Growing Calories: The Forgotten Art of Feeding Ourselves

What if your garden could actually feed you?

In this episode, we explore:
 🥔 High-calorie survival crops
 🌽 Small-space food production
 🫘 Beans, potatoes, corn & resilient staples
 🌎 Ancient growing methods from around the world
 🌱 Soil, water & climate resilience

Because real food security starts closer to home than most people realize.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

There was a time when survival was measured differently. Not by money in a bank account, not by subscriptions or convenience, but by what could be stored in a root cellar, what could survive winter, what could fill a stomach when times became uncertain. People understood calories in a deeply practical way, not as numbers on packaging, but as life itself. A sack of potatoes meant security, beans drying in the fire meant resilience. A patch of corn meant the difference between scarcity and stability. Today, many gardens are built for beauty, some for hobby, some for fresh flowers. But fewer people are taught how to grow food that truly sustains. Food that stores well. Food that nourishes deeply. Food that can feed a household through uncertain seasons. Today we're talking about growing calories, the practical ancestral art of cultivating real sustenance in small spaces, clim difficult climates, and changing times. Welcome, witches, pagans, heathens, spiritualists, and anyone interested in living sustainably.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

This is Old Ways, New Days, where the old ways meet the good dirt. I'm Kayla, and I'm Nell. And each week we explore the sacred art of living close to the land. From compost to covens, chickens to charms, we're reclaiming self-sufficiency, seasonal living, and ancestral wisdom.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Whether you're stirring your cauldron or your soup pot, this is a space for wild-hearted folk walking the homesteading path with intention, magic, and muddy boots. Today is going to be a solo podcast as Nell is still in the throes of moving and was not able to get any time to join me today. So we'll do a check-in with her hopefully next time. I'm just recording the one episode and I want to apologize for missing last week. It was a whirlwind for me coming back from New Jersey. So now that I'm back home and I'm settled and work has righted itself, I'm ready to get into our topic today. So I know with everything that's going on in the world, it can seem a little daunting and a little scary sometimes with not knowing, you know, gas prices are increasing dramatically in some places. But I want you, my listeners, to um get an idea of what you can grow that will keep the calories coming when the grocery stores don't have anything. So we're gonna talk about what it means to grow calories. A lot of modern gardening focuses on herbs, salad greens, decorative crops, and small seasonal harvests. And while there's nothing wrong with that, uh calorie gardening is different. It asks a more fundamental question. What food actually sustains human life? Because while lettuce is healthy, you cannot survive on lettuce. Calorie crops are foods that provide energy, carbohydrates, protein, fat, and have long-term storage potential. Historically, nearly every survival-based agricultural society relied on a handful of stable crops potatoes, corn, beans, rice, squash, sweet potatoes, grains. These foods formed the backbone of civilizations. So let's talk about some of the most practical foods for modern homesetters and small space growers. Potatoes. They are the king of survival crops. Potatoes are one of the highest calorie crops you can grow in relatively small spaces. Why they matter? They're extremely calorie dense, they are adaptable to many climates, they store for months when cured properly, and grow vertically in containers or bags. Some tips: use grow bags, buckets, or towers for urban spaces. Hill or soil around stems as they grow will increase your yield. So if you're using a bucket, start with maybe only six inches of dirt. Put your little seedlings, your potato eyes in there, and then as they grow stems, you add more dirt, and this will give you a much larger yield. And of course, save your healthiest potatoes for next year's seed stock. The global relevance of this is that potatoes grow successively in cold climates, temperate regions, high altitude environments. This is why they became a foundational crop across the world. There is something deeply powerful about growing your own medicine. Not the kind that comes in a plastic bottle from a pharmacy shelf, but the kind that begins with soil under your fingernails, sunlight on green leaves, and the quiet patience of the seasons. For thousands of years, people all over the world turned to plants first. Long before modern pharmaceuticals, families kept small plots of healing herbs close to the kitchen door. Plants for fever, for cough, for sleep, for calming the nerves after a long day's work. Those gardens weren't just practical, they were sacred. Medicinal garden is one of the simplest ways to reconnect with that tradition, even if you only have a patio, a balcony, or a few containers in a sunny window. That's why we have partnered with a medicinal growing kit that's perfect for beginners and seasoned plant lovers alike. This kit comes with carefully selected seeds for classic healing herbs like chamomile for calming teas, calendula for skin healing, lemon balm for stress and sleep, peppermint for digestion, lavender for relaxation. What we like about this starter kit is that it removes the overwhelm. You're not standing in a garden center staring at hundreds of seed packets, wondering where to begin. Instead, you start with the plants that have been traditionally used in herbalism for generations. With your seed kit, you'll also receive a copy of the Herbal Medicinal Guide from Seeds to Remedies. This guide will show you how to turn these 10 plants into tinctures, ointments, salves, poulces, decoctions, infusions, essential oils. All in minute detail so you can follow the guide even if you've never made an herbal medicine in your life. And if you're someone who practices earth-based spirituality, herbal magic, or simply wants to reconnect with older ways of caring for yourself and your family, growing medicinal herbs can become part of your seasonal rituals. Planting seeds becomes intention, harvesting becomes gratitude, and every cup of tea carries a story from the soil to your hands. If you're interested in starting your own medicinal herb garden, check out the affiliate link in the show notes. Supporting the link also helps support the podcast and keeps episodes like this growing, because sometimes the most powerful medicine is the kind you grow yourself. Corn is an ancient stable and it is a modern resource. Corn is more than a summer vegetable. Historically, it was ground into flour, dried for storage, fed to livestock, used for fuel and trade. When growing corn, some easy tips would be to plant in blocks, not rows, for pollination. Choose dent corn or flower corn for calorie production. Interplant beans and squash using the Three Sisters method. Corn is important as it is nutrient demanding. Healthy soil and compost are essential to grow a healthy crop of corn. Beans are a protein security. Beans are one of the most important crops for resilience. They provide protein, fiber, the fixed nitrogen in the soil, which improves it over long term, and they store almost indefinitely in dry storage. The best options are dry beans, runner beans, cowpeas in hot climates. Some tips would be to let the pods fully dry before storage, store in airtight containers, grow vertically to maximize small space. Beans are one of the easiest to global crops to adapt across climates. Sweet potatoes, especially valuable in warmer climates. Some advantages is that they are calorie dense, they are nutrient-rich, drought tolerant, and the leaves are edible too. Some tricks would be to grow your sweet potato slips from grocery store sweet potatoes. Use containers if land is limited. Excellent for poor soils compared to regular potatoes. Now I did attempt last year to grow sweet potatoes, and while the sweet potato vine was absolutely massive, and I completely forgot what was there, I unfortunately did not get any sweet potatoes. So and I used grocery store potatoes, sweet potatoes. I would not recommend that as whether or not you have a good success would depend on how old they are. Were they grown specifically to be sterile? Which means that they won't produce more potatoes if you try growing them, which I think is what I ended up with. I think I ended up with sterile sweet potatoes, which while they were lovely and tasted phenomenal, they did not produce anything for me in the long run. So uh growing in small spaces, one of the biggest myths is that you need land. You don't. You need strategy. Use vertical growing, trellises, fences, hanging systems. This works especially well for beans, cucumbers, malabar, spinach, small squash varieties. Container calorie gardening is best for potatoes, sweet potatoes, bush beans, dwarf corn, and juice Jerusalem artichokes. Use fabric grow bags for better drainage and root development. They allow air to pass through the root systems a lot better, which will help you avoid root grot. For balconies and rooftop growing, even small urban areas can produce meaningful food. You want to focus on high calorie crops first, multi-purpose plants, and dense planting systems. Thanks, survival utility over aesthetics. And when we mean dense planting, you don't need to plant in rows. You can plant things a lot closer together than you think. Everything doesn't need to be spaced six to eight inches or twelve inches, depending on what your seed packet says. You can space things a lot closer and fit a lot more into your garden. The healthiest gardens, of course, begin underground without living soil. Your yields decrease, your plants weaken, and water retention suffers. You want to build soil essentials, so compost, mulch, worm castings, leaf mold, and biochar, which would be ash from a fire pit. Globally, every sustainable agricultural tradition prioritized soil first. Healthy civilizations were built on healthy ground. So with our water being stolen by AI plant processing plants and causing further climate issues potentially, the climate instability changes how you garden. There's longer droughts, sudden storms, unpredictable temperatures, and resilient gardens prepare for variability. So some water saving tricks. Mulch heavily. Mulch reduces evaporation and keeps the soil moist longer in between rain or water your ability to water. Use olas. An ola is an unglazed clay pot which is buried in soils which slowly releases water over time. These have historically been used in Africa, China, and Latin America. And of course, if it is acceptable in your area, harvest rain water. Even a small barrel system can make a world of difference when you are suddenly faced with a drought. And finally, when you do bring in all of your food at the end of the season, you want to preserve what matters most. So growing food is only half of that equation, storing it is what creates resilience. Historically, drying, fermentation, root cellaring, canning, and smoking allowed communities to survive winter and scarcity. For beginner preservation methods, the easiest is drying herbs and beans, freezing vegetables, and fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut or kimchi. Advanced would be pressure canning, root cellaring, and grain storage systems. Food insecurity affects more than hunger. It affects anxiety, decision making, nervous system regulation, and community stability. Growing even a portion of your food creates something powerful. It creates agency. You begin to feel less hopeless, more connected, more capable. Not because you can control everything, but because you are participating in your own survival. Some of the best resilience practices already exist across the world. Africa, which is a drought adapted farming systems and water harvesting. Indigenous Americas, the Three Sisters planting method, corn, beans, squash, each supports the others and provides a mulch of sorts with the squash leaves shading the soil from hot sun. In Asia, intensive small space growing and rice terrace systems. Eastern Europe, root cellar traditions, and fermentation. In the Middle East and North America, dry climate gardening and clay irrigation systems. Modern resilience often means remembering older knowledge. Growing calories is not about fear. It is about remembering. Remembering how humans survived before convenience, how communities sustained themselves, how food once connected people directly to the seasons and the land. Every potato planted, every bean dried, every jar stored away. It's an act of resilience. Not panic, not collapse thinking, but participation. A quiet declaration that even in uncertain times life can still be cultivated. One seed at a time. This has been Old Ways New Days. I am Kayla. Nell will hopefully be back with me next time. So please keep listening. And we'll see you, I guess. No, here. Um we'll be back next time, and please please tune in.