 Today we're talking about the permaculture roots and tubers guild that I've been brainstorming but it's time to finally put it into action. People are probably going to think I'm crazy but if you follow me to the end I think I can talk you through the process on how I designed this particular polyculture plus give you a roadmap for designing your own experimental polycultures. Welcome back permanots if you haven't already do me a huge favor and hit that shiny red subscribe button down below. It really helps a small channel like mine to smash our robot overlords. Remember when I used to give you jokes for free? Well forget it. Plus it entitles you to more permaculture experiments like the ones we're doing today. This is Achira an ancient Andean crop which predates the Inca and which I first learned about in Eric Tonesmeyer's Perennial Vegetables where he dedicated almost two pages to this one crop. They are primarily grown for these large fleshy rhizomes which can be consumed just like a potato or they're also milled for starch which just happens to be the most popular starch in Vietnam for making cellophane noodles. In my climate the yield is supposed to be about 10 pounds per plant but in ideal conditions yields of up to 60 pounds have been recorded. They're primarily eaten for these rhizomes but young shoots can also be eaten and the large leaves are sometimes used as an alternative to wrap tamales. This map shows where in the U.S. that Achira can be grown with the pink areas indicating where it can be overwintered in the ground and the yellow areas indicating where it needs to be dug and brought indoors for the winter. In addition to perennial vegetables you can also read up about Achira and lost crops of the Incas which is available as a free pdf download from the National Academies of Science or you can also read about it in the Cultivariable Growing Guide which is also available for free. Links to those resources are in the description. The next crop in our polyculture is runner beans which some people might already know produces an edible tuber. In North America it's commonly grown as an ornamental for its brilliant displays of primarily red but sometimes orange, peach, pink, or white flowers. In the U.K. it is the preferred species to grow for green beans. Given a long enough season they'll even produce an abundant crop of massive dry beans in an assortment of beautiful colors. And that tuber well it's said to taste like taro root which will give those of us in the north a little taste of the tropics while we're at it. Considered a mere weed in its native Florida and the surrounding southwest states to which it spread. The final plant in our polyculture Florida Betany. Florida Betany is a creeping ground cover in the mint family and you might actually be more familiar with its more famous cousin the Chinese artichoke aka Crohn. Crohn's can fetch up to $150 per pound on the gourmet food scene but Florida Betany it's basically unknown outside of foragers in its native range but it should be. Florida Betany is a much heavier producer and unlike the one to two inch tubers that you get with Crohn's Florida Betany can get up to 12 inches. That seems much more worthwhile in my book. Now let's break down how I design this polyculture starting with why it might not work. Most people recommend against planting root tuber and rhizome crops in the same area because they can compete for the same space in the soil as well as potassium and the other nutrients that they need to form a large root crop. Charles Dowding promotes the multi-sewing technique wherein multiple root crops are planted in the same space and Paul Gauchy recommends against thinning root crops. In both cases the argument is that the softening soil under no-till management allows root crops to push each other out of the way rather than competing for the same space. Now let's talk about why I think this polyculture will work starting with the less controversial bit the stuff that's above ground. When we're brainstorming new polycultures we're thinking in terms of form and function. When we're ranging plants in space we're often thinking in layers just like many of us have been taught to think about tree-based systems. You're going to have your tall canopy species often with vining plants climbing up them and below that you might have some shorter plants and even shorter than that we'll have some creeping ground covered. This overarching design can be applied to long-lived perennial systems like those involving trees but it can just as easily be applied to short-lived annuals like we see in the Three Sisters planting method. The principles are the same the difference is in the scale. In this case Achira is our canopy species reaching heights of 6 to 10 feet. Our runner beans need something to climb in order to be their most productive and that's them coming out of the ground right here but if we plant them on the same spacing as our Achira they'll scramble along the ground until they get here and then they'll do their climbing. That leaves Florida Betany as our ground cover to fill in these spaces in between the plants. That covers form but it also starts to touch on function. Florida Betany shades the ground and prevents weeds from moving in. The Achira acts as a living trellis that increases the productivity of the beans and the beans themselves fix nitrogen so that it's increasing the fertility for the whole system. Before we get into what's going on underground let's talk about why roots and tubers can be such a problem in a young food forest but why I think they're such an important part of our overall food production strategy. Peans and corns can produce about a quarter pound per plant. Some varieties of amaranth can even produce a pound or more per plant but potatoes the gold standard they're expected to produce two to three pounds even for a novice grower and can get up to 10 pounds if you know what you're doing. I did a lot of research on annual crops when I was building my annual staple crop calculator and the one thing that kept blowing everything else away were root and tuber crops. They're some of the few things that can produce a multi-pound yield in a single year. Other tuber crops like mashua can produce up to 15 pounds. I have an oka that's supposed to grow four pounds per plant and sun chokes one of the reliable standards in permaculture systems. Minimum yield is three pounds on those but if you provide ideal conditions they can produce eight, ten, thirteen pounds or more. Our Achira here can produce 10 pounds on up to 60 pounds in the right conditions. What fruit tree in a temperate climate is producing 10 pounds of fruit in its first year? None that I know of. And trying to mix roots and tubers with our young fruit trees is a serious problem. If I tried to put roots and tubers with this tiny little fig tree when I went to dig the roots and tubers I would absolutely destroy the root system of that tree. That's why I wanted to develop a polyculture of roots and tubers. I wanted to be able to include these plants on the edges of my forest garden where they make sense. Where there's an entire grouping of plants that are all dug and not only that but dug at the same time so that digging them doesn't disturb the roots of other plants. Permaculture doesn't mean that we have to exclude certain plants from our systems. It just means we have to design around how those plants need to be managed. Now let's take a look at what's going on underground. You can see this outline here. That's the Achira roots. They tend to grow near the surface so that they can send up these shoots as it progresses through the season. Runner beans take a slightly different approach. They're a little bit deeper and they tend to be a lot more vertical and a lot less horizontal. Florida Betany takes a different strategy altogether. Setting tubers deeper and making them long and skinny so they can zig and zag around other things that are in the ground. That's a hypothesis at any rate. Now we just have to test it out. The other reason it's so great to group these three plants together is because they all require a fair amount of water and fertility to produce their best crops. Why create three separate areas of the garden that all need to be managed in effectively the same way? Instead we can treat this like people in the tropics treat banana circles. This is one area where all of my extra water and all of my extra fertility will get dumped so that it can benefit these plants. The only real hard limit on planting density is the amount of light that it gets. Everything else from the water to the fertility is something that we can manage if we have the ability to add extra water and fertility in one spot. It increases our ability to really pack things in. In areas with warm enough climates, you can store these plants in the ground until you're ready to consume them. In fact, that's probably the best way. If you're in a colder climate and that map that I showed earlier can help you figure out if that applies to you, you'll need to dig these up in the fall when the tops die back and bring them in for the winter. When you're all done with the harvest, just simply leave the tops on the ground as a mulch to help protect the soil from erosive winter precipitation. Because my goal is to grow 100% of my own food, I do want to touch on the yields, but I don't want to bore you with all the numbers. If you're really curious, I'll create a post on my journal over at Permies and put all the numbers there. Suffice it to say, I expect this little plot to produce 10 to 15% of my total annual calorie needs. That's not too bad considering the amount of space it takes up and the minimal amount of work that it will take to maintain it. And if you're looking for other ways to grow food with minimal maintenance, check out this video on growing everything on contour. It's a great way to increase soil retention, increase water harvesting, and maximize food production with a minimal amount of labor. And when I dig this bed in the fall, you can bet that I'm going to include yield numbers. A link to that video will be right here when it happens. If that video hasn't happened yet, then click the subscribe button right down here so that you can be notified when that video goes live. So let's do it. Let's click on some stuff and continue our permaculture experimentation together.