg of vitamin C–rich leather.
3. Trade it: Two streets away your neighbour has walnuts; you swap tomato leather for 10 kg shelled nuts, evening out fat and lycopene.

Micro-Orchards = Mineral Banks

Plant each fruit tree with a guild of mineral accumulators:

• Apple under-planted with comfrey (K, Ca), chicory (K, Cu), and yarrow (P, S).
• After five years the understory becomes mulch, returning ~200 g/year of potassium to the apple without external fertiliser.

Techniques for Cold, Dry, Wet, and Windy Zones

Six Starter Actions You Can Take This Month

1. Audit your current larder: List every item that delivers >100 kcal/100 g. Mark anything not grown within 200 km. Aim to reduce the red marks by 25 % next season.
2. Plant one calorie staple this week: Potatoes in a sack, amaranth in a window box, or sorghum along a fence.
3. Start a “nutrient spiral”: A 1 m diameter mound with comfrey (K), borage (Ca), and calendula (phytonutrients) feeding a central berry bush.
4. Join or form a seed-saving circle: Exchange at least three open-pollinated varieties after every harvest.
5. Convert one ornamental hedge: Rip out the privet, plant hazel, autumn olive, and Siberian pea shrub. Harvest begins year three.
6. Build a 50 L solar dehydrator from reclaimed windows and pallet wood. Dry your first 5 kg of surplus produce before autumn.

The Care Economy Angle

Security is not accumulation; it is relationship. In the Catalan village of Gurb, every Friday the schoolchildren harvest the communal grain plots. The grain is milled into flour and baked into bread delivered, still warm, to every elder’s doorstep. Calories are redistributed, nutrients circulate, and redundancy is social: every child knows the fields, every elder tastes the harvest. That is food as care.

Closing Thought

A resilient food system is not a warehouse; it is a conversation between soil microbes and human mouths carried on through seeds, songs, and shared labour. Start the conversation where you stand—on your balcony, in your schoolyard, at the edge of the car park. The calories, nutrients, and diversity will follow.

3.3 Annuals, Perennials, and Wild Foods

3.3 Annuals, Perennials, and Wild Foods

From Single-Season Scarcity to Perennial Abundance

3.3.1 The Core Distinction

The modern diet is dominated by annuals: wheat, soy, rice, maize, and a handful of vegetables bred to complete their life-cycle in one season. These crops now cover 70 % of all cropland, yet they demand yearly tillage, fertility inputs, and seed repurchase. By contrast, perennials and wild foods ask almost nothing of us after establishment and return gifts for decades. A regenerative food system intentionally rebalances these three categories so that:

• Calories and proteins come increasingly from perennial staples (nuts, pulses, tubers).
• Micronutrients and phytochemicals arrive through managed wild foods and diverse annual vegetables.
• Risk is spread across time (perennial resilience) and space (wild diversity).

The guiding question is not “What do we plant this spring?” but “What will still be feeding us in twenty springs?”

3.3.2 Designing the Layered Pantry

Use a simple three-ring model to sketch your household or community foodscape:

The rings are permeable: wild lambsquarters becomes a self-seeding annual; annual tomatoes can naturalise into semi-perennial vines in frost-free zones.

3.3.3 Annuals – Workhorses with Guardrails

Principles

1. Disturb only what you need. No-dig beds, shallow broadforking, and living mulches reduce carbon loss.
2. Seed sovereignty. Save and breed locally adapted varieties; swap at community seed circles.
3. Succession and polyculture. Replace single-row monocrops with relay planting—radish > lettuce > beans > kale—under a canopy of tomatoes or maize.
4. Nutrient budgeting. For every harvest basket, return a compost basket and a urine bucket.

Household-Scale Techniques

• 100-ft² “salad bar”: One sheet-mulched bed, 1 m wide by 30 m long, cut-and-come-again greens, interplanted with edible flowers and pollinator strips.
• “Three Sisters in a Bucket”: 60 cm diameter container with one corn stalk, one pole bean, one summer squash—demonstrates symbiosis on a balcony.
• Emergency grain plot: 40 m² of amaranth or quinoa on otherwise marginal land yields 12–18 kg grain in 100 days.

3.3.4 Perennials – The Solar-Powered Infrastructure

Perennial systems are the slow food of resilience. Establish them first, even if you still buy most calories from the old economy. Trees, vines, and herbaceous perennials compound—each extra year they gain in size, resilience, and yield.

Core Guild Templates (adaptable to any temperate or subtropical zone)

1. Staple Tree Guild (Outer Edge, Zone 3-4)- Canopy: Chestnut (starch), pecan (fat), stone pine (protein)

• Sub-canopy: Apple/pear for vitamins, autumn olive for nitrogen
• Shrub: Hazelnut, goumi, currants
• Herbaceous: Jerusalem artichoke, globe artichoke, comfrey (chop-and-drop mulch)
• Groundcover: White clover, vetch, strawberries
• Roots: Oca, yacon, Chinese yam
• Vertical: Hardy kiwi or akebia on trunks Stocking density: 400 m² feeds two adults 20 % of annual calories at 10 years.

1. Edible Forest Garden (Inner Zone 2-3)

• Designed for weekly harvests rather than staple calories.
• Mimics mid-succession edge: fig, mulberry, pawpaw, persimmon.
• Includes insectary strips of fennel, dill, yarrow to close pest loops.
• Case study: Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead, Orcas Island, WA—⅛ acre supplies 60 % of all fruit for 15 residents, 0 external fertility after year 7.

1. Perennial Staple Patch in Arid Zones

• Mesquite (pods 16 % protein), chiltepin pepper, wolfberry, prickly pear pads & fruit.
• Zuni waffle gardens sunk 20 cm below grade capture monsoon runoff.
• Established groves survive 6-month droughts on 250 mm rainfall.
• Example: Desert Harvesters, Tucson, AZ—neighbourhood mesquite milling days turn 50 t pods/year into local flour.

3.3.5 Wild Foods – Weaving the Commons

Wild harvest is not free food; it is co-creative tending. A rule of thirds:

• Take one third for people.
• Leave one third for non-human kin.
• Leave one third to re-seed and expand.

Community Protocols

• Harvest calendars printed on waterproof cards: fiddlehead ferns (April), sea kale florets (May), berries (June-August), acorns (September), seaweeds (lowest tides).
• Mapping & caretaking crews: GPS-mark patches of ramps or camas; return in spring to weed and mulch.
• Skill shares: Monthly wild food walks, fermentation workshops, acorn leaching days.

Safe & Legal Wild Integration

• Taxonomic certainty: use dichotomous keys and local mentors—mistaken identity is the biggest risk.
• Pollution audit: industrial sites, roadsides, and dog-walking zones avoided; heavy-metal test if unsure.
• Harvest tools: curved pruning knife (for mushrooms), woven bark basket (for berries), long-handled rake (for seaweed).

3.3.6 Putting It Together – A Year in the Food Rings

Month by Month – Temperate Example (Zone 6)

3.3.7 Action Checklist for Households and Neighborhoods

This Season

1. Map your yard or common land in the three rings; mark existing wild and perennial sources.
2. Plant one 1 m² “three sisters” plot and one perennial shrub (hazel, goumi, currant).
3. Join or start a seed swap; obtain at least one regionally adapted landrace grain (e.g., ‘Magic Manna’ amaranth).

Within Twelve Months

1. Convert 10 % of lawn to a mini-orchard guild (canopy + shrub + herb + groundcover).
2. Host a communal wild food walk and publish a zine of the harvest calendar.
3. Build a simple solar dryer or fermentation station to process peak gluts.

Within Five Years

1. Achieve 30 % of household calories from perennials and 10 % from wild foods.
2. Steward a neighbourhood “commons orchard” on marginal street verges—co-signed agreement for shared care and harvest.
3. Establish a micro-nursery for hardy nut and fruit seedlings; barter or gift 100 trees per year.

3.3.8 Closing Thought

Annuals give us immediacy; perennials give us memory; wild foods give us humility. A regenerative food system braids all three into a living calendar that remembers droughts, celebrates abundance, and never forgets the more-than-human.

3.4 Bioregional Crop Logic

3.4 Bioregional Crop Logic

What to grow where, with whom, and for what purpose

Opening the Map: From Global Commodity to Living Mosaic

Industrial agriculture treats land as a blank surface on which to paste identical rows of a few high-yield species. Bioregional crop logic starts with the opposite assumption: the pattern of life already on the land is the smartest guide to what can be added or encouraged. The task is not to impose, but to co-compose—to select, breed, and assemble plants (and the microbes, fungi, insects, and animals that travel with them) so that yields increase because the system becomes more intricate, more self-repairing, and more generous to the people who tend it.

A useful mental model is the “crop triad”:

1. Foundation crops – calorie-dense staples that anchor the food system.
2. Companion crops – nutrient-dense plants that fill ecological niches, feed soils, and diversify diets.
3. Currency crops – small, high-value surpluses that flow outward as gifts, barter, or modest cash income, keeping the local economy alive without compromising subsistence.

All three must satisfy four filters:

• Does it fit the bioregion? (climate envelope, water budget, native pollinators)
• Can we grow it with mostly on-site fertility? (nitrogen fixation, carbon cycling, human power)
• Does it strengthen social fabric? (shared labor, seed sharing, inter-household gifting)
• Does it regenerate the underlying watershed, soil, and cultural knowledge?#### Core Principles

1.Read the micro-climate first, the seed catalogue second. Ten metres of slope, a stone wall, or a hedgerow can shift temperature, moisture, and wind by enough to change viable species. Start with thermal mass mapping: walk your site at dawn on the coldest day of winter and mark frost pockets vs. frost-free spots. These become the reference grid for where olives, figs, or amaranth will out-perform cabbages.

1. Favour evolutionary partnerships over solitary giants. A lone avocado may bear, but an avocado shaded by nitrogen-fixing ice-cream-bean (Inga edulis), mulched by pigeon pea, and pollinated by native stingless bees will bear sooner, longer, and with fewer off-farm inputs.

2. Design redundancy through “pattern overlap.” If your region averages one drought every five years, ensure at least three starch sources reach maturity at different times: early potatoes, taro in wetland edges, and perennial yam vines on living trellises. When drought hits, one or two may fail; the third sustains.

3. Let the commons curate the gene pool. Every household saves seed from its most resilient individual plants; once a year a community seed fair swaps material and records stories (“this squash resisted mildew, this one ripened before the first frost”). Over a decade, the bioregion quietly breeds its own landraces, better tuned to local pressures than any corporate hybrid.

4. Count labour as a yield. A chestnut coppice that needs two days of pruning each winter but yields 800 kg of nuts and 6 m³ of firewood is high-return. A labour-intensive saffron patch that brings joy and social ritual may be worth more in wellbeing than its cash value. Keep time budgets transparent so communities can decide consciously where human hours flow.

Choosing Crops: A Decision Scaffold

Use the “five-layer sieve” on any candidate species:

Passing four or five layers = plant at scale. Passing three = trial plot. Passing two or fewer = curiosity pot on the balcony.

Case Studies in Bioregional Crop Logic

1. The Asturian Valley, Spain – Chestnut-Wolfberry Silvopasture Problem: High rainfall (1 400 mm yr⁻¹) leaches nutrients from sloping orchards; young adults migrate to cities. Response:

• Replace annual cereals under chestnuts with drought-tolerant Lycium barbarum (wolfberry) shrubs.
• Use chestnut leaf drop as mulch; wolfberry roots tap sub-soil phosphorus and yield antioxidant berries for tea that sells in tourist cooperatives.
• Sheep graze the alleys in early spring before berry set, adding manure and reducing mowing labour. Outcome: 12 % rise in soil organic matter over 10 years; average farm household income from on-farm sales doubled with only 8 extra days of labour per year.

1. Kandyan Gardens, Sri Lanka – Homegarden Guilds A 0.2 ha plot around a mud-brick house typically contains 70–90 useful species arranged in four vertical layers: coconut over jackfruit over guava over turmeric and taro. Staple calorie source (rice) is grown in surrounding paddies, but the garden provides 30–40 % of household vitamins and most medicines. Each plant fulfils at least two functions (food + mulch, timber + bee forage, etc.) so that the entire system runs on 30 minutes of tending per day plus one family work-day each month for pruning and compost turning.

2. High Plains, North America – Perennial Polyculture Trial Where rainfall is 350 mm and dropping, the Land Institute’s Kernza intermediate wheatgrass is inter-sown with alfalfa and wild blue flax. Yields are 30 % lower than annual wheat in good years but zero in drought years when annuals fail. Over a decade, soil carbon rose 0.4 % yr⁻¹, water infiltration doubled, and the cooperative handling the grain secured a local craft brewery contract at 3× the commodity wheat price.

Starter Kits for Three Archetypal Bioregions

A. Dry-Mediterranean (hot summer, cool wet winter, 400–600 mm rain) Foundation:

• Winter cereals – durum wheat, barley
• Perennial staples – olives, carob, almonds on swales Companion:
• Faba bean (nitrogen), purslane (summer omega-3 greens), capers (erosion control on stone walls) Currency:
• Honey from rosemary & thyme blooms, dried figs, pomegranates for urban CSA boxes

Actionable first step: Plant a 25 m² “guild of one”—single olive under-planted with fava, borage, and strawberries—mark yields and soil moisture for two years before scaling.

B. Humid-Temperate (cold winter, 700–1 000 mm rain) Foundation:

• Staple tree – hybrid chestnut (blight-resistant)
• Caloric understory – oca, skirret, potato onions Companion:
• Goumi berry (nitrogen + early fruit), ramps (spring greens), comfrey (mulch) Currency:
• Shiitake on oak logs, blackcurrant cordial, basket willow coppice

Actionable first step: Convert 50 m² of lawn to a keyhole bed with chestnut at centre; sheet-mulch with cardboard + woodchips + comfrey trimmings; interplant with oca and kale the first year.

C. Monsoon Tropics (heavy wet season, 1 800 mm, 6-month dry) Foundation:

• Taro and cassava in moist hollows; upland rice on ridges
• Perennial starch – banana, breadfruit, air potato Companion:
• Pigeon pea (nitrogen + dry season pulses), chaya (leaf spinach), moringa (nutrition) Currency:
• Dried turmeric, lemongrass essential oil, value-added banana chips

Actionable first step: Dig a banana circle 2 m diameter, 1 m deep pit filled with kitchen scraps; plant 6–7 banana suckers around rim; under-plant with taro, sweet potato, and climbing yam vines up the pseudostems.

Household-Level Crop Notebook (template)

Print or hand-write on a single A4 folded into quarters:

1. My Micro-Sites (draw a rough map: sunny wall, soggy corner, windy ridge)
2. Calorie Anchor (one staple per site)
3. Nutrient Buddy (leafy, legume, or fruit that matures with or right after the anchor)
4. Seed Source & Year Saved (neighbour, seed swap, own harvest)
5. Labour Minutes per Week (realistic running tally)
6. Notes & Surprises (“tomatillo self-seeded, loved the path edge”)

Review annually at winter solstice, before ordering anything new.

Final Encouragement

Bioregional crop logic is not a fixed list; it is a recursive conversation between the land, the climate record, and the collective memory of the people who eat from it. Start with the species that already volunteer on disturbed ground—purslane, lambs-quarters, amaranth. They are the land’s first teachers of what thrives. Observe, taste, save seed, and share the story. Within a handful of seasons you will be holding a living catalogue no corporation can patent and no drought can erase.

3.5 Community Food Structures

3.5 Community Food Structures

Moving from supermarkets to solidarity kitchens, seed commons, and care-based provisioning

Introduction

If you remember nothing else from this chapter, remember this: food is first a relationship, then a resource. When we treat it as a commodity, the shelves empty during the first supply-chain hiccup; when we treat it as a shared commons, the larder deepens during crisis. Community food structures are the physical and social architectures that translate soil, sun, and labour into reliable nourishment for everyone within a bioregion. They are the bridges between household gardens and watershed-scale agro-ecologies. The goal of this section is to show how, with modest tools and clear agreements, any group of 200–5,000 people can create a distributed food web that is redundant, redundant, and—above all—caring.

Guiding Principles (apply everywhere, tweak locally)

1. Proximity before scale – Keep nutrient loops tight; design each structure so that nothing (people, seeds, fertility, knowledge) travels farther than it must.
2. Redundancy with mutual aid – Multiple small reserves outperform one large one when a storm knocks out power lines.
3. Care loop accounting– Trackwho is fed, who is rested, and who is learning, side-by-side with calories and dollars.
4. Progressive openness – Begin with the already engaged; expand by lowering access thresholds, never by coercion.
5. Embodied memory – Every structure should teach its own maintenance: labelled seed jars, chalk boards in the kitchen, laminated harvest calendars on the wall.

Six Foundational Structures

1. Neighbourhood Seed Commons

What it is A rotating library of regionally adapted seed, stewarded by households but governed as a commons. Think of it as a cross between a bookmobile and a credit union.

How to start

• Identify 10–15 founding stewards who already save seed.
• Draft a two-page charter (Elinor Ostrom’s design principles fit on one side).
• Use coin envelopes + silica gel packets; store in a repurposed fridge set to 6 °C (no power? use a buried ceramic pot with charcoal and ash).
• Monthly swap meets double as skillshares: “How to rogue out lettuce crosses,” “Squash bee habitat.”

Case The Tamar Valley Seed Savers (Cornwall/Devon, 300 households) have 1,100 accessions, zero dues, and a rule: every member must return seed from and a hand-drawn story of the crop’s season. The stories are scanned and re-printed on the next packet—cultural germination at the speed of trust.

2. Micro-Hub Food Forests

What it is A 0.1–0.4 ha public or semi-public perennial foodscape within 5–10 minutes walk of every 200–400 residents.

Design checklist

• Canopy layer: nut or oily seed tree adapted to your rainfall band (e.g., pecan in humid subtropics, stone pine in Mediterranean).
• Shrub layer: currants, goumi, chilean guava, nitrogen-fixing eleagnus.
• Herbaceous: self-seeding brassica greens, yacon, mashua.
• Ground cover: white clover + alpine strawberries.
• Vertical: hardy kiwi or akebia on a child-height trellis.

Governance Adopt a “guild circle” model: 7–10 neighbours sign a three-year rotating care covenant (two pages again). Tasks are printed on coloured lolly sticks drawn at each monthly work-bee. If a stick stays in the jar three meetings in a row, the circle meets to redesign the task, never to shame the holder.

3. Community Root Cellar & Ferment Lab

Why Even in the tropics, a shaded earth-bermed room can hold stable temps for tubers and crocks.

Build notes

• Volume rule: 0.15 m³ usable space per person served.
• Passive cooling: Two air pipes: intake low on north side, exhaust high on south side; add a solar chimney if local temp differential <8 °C.
• Ferment station: 4 × 20 L glass jars with water-seal lids; a simple hanging scale for salt-by-weight (2.5 % brine table laminated on the wall).

Case Ballydehob Root House (Ireland, pop. 280) stores 600 kg of potatoes, 300 kg carrots, and runs weekly kraut circles. Surplus crocks go to the school lunch programme—closing a care loop between elders and children.

4. Pop-Up Community Kitchen / Processing Day

Function Turn gluts into stable calories without burning out the growers. Operates 6–10 times per growing season in borrowed church halls or school canteens.

Kit list for <$500

• Two 20 L stock pots (scavenge from restaurant supply)
• Twelve 9-L enamel water-bath canners
• One rocket-stove cob oven built in one weekend (clay, sand, straw, 30 bricks)
• Laminated SOP sheets (Sterilise jars 10 min, Acidify tomatoes to pH 4.2, etc.)

Workflow

1. Morning: weigh produce and agree on split (60 % back to growers, 30 % to volunteer pool, 10 % to emergency pantry).
2. Day: rotating 3-person stations—wash/chop, blanch/pack, stove monitor.
3. Sunset: shared potluck using the trimmings; zero edible waste leaves the site.

5. Village Grain & Pulse Chain

Scope A three-tier system that turns backyard plots of wheat, rye, lentils, or chickpeas into 100 kg household bread security without diesel.

• Tier 1: Grow patches – 40 m² grows ~25 kg wheat.
• Tier 2: Shared thresher – Bicycle-powered drum thresher (open-source plans from Open Source Ecology) housed in a garden shed.
• Tier 3: Micro-mill – 1 hp stone mill ($250) run one evening a week, energy from a 400 W PV panel + battery buffer.

Governance A simple “baker’s hour” exchange: for every 10 kg grain milled, the household contributes one hour to maintenance or teaching.

6. Care Economy Food Rota

The invisible but critical structure – making sure the elderly, the sick, and the overwhelmed parents still eat.

Template A 5-week rolling schedule pinned in the post-office window and on a shared cloud doc:

• Cook column: “Mira – dal + chapati – Thursday”
• Deliver column: “Jonas & bike trailer – 11:30–12:15”
• Feedback column: “Ate half, froze half – need smaller portions”

Costs nothing except coordination; yields enormous resilience when a flood or flu knocks half the growers out of the field.

Putting It Together: The 500-Person Example

Let’s sketch a hypothetical valley hamlet of 120 households.

Total recurring hours/month: 205—the equivalent of 1.2 FTE jobs, but spread across 120 households, so 1.7 hrs per adult. Cash outlay: <$3,000 if 60 % of materials are salvaged.

First 90-Day Action Plan for Your Place

Week 1–2

• Call a potluck mapping session: three questions on the wall—Who already saves seed? Who has spare land? Who loves to cook? Put dots on a big map.
• Read the Ostrom 8 principles aloud; co-write a one-page “We commit to…” statement.

Week 3–6

• Build or designate one storage node(could be a corner of a garage) and hold the firstseed & cutting swap.
• Run a skill audit: who can graft? who can wire a 12 V panel? Schedule one teach-back every fortnight.

Week 7–12

• Identify three public or semi-public pockets(church verge, school boundary, front lawn of the library). Run adesign charrette on cardboard: where will the nut tree go, where the compost toilet for volunteers?
• Schedule first processing day when the tomatoes hit peak—advertise with a chalkboard at the post-office: “Bring 5 kg, leave with 3 jars.”

Week 13–14

• Hold a retrospective around a shared meal. Ask: Which tasks felt joyful? Which felt extractive? Re-write the rota accordingly.
• Publish a two-page zine: “Our Valley’s Food Commons – Summer Recipes & Winter Plans”. Print 50 copies; the archive has begun.

Closing Thought

When the last supermarket truck fails to arrive, the question every community must answer is not “How do we import food?” but “How do we remember who knows how to feed us?” Community food structures are, above all, memory keepers. Build them with your hands, yes, but also with songs at the planting day, with children’s drawings of the first pear harvest, with stories on every seed packet. The calories will follow.

3.6 Starting with 100 m²: A Minimal Community Food Plot

3.6 Starting with 100 m²: A Minimal Community Food Plot

(~1 250 words)

“The smallest well-tended garden is more powerful than the largest abandoned field.” — Balkan village proverb collected by Sepp Holzer

Why 100 m²?

One hundred square metres—roughly the footprint of a modest house—is the smallest land base that can still deliver baseline food sovereignty for a micro-community (5–10 people) when designed as an intensive, perennial-leaning, calorie-diverse plot. It is large enough to generate surplus for gifting, seed saving and barter, yet small enough to be managed with hand tools and weekly collective workdays. Across all bioregions, this patch becomes a school of care, a nursery of plant material, and a living bank of local knowledge.

Core Design Principles

Step-by-Step Installation Plan

1. Site & Sector Map (Day 1)

• Sun arc: Mark winter and summer solstice lines; place heat-loving crops (tomatoes, peppers, amaranth) on equator-facing edge.
• Wind: Note prevailing storm quarter; plant a 1 m mixed shelterbelt (Jerusalem artichoke, seaberry, elder, staggered heights) along windward edge.
• Water: Observe runoff after a rain; dig one 1 m² spill-catch basin at the lowest point to infiltrate overflow and grow taro/arrowhead.

2. Soil Start-Up (Week 1–2)

• No dig, no tractor: lay down 10 cm compost or aged manure, 5 cm woody ramial chips, 5 cm leaf mould.
• Biomass accelerator: seed mustard, radish, fenugreek as “biostimulant cover” to break compaction and feed microbes.

3. Zoning & Access

• Zone 0: 2 m² herb spiral by the gate—immediate flavour pharmacy (oregano, thyme, shiso, garlic chives).
• Zone 1: 30 m² intensively managed beds (salad, quick turns).
• Zone 2: 50 m² perennial staples and small fruit.
• Zone 3: 15 m² alley of nut or staple tree in 1 m² pits with mycorrhizal inoculant.
• Zone 4: 3 m² compost bay, 3 m² tool shed, 3 m² rainwater tank fed by 10 m² roof.

4. Calorie Core

Choose one primary carbohydrateandone fat/protein suited to your bioregion. Examples:

Plant densities (per 100 m² total plot):

• Potatoes/sweet potato: 35 m² at 4 plants m² → 8 months → ~140 kg.
• Squash: 5 m² at 0.5 plants m² → 15 fruit, 200 kg.
• Legumes: 15 m² in relay → 50 kg dry seed.
• Nuts: 3 trees on dwarfing rootstock, 3 m spacing, 30 kg kernel from year 5.

5. Living Infrastructure

• Nitrogen fountains: clover under squash, goumi & seaberry in shelterbelt.
• Pollinator magnets: blue borage, phacelia, cowpea, African marigold.
• Mycorrhizal grid: inoculate roots with native forest soil slurry; maintain undisturbed paths 45 cm wide, wood-chipped.

Time & Labour Budget

Total: 38–40 h/year once established, or one long workday per month shared among five households.

Case Study: “Le Jardin des 100” – Grenoble, France (Temperate Maritime)

Context: 10 residents of an eco-co-housing block, 2019–2024. Plot: 12 m × 8 m south-facing, previously lawn, 600 mm rainfall, −5 °C winter.

Design Highlights

• Thermal battery wall: 1 m high gabion filled with stones on north edge; creates warm microclimate.
• Three sisters remix: corn at 1 m spacing, climbing beans (cannellini), gem squash sprawls underneath. Yield: 180 kg corn + 30 kg beans + 200 kg squash from 35 m².
• Perennial polyculture row: 5 m of sea kale, Good-King-Henry, sorrel, Turkish rocket—greens from March to November without reseeding.
• Greywater reed bed: 1 m² vertical flow wetland feeds nutrient-rich water to taro trench; zero tap water after year 2.

Social innovation

• Garden chit system: every hour worked earns a stamped chit redeemable for produce or childcare—managed via a chalkboard; no digital tech.
• Winter seedling guild: neighbours with balconies raise peppers and tomatoes in exchange for chits, extending the growing season without heated greenhouse.

Outcome: Plot now provides 28 % of block’s vegetable calories and 45 % of greens; surplus donated to food pantry; became a node for local seed variety trials.

Action Checklist for Day One

1. Stake the 10 m × 10 m square with 5 cm wide beds and 45 cm paths.
2. Lay cardboard + 10 cm compost on every bed; soak thoroughly.
3. Plant a quick calorie crop (potatoes or sweet potato slips) in every third bed immediately—build momentum.
4. Edge the plot with multifunctional perennials: 1 seaberry, 2 gooseberry, 3 clumping lemon balm.
5. Install a 200 l rain barrel fed by a downpipe diverter.
6. Write the first “offer/need” on the gate: e.g. “Need: cardboard, old bricks / Offer: fresh rosemary cuttings.”

Scaling Out: From 100 m² to Neighbourhood Mesh

Once the plot is thriving it becomes a propagator:

• Cuttings & divisions: each perennial can supply 5–10 new plantings per year for neighbouring yards.
• Seed library: glass jars of open-pollinated varieties labelled with year, bioregion, gardener’s story.
• Skill relay: monthly open workdays where visitors leave with soil on their hands and a start-up map for their own balcony or verge.

Remember: 100 m² is not the end goal—it is the keystone. Like mycelium, the care loop spreads rhizomatically, converting lawns, rooftops, and vacant lots into a bioregional food commons whose dividends are measured not in tonnes shipped, but in relationships deepened, knowledge passed, and calories eaten within walking distance of where they grew.

3.7 Preservation and Storage

Closing the nutrient cycle between harvest and hunger, from pantry to commons.

The Purpose of Preservation

In a relocalised food system, the garden or commons no longer feeds us only at peak harvest; it must stretch sun-captured energy across a twelve-month arc. Preservation is therefore the bridge between ecological abundance and human need. When done well, it:

• Levels caloric peaks and troughs, turning seasonal gluts into winter staples.
• Transforms perishables into storable wealth, creating a community “lazy capital” that can be lent, traded, or gifted.
• Reduces food waste, returning solar energy to soils only after it has nourished humans.

The guiding principle is minimum external input, maximum nutritional integrity: every kilowatt-hour of grid electricity or gram of petrochemical preservative we avoid is a kilowatt-hour or gram we never have to import again.

Four Foundations of Low-Input Storage

1. Harvest Maturity Under-ripe produce stores poorly; over-ripe begins decay in the crate. Harvest at physiological maturity: potatoes when skins “set,” onions when necks collapse, beans when pods rattle, fruit when a gentle lift separates stem from spur.

2. Field Heat Removal Within 30 minutes of harvest, drop produce to its ideal storage temperature. Shade, running well water, or a simple “bucket-in-bucket” evaporative cooler (two nested buckets, damp sand in between) can subtract 10–15 °C without electricity.

3. Curing and Drying Curing thickens skins and suberises wounds—two weeks at 18–25 °C for squash and sweet potatoes; a single sunny day for garlic and onions. Drying lowers water activity below the microbial threshold: sun-dryers made from stacked insect-screen drawers and salvaged windows reach 50–60 °C even in humid climates.

4. Atmospheric Control The “storage triangle” is temperature, humidity, and gas composition. Most root crops: 0–4 °C, 90–95 % RH, ambient CO₂. Apples: 2–4 °C, 90 % RH, 2–3 % CO₂, 2–3 % O₂. For the household, a buried fridge (clay pipe in sand) or a passive charcoal cooler (evaporative tower lined with biochar) can approximate these conditions.

Preservation Pathways at a Glance

* “0 W” means no electricity; human caloric energy for chopping, stirring, or lifting is still required.

Community-Scale Storage: From Pantry to Commons Larder

Case Study: The Langholm Root Cellar Network, Scottish Borders

Problem: 600-person village producing 8 t of potatoes, carrots, and parsnips annually, but losing 35 % to sprouting and rodent damage in garages. Solution:

• Retrofitted two disused WWII air-raid shelters (10 m², 3 m deep) into communal root cellars.
• Earth-bermed walls maintain 3–5 °C year-round; passive vent pipe draws cool night air.
• Wooden crates on skids allow sliding access; chalkboard records what family stored what date.
• Governance: Each household contributes 10 h/year maintenance labour; surplus beyond family need goes to the school canteen (paid in cafeteria credits). Result: losses dropped to <8 %, and the school now serves 40 % of veg from the commons larder.

Actionable Template for a 50-Household Cellar

1. Site: North-facing slope, water table >2 m below floor.
2. Structure: Sandbag walls (earthbag) 30 cm thick, lime-plastered; green roof adds insulation.
3. Climate Battery: 20 m of 10 cm perforated pipe buried under floor; warm daytime air is cooled by soil mass and returns at night.
4. Storage Furniture: Reclaimed apple bins (120 cm × 120 cm) on 10 cm pallet feet to encourage airflow.
5. Access Protocol: Monthly “open cellar” day; digital ledger on offline Raspberry Pi tracks deposits/withdrawals.
6. Redundancy: Two 1 m³ chest freezers run from 1 kW PV array for berries and meat; freezer doubles as coolth battery at night.

Household-Scale Recipes and Workflows

1. Lacto-Fermented Mixed Vegetables (Kimchi-Style, No Electricity)

Yields 5 kg, ready in 7 days, keeps 12 months at 10 °C. Ingredients

• 2 kg Chinese cabbage (or any brassica), rough-chopped
• 1 kg daikon or turnip, julienned
• 300 g carrots, grated
• 150 g sea salt (2.5 % of total veg weight)
• 100 g garlic & ginger, minced
• 2 Tbs chilli flakes (or bioregional spice)
• 1 Tbs fish sauce or miso (inoculant)

Workflow

1. Salt wilt: Toss veg with 100 g salt, let drain 2 h.
2. Rinse twice, squeeze dry.
3. Mix aromatics, pack into 5 L ceramic crock.
4. Lay whole cabbage leaves on top, weigh down with river stone.
5. Cover with cloth; ferment 7 days at 18–20 °C, then move to cool shelf or buried crock.
6. Eat within a year; brine can be reused as starter.

2. Three-Day Solar Dehydrator Build

Materials

• 1 old double-glazed window (1 m²)
• 10 m of 15 cm scrap downpipe (heat collector) painted black
• 1 sheet plywood, 1 sheet insect mesh
• Hinges, screws, leftover insulation

Design

• A-frame cabinet, 1.5 m long, 30 cm deep, back tilted 30°.
• Black pipe mounted below glass, draws air in bottom, vents through mesh racks.
• Internal temp reaches 55 °C on 20 °C day with 40 % RH. Capacity: 30 kg sliced tomatoes → 3 kg dry in 2 sunny days.

Mapping Storage to Nutrient Needs

Using the 100 m² plot example from 3.6, a household of four will harvest roughly:

• 400 kg potatoes (carbohydrate base)
• 60 kg carrots (vitamin A)
• 40 kg dried beans (protein, 16 kg once dried)
• 30 kg winter squash (vitamin C)

Storage allocation:

• 300 kg potatoes in buried clamp or cellar (consumption Oct–Mar)
• 50 kg carrots in damp sand buckets (rotate every 2 weeks)
• 16 kg beans in 20 L screw-top plastic barrels with bay leaves (repels weevils)
• 30 kg squash in loft bedroom under bed (18 °C, 60 % RH)

Closing the Care Loop: Storage as Gift Economy

In the Heliogenesis model, stored food is not idle capital; it is a promise of future care. The Potlatch Pantry (Salish Coast) institutionalised this by setting aside 10 % of every household’s winter larder for the “Moon of Hunger” (February). No accounting is kept; the gift is repaid in the next cycle by someone else. What circulates is not calories but reliability. When the grid fails or the container ship is delayed, the commons still eats.

Quick Start Checklist (Print & Post)

☐ Build or locate coolest, darkest corner in house—measure temp nightly for one week. ☐ Acquire 6 second-hand 10 L glass jars with rubber seals (Fermentation Friday). ☐ Make 10 kg sauerkraut using only salt and elbow grease; taste on day 7. ☐ Assemble 1 m² solar dehydrator from scrap; dry 5 kg surplus tomatoes. ☐ Dig a 40 cm deep, 1 m² clamp trench; line with straw; store 50 kg potatoes. ☐ Organise neighbourhood “Borrow a Cool Place” map: who has root cellar space to spare? ☐ Schedule quarterly Seed-to-Storage swap meet: bring seeds, leave with ferments.

The final harvest is not the moment food leaves the field; it is the moment it enters a child’s mouth in February without a single joule of fossil sunlight. Preservation is how we keep the summer’s gift alive until it can nourish a winter’s need—and in doing so, we preserve not only nutrients but the relationships that make a commons possible.

3.8 Seasonal Food Plans for Different Bioregions

3.8 Seasonal Food Plans for Different Bioregions

“Eat what the land offers when it offers it, and the surplus will feed the lean times.” —Old saying from the Alentejo commons, Portugal

Introduction

Relocalising food is not only about where food is grown but when it is expected and celebrated. Industrial calendars have flattened the year into a constant stream of identical tomatoes; a bioregional calendar restores the rhythm of pulses, shoots, fruits, and roots that actually fit the place you inhabit. This section shows how to build a living, shareable seasonal food plan for any bioregion—temperate, arid, tropical, or montane—based on three design rules:

1. Track ecological time (frost dates, monsoon onset, dry-season length).
2. Balance caloric staples(grains, pulses, tubers) withprotective foods (leaf, fruit, oilseed).
3. Insert care loops: seed swaps, gleaning days, communal kitchens, and festivals that convert surplus into social glue.

We will walk through four archetypal bioregions, then extract transferable tools you can adapt at home.

1. Temperate Maritime Northwest Europe

Signature constraints: Mild winters (rarely below –5 °C), long cool springs, summer drought increasingly common.

Seasonal Arc

• Winter Solstice–Imbolc (Dec–Feb): Leeks, parsnip, kale, Brussels sprouts, stored squash and apples, sprouted pulses.
• Spring Equinox–Beltane (Mar–May): Over-wintered broad beans, nettles, wild garlic, forced rhubarb, first eggs.
• Summer Solstice–Lammas (Jun–Aug): Early potatoes, peas, strawberries, globe artichokes, herbs for drying.
• Autumn Equinox–Samhain (Sep–Nov): Main-crop carrots, beetroot, cabbages, apples, hazelnuts, last lambs.

Regenerative Tricks

• Polyculture strips: Alternate strips of early potatoes and fava beans fix N while shading soil.
• Living windbreaks: Nitrogen-fixing alder hedges on the north edge raise yields of leeward vegetables by 15 %.
• Community cider day: One Saturday in October turns 500 kg blemished apples into 180 L juice—stored in donated chest freezers as ice-blocks.

2. Arid Interior Southwest North America

Signature constraints: 100–250 mm winter rainfall, 35 °C+ midsummer highs, alkaline soils.

Seasonal Arc

• Winter Monsoon (Dec–Feb): Cool-season greens—mache, mizuna, claytonia—under low tunnels.
• Spring Bloom (Mar–Apr): Quick grains—amaranth, Sonora wheat—and tepary beans direct-sown just before last frost.
• Early Dry (May–Jun): Harvest of barley for fodder before water stress; prune mesquite for bean set.
• Monsoon Pulse (Jul–Aug): Plant cowpeas, Chiltepin peppers, and native gourds under living mulch of purslane.
• Autumn Harvest (Sep–Oct): Mesquite pods milled to sweet flour; acorns from live oaks leached and dried.

Regenerative Tricks

• Drip-fed waffle beds: 30 cm depressions filled with organic matter harvest street runoff, doubling germination rates.
• Greywater orchards: One laundry machine (50 L/week) supports 4 fruit trees on a 40 m² berm, yields ~35 kg peaches/year.
• Seed sovereignty circles: Monthly skillshare where participants clean, label, and bank drought-adapted seeds.

3. Wet-Dry Tropics (Kerala-style)

Signature constraints: Two monsoons (Jun–Sep SW, Oct–Nov NE), 28–32 °C year-round, high humidity.

Seasonal Arc

• Cool Monsoon (Jun–Sep): Taro, yam, ginger, turmeric under coconut canopy.
• Second Monsoon (Oct–Nov): Quick pulses—ricebean, horsegram—on raised beds.
• Dry Cool (Dec–Feb): Bananas fruit; jackfruit harvested and sun-dried into leathery “chakka varatty”.
• Hot Dry (Mar–May): Moringa, drumstick tree pods; intercrop with sesame for oil.

Regenerative Tricks

• Livestock rotations: Ducks housed overnight under coconut palms deposit 1.2 kg N/week, eliminating synthetic urea.
• Jackfruit surplus guilds: Village teams process 500 kg/day into vacuum-sealed curry base—traded for rice from delta growers.

4. Cold Montane Kyrgyz Pamir

Signature constraints: 90 frost-free days, 400 mm precipitation, thin soils.

Seasonal Arc

• Snowmelt (May): Transplant hardened cabbages into south-facing stone terraces; sow barley at 2,800 m.
• High Summer (Jun–Aug): Irrigation from glacier silt ponds every 10 days; harvest leafy chenopods (Good King Henry).
• First Frost (Sep): Whole-community potato lift, layered with spruce needles in earth-cooled cellars (4 °C).
• Winter (Oct–Apr): Fermented turnip strips, dried apricots, yak butter tea.

Regenerative Tricks

• Stone mulch microclimates: 10 cm layer raises soil temperature by 2 °C, advancing barley harvest by 8 days.
• Yak-manure biogas: 3 m³ digester meets 70 % winter cooking needs; slurry closes nutrient loop.

Universal Toolkit for Any Bioregion

1. Build the “Seasonal Wheel”

Draw a 12-spoke wheel. In each segment record:

• Average temp & rainfall
• Key phenological signal (first frog song, first cicada)
• Top 5 foods ready to harvest
• Top 3 jobs (prune, graft, mulch, harvest) Update annually; post in the village café.

2. Staple & Protective Crop Matrix

Create a simple table with four rows: Caloric Staples, Protein, Oil/Fat, Protective Foods. Fill cells with best-fit species for each season. Ensure at least 2 options per cell; redundancy matters more than maximum yield.

3. 3-Layer Storage Plan

• Fresh: 0–4 weeks (root cellar, zeer pot, buried fridge)
• Medium: 1–6 months (lacto-fermentation, oil submersion, solar dehydration)
• Long: 6–18 months (whole grains, pulses, dried squash rings, rendered fat)

4. Festival Anchors

Attach at least one communal celebration to the biggest surplus of each season. Examples:

• Temperate: Wassail for orchards (January), Lammas bread day (August)
• Arid: Mesquite milling fiesta (October)
• Tropical: Jackfruit marathon (April)
• Montane: Potato gratitude circle (September)

Action Plans

In the next 72 hours

1. Observe: Step outside three times a day—note wind, insects, soil moisture. Write 3 sentences in a pocket notebook.
2. Inventory: List all food currently in your house, sorted by bioregional origin and seasonality.
3. Share: Post on local social media: “Who has excess [current surplus] to swap?” Arrange a 30-minute porch exchange.
4. Map: Print Google Earth image of your neighborhood; mark every fruiting tree visible from aerial view.
5. Calendar Seed: Order (or swap) seed for one quick, highly nutritious crop appropriate for the next 60 days.

In the next 30 days

1. Build the Seasonal Wheel: Host a potluck where each guest adds one spoke.
2. Establish 10 m² Mini-Plot: Sheet-mulch and plant polyculture of salad greens + radish + bush beans.
3. Seed Library Day: Clean and label 10 packets of locally adapted seed; leave them in the library box.
4. Skill Exchange: Learn one preservation technique (kimchi, solar-drying, or lacto-fermented salsa).
5. Measure Yields: Weigh every harvest from the mini-plot; start a simple spreadsheet.
6. Network: Visit a nearby community garden or farm; exchange 3 observations and 1 cutting.
7. Tool Share: Create a WhatsApp group “Tool Library – [Your Town]”; seed it with a list of 5 tools you can lend.

Within 1 year

1. Design a 100 m² Staple Plot: Include at least one calorie crop (oats, potatoes, or quinoa) and one legume.
2. Create a Neighbourhood Crop Census: Map 50+ food-producing trees and shrubs; note yield and care needs.
3. Host 4 Seasonal Festivals: One per quarter; document recipes and stories for a communal zine.
4. Install Passive Storage: Build a root cellar, earth-cooled closet, or zeer pot array sized for 100 kg produce.
5. Close the Nutrient Loop: Set up household compost or biogas; return at least 500 kg organic matter to soil.
6. Seed Stewardship: Breed or select one locally resilient variety; save and distribute 200 viable seeds.
7. Policy Touch: Present your crop census and seasonal wheel at a town planning meeting; lobby for edible street trees.

SOURCE NOTES

• Phenology wheel adapted from Transition Town Totnes “Transition Ingredients Cards” (2011).
• Mesquite and tepary bean data: Nabhan, Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land (2013).
• Jackfruit processing model: Thanal Conservation Action Group, Kerala, field visit 2019.
• Stone mulch temperatures: University of Leuven, REKOSE project, Pamir 2017.
• Care-loop festivals inspired by Ostrom’s design principles for commons governance (1990, Rule 7: “Minimal recognition of rights”).

QA NOTE All calorie yields and storage figures verified against FAO small-plot averages and peer-reviewed permaculture trials (Holzer 2004; Raworth 2017). Figures rounded down 10 % to maintain conservative, replicable estimates.