Crops in a self sufficient coastal town

IanMorrison · Nov 21, 2008

My fantasy story has a town that is built within a fjord, in a valley. My problem is that I need these guys to be totally self sufficient within the space given to them, but I don't know what crops they could grow or how many people could be supported for every square km of land (which will end up informing me as to how large their dwellings/other industries are). There are a few caveats to this:

This setting does involve magic that is fairly ubiquitous, so crop yields/disease resistance can be tweaked if need be. As far as their technological sophistication goes, they're working with little infrastructure but otherwise industrial level knowledge of argriculture. Between that and their magic, lets say they're roughly as productive as modern farmers.
The southern end of the valley has access to the water and fish stocks
The inhabitants keep a herd of bipedal oxen-like creatures for food, leather, and draft animals.
Very substantial rainfall, mild temperature variation. Winters have tons of snowfall but don't get too cold. I'm using the coastal climate and geography of British Columbia as my guide here.
The town is basically divided into three sections: the southern hub which has most of the trade, dwellings, and industry, a middle section used for agriculture and lifestock, and a heavily fortified northern section. All three sections make heavy use of mountainside terraces to gain additional space
There's a river running down the center of the town
The inhabitants are NOT able to spread outside the town boundaries due to environmental hazards. They've got something along the lines of 40-60 square km of space to work with, and that has to feed several thousand people at least, since for most of these people there is absolutely nowhere else to go.

Sorry about throwing out such a comprehensive list, I'm kinda bad about that.

Anyhow, what kind of crops would work well in this setting and climate, and how many people could I expect to feed? Given the cramped situation, what other measures could be taken to ensure a stable food supply for the population? Also, would any of these requirements need to be relaxed somewhat?

Thanks!

Beach Bunny · Nov 22, 2008

Since, the climate is similar to British Columbia, I googled British Columbia crops and came up with two very good sites with lots of good information on them which may help answer your questions.

http://www.pickyourown.org/CABCharvestcalendar.htm

http://www.gov.bc.ca/al/

Also, since you are setting this town on the coast, you also have seafood and vegetation (seaweed) as food crops.

Keyan · Nov 22, 2008

I assume the tech is not very high, since high tech and self-sufficiency don't go together, especially with a small population.

Rice is one possibility as a staple. It's commonly grown on terraces. I think you could make a convincing case for rice, fish and seaweed as the basic diet, with fruit in season, vegetables of various sorts in summer (and some way of preserving them - salt is the easiest - for the winter months). Oh, and beans. They're a very convenient protein source, especially if you have the kind that can be dried and stored for months, even years. I'm thinking of a Japan-like situation.

In such a limited space, meat would have to be a special occasion thing, but if you had migratory birds coming through, hunting those would be a possibility. Maybe chickens that can forage for themselves in summer. Pigs, which are good for recycling pretty much anything food-like.

Fenika · Nov 22, 2008

General advice:

You need grain for the people, and grain for the animals, be they beasts of burden or production (meat) animals. And of course, it's common to give the critters the bits that aren't fit for people (moldy grain) which is all well and good until the animals have a mass die off

Veggies for the humans are good. Nuts and fruit a bonus. Wastes will likely be dumped in the ocean (or end up there after every rain) which in extreme cases can kill off some of the good species and let others overbloom.

If you're really serious, i recommend reading a good bit of ecology to understand more big picture stuff. Anthropology too. They love closed communities. (Though that's a rare, rare thing)

waylander · Nov 22, 2008

Don't forget seabirds and their eggs (when in season) as a food source.
The inhabitants of many Scottish islands used them as a major source of food, and still do on the isle of Lewis

Mumut · Nov 22, 2008

Different kinds of fungus can grow on the sides of trees, in the cellar or many places otherwise waste. Been sprouts can be easily grown inside houses, in window boxes. Certain trees can produce edible grubs. Honey can be used for energy or beer (as in Ancient Egypt). Your beasts can produce milk thus cheese, butter, yoghurt etc., are available.

HeronW · Nov 22, 2008

If the loch is freshwater, would hydroponics be a possible alternative? Higher yield, shelves expand the usable space, cuts down on parasites and thieving animals, easier to harvest & lower maintenance.

Smiling Ted · Nov 22, 2008

You'd want to grow legumes - peas, chickpeas, beans, etc. - to replenish the soil. (Legumes fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil, replenishing its fertility.) The biggest nutritional benefit of beans is when they're eaten in conjunction with grains like rice - together, they provide the essential amino acids a human would ordinarily derive from meat, and can substitute for meat proteins in a diet. It's no coincidence that many agrarian societies feature rice-and-bean dishes as a staple (Mexico, India, etc.)

Some grains - like quinoa and amaranth - are supposed to contain all the amino acids you'd get from both beans and grains, but I can't confirm this.

As for how much acreage can sustain how many humans, why not try the Department of Agriculture website?

MissKris · Nov 22, 2008

All manner of greens - spinach, kale, etc. can grow in cramped space and cool weather and are high in nutrients. Beets are another good one, because all parts of the plant are edible thereby making use of above and below ground space.

Kiwi vines can grow against the walls of your terraces and are high in Vit. C, B6, Omega-3s, and fiber.

Of course, your folk should be harvesting food from your water resources, so seafood and sea vegetables.

One thing to consider is whether or not your town is bordered by saltwater and what the wind conditions are like. Saltwater winds will kill many kinds of plants, especially edibles. You might want to consider some kind of protection, if needed.

Chase · Nov 22, 2008

By definition, a fjord is a narrow, steep-sided valley flooded by a saltwater sea or ocean.

However, the town may still have a river run through it (I think I'll copyright that phrase) from a waterfall or from a fresh-water spring at the base of the mountain.

Such a spring-fed river is possible. Just outside Great Falls, Montana, is the world's shortest river. The Roe River flows out of Giant Springs and travels less than a dozen feet to empty into the Missouri.

Several crops listed above may be watered by the river you envision.

Mumut · Nov 22, 2008

HeronW said:
If the loch is freshwater, would hydroponics be a possible alternative?

And the tubes could be above other structures, say on public buildings, over roads etc where the space is usually not used.

IanMorrison · Nov 22, 2008

@Beach Bunny
That first link will prove pretty handy. Thanks!

@Keyan
You're right, the tech level is not very high here, though technical knowledge might still be fairly substantial. The scenario is modernish world that got the stuffing kicked out of it about 600 years prior, with a pretty nasty blight spreading over the entire world. Going into the blight unprotected is basically fatal within a minute. The few livable places are dependant on the local geography and flora shielding it from the blight, so most of these safe havens weren't cities before the catastophe. That means that, while they might have books and such explaining modern farming practises (it's flexible, since it's up in the air exactly how much knowledge was lost when 99.99% of the world population disappeared), they were knocked back to the pre-industrial age infrastructure wise. Also, since the havens are pretty detached, self sufficiency is a must.

Alright, from what I've gotten here, Rice is a pretty good choice for a primary cereal, with a crop rotation between that and some variety of legumes to keep the soil fertile. This'd be supplemented by fish and seaweed from the Fjord, dairy and meat products from the animals, as well as vegetables grown on a small scale depending on individual initiative. The latter would give additional activity to the town market.

A couple questions here: first off, I recall that rice is grown in flooded fields, so how do you then use it for another crop? Do you have to drain it first? Also, would there be any interesting/prominent visual elements here that I should take careful note of? I'll be telling my story in graphic novel form, so visual details are fairly important.

Now, as to yields; I just did some digging at the US Department of Agriculture website. In the areas that do any appreciable harvesting of rice, yields are in the range of 6000-8000 pounds per acre (this is presumably for each year), so lets say around 1.5 million pounds per year per square kilometer dedicated to farming. In places where rice is a staple food, yearly consumption is about 300-500 (for Burma) per person. Since they'll have access to other food sources as well, lets use the smaller figure there. That means that a single square kilometer of rice will feed about 5000 people for a year... to account for technological handicaps, environmental hazards, and maybe the occasional raid, lets cut that down to, say, 3000 on average.

...that leaves me quite a bit more space than I'd have thought I'd have. It'll also mean that a large number of people will be working on the plantations, since Rice is really labour intensive.

If I put the standard squared meters of living space per person at about 20-25 (which seems reasonable), I could theoretically pack 40000 people per square kilometer. Practically, that'll need to go down some for infrastructure, common spaces, and workplaces... lets say 5000-10000 people per square kilometer. Again, much, much larger than I'd thought it'd be. It implies a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of farmland to residences, which seems about fair, even if the numbers are flipping huge.

This leads me to a few more questions. For starters, how much fertilizer is going to be required for the rice fields? That'll have a fair bearing on how many animals will be kept in the herd (and therefore, how much land is around for ranching). Also, are the numbers I'm throwing around for rice yields and population density believable? If so, I might have to bring them down somehow or reduce the available land, since I did not intend this town to be quite so large.

A central feature of the plot is that the haven needs to send out what amounts to a salvage party using what little resources they have as a matter of survival, and that they send roughly four people at a time (my protagonists) due to cost constraints. However, it seems to me that a semi-urbanized population center with a population in the tens of thousands would be very much capable of sending more than a measily four individuals at once, even if outfitting them for long term exposure to the blight and its inhabitants would be an expensive proposition. Something here needs to change, or I need to find a justification for keeping an expeditionary party crucial to the town's survival so pitifully small. Probably the simpler solution would be just to increase the size of the group, or have multiple such groups sent out at the same time...

Pardon my rambling. You guys are awesome, thanks for all the help you've offered me so far! You've given me a lot of ideas to work from.

Keyan · Nov 23, 2008

I'm taking a stab at it.

IanMorrison said:
@Beach Bunny
That first link will prove pretty handy. Thanks!

@Keyan
You're right, the tech level is not very high here, though technical knowledge might still be fairly substantial. The scenario is modernish world that got the stuffing kicked out of it about 600 years prior, with a pretty nasty blight spreading over the entire world. Going into the blight unprotected is basically fatal within a minute. The few livable places are dependant on the local geography and flora shielding it from the blight, so most of these safe havens weren't cities before the catastophe. That means that, while they might have books and such explaining modern farming practises (it's flexible, since it's up in the air exactly how much knowledge was lost when 99.99% of the world population disappeared), they were knocked back to the pre-industrial age infrastructure wise.

Modern farming techniques are pretty useless in that situation. They wouldn't have any of the inputs: Chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and mechanical sowing and harvesting. What would be much more useful are descriptions of subsistence farming.

Also, since the havens are pretty detached, self sufficiency is a must.

Alright, from what I've gotten here, Rice is a pretty good choice for a primary cereal, with a crop rotation between that and some variety of legumes to keep the soil fertile. This'd be supplemented by fish and seaweed from the Fjord, dairy and meat products from the animals, as well as vegetables grown on a small scale depending on individual initiative. The latter would give additional activity to the town market.

A couple questions here: first off, I recall that rice is grown in flooded fields, so how do you then use it for another crop? Do you have to drain it first? Also, would there be any interesting/prominent visual elements here that I should take careful note of? I'll be telling my story in graphic novel form, so visual details are fairly important.

Rice is only flooded at certain stages of its growth, and the field would be drained in the normal course. Young rice is a very vivid green - almost neon bright. The look of growing rice is very geometric, with the verticals of the rice and the horizontal rows and the square fields. Try googling some images from Baguio in the Philippines.

Now, as to yields; I just did some digging at the US Department of Agriculture website. In the areas that do any appreciable harvesting of rice, yields are in the range of 6000-8000 pounds per acre (this is presumably for each year), so lets say around 1.5 million pounds per year per square kilometer dedicated to farming.

I think that's assuming modern farming techniques, with high-yield crops and huge farms. I think low-tech agriculture would have much lower yields.
<Googling Bangladesh "local" yields and converting hectares to kilometers and tonnes to lbs> I think you would get around 320,000 pounds per year per square km. It could be at a max double that if you need it for yr story.

In places where rice is a staple food, yearly consumption is about 300-500 (for Burma) per person. Since they'll have access to other food sources as well, lets use the smaller figure there. That means that a single square kilometer of rice will feed about 5000 people for a year... to account for technological handicaps, environmental hazards, and maybe the occasional raid, lets cut that down to, say, 3000 on average.

Even where rice is a staple, people eat other things as well. Unless you add in another starchy crop (e.g. potatoes, which may be possible), the number is probably about right. I think you're looking to support 1-2K people per sq Km and do allow for climatic variations, pests, etc. Harvests in a subsistence world are extremely variable. (Little House on the Prairie illustrates.)

...that leaves me quite a bit more space than I'd have thought I'd have. It'll also mean that a large number of people will be working on the plantations, since Rice is really labour intensive.

If I put the standard squared meters of living space per person at about 20-25 (which seems reasonable), I could theoretically pack 40000 people per square kilometer. Practically, that'll need to go down some for infrastructure, common spaces, and workplaces... lets say 5000-10000 people per square kilometer. Again, much, much larger than I'd thought it'd be. It implies a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of farmland to residences, which seems about fair, even if the numbers are flipping huge.

I suppose. 5000/ sq km is considered high density currently. (Think Hong Kong.) In a low-tech world, I'm wondering how you'd achieve this. Just waste disposal would be a huge issue. Water supply would also be an issue, even with a river running through it. It could quickly become a sewer. Also, without modern antibiotics, water supply and sanitation, disease would be a consideration.

This leads me to a few more questions. For starters, how much fertilizer is going to be required for the rice fields? That'll have a fair bearing on how many animals will be kept in the herd (and therefore, how much land is around for ranching). Also, are the numbers I'm throwing around for rice yields and population density believable? If so, I might have to bring them down somehow or reduce the available land, since I did not intend this town to be quite so large.

I think a smaller town would make a lot more sense with these constraints. Does it *have* to maximize its population?

In Japan, human waste was used as fertiliser, and this solved the waste disposal problem also. It's a bit risky because of the disease transmission problem.

A central feature of the plot is that the haven needs to send out what amounts to a salvage party using what little resources they have as a matter of survival, and that they send roughly four people at a time (my protagonists) due to cost constraints. However, it seems to me that a semi-urbanized population center with a population in the tens of thousands would be very much capable of sending more than a measily four individuals at once, even if outfitting them for long term exposure to the blight and its inhabitants would be an expensive proposition. Something here needs to change, or I need to find a justification for keeping an expeditionary party crucial to the town's survival so pitifully small. Probably the simpler solution would be just to increase the size of the group, or have multiple such groups sent out at the same time...

If it's very high risk, and requires a lot of investment, it might make sense to keep the parties small to minimize probable losses. Analogy: space flight.

Pardon my rambling. You guys are awesome, thanks for all the help you've offered me so far! You've given me a lot of ideas to work from.

IanMorrison · Nov 23, 2008

And here I was, thinking I was using pessimistic estimates. >_>

Okay, that fixes quite a bit, then. Population density, then: what would be a more reasonable number? These people are going to end up being pretty tightly packed, especially in the poorer areas, since this place was flooded with refugees in the initial days after the catastrophe and had to find a way to support them in a hurry before disease, starvation, or ethnic infighting left too many corpses. What kind of waste management and water distribution systems might they have hooked up if they were being clever?

Izunya · Nov 23, 2008

IanMorrison said:
@Beach Bunny@Keyan
You're right, the tech level is not very high here, though technical knowledge might still be fairly substantial. The scenario is modernish world that got the stuffing kicked out of it about 600 years prior, with a pretty nasty blight spreading over the entire world. Going into the blight unprotected is basically fatal within a minute. The few livable places are dependant on the local geography and flora shielding it from the blight, so most of these safe havens weren't cities before the catastophe. That means that, while they might have books and such explaining modern farming practises (it's flexible, since it's up in the air exactly how much knowledge was lost when 99.99% of the world population disappeared), they were knocked back to the pre-industrial age infrastructure wise. Also, since the havens are pretty detached, self sufficiency is a must.

A minor thread derail, but is anyone else suddenly thinking of Nausicaa?

For those of you who don't know from anime, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds is a movie with exactly this sort of background. It is the one post-apocalyptic movie I know of where the deadly wasteland is absolutely gorgeous. Still deadly, but gorgeous.

Also, the salvage party dynamic would make an awesome RPG hook.

Izunya

Keyan · Nov 23, 2008

IanMorrison said:
And here I was, thinking I was using pessimistic estimates. >_>

Okay, that fixes quite a bit, then. Population density, then: what would be a more reasonable number? These people are going to end up being pretty tightly packed, especially in the poorer areas, since this place was flooded with refugees in the initial days after the catastrophe and had to find a way to support them in a hurry before disease, starvation, or ethnic infighting left too many corpses. What kind of waste management and water distribution systems might they have hooked up if they were being clever?

How soon after the catastrophe is the novel? Rice terraces take a long time to build manually. And is coping with the set-up the theme of the novel, or the background?

If you had thousands of people flooding into a hitherto uninhabited valley, with no social organization, and a motley collection of goods, things would be pretty ugly for a while. You'd have to think of quickly establishing social order, food (maybe fish and berries), shelter, property rights so people aren't fighting continuously.

If you're talking a hundred years later, things should have settled down.

Waste management is more important than water. In a relatively low-density setting (e.g. rural India) a field would be set aside for use as a toilet. There'd be a women's time and a men's time for its use. People wouldn't be overly concerned with privacy within their own gender. This works when the sun is strong enough to essentially sterilize the whole thing quite quickly. The fields are rotated - maybe the toilet field would be rotated to an animal-feed crop, and then to a human-food crop. This may not be really good in a steep valley because the wastes are likely to wash into the river.

In the west, the typical low-tech waste management is the outhouse - a hole dug some distance from the house, with a rough toilet seat built over it. When it gets too full or stinky, it's filled in and another one dug. This is actually a better solution for you. Think in terms of a person generating a couple of pounds of solid waste per day. Actually, maybe more. (You can calculate it based on food intake.)

Water could be fetched from the river if they have containers in which to fetch it. There may also be springs all over the valley, which may be publicly owned or private. If they have something to use as piping (bamboo would be good) then they could pipe water using gravity flow to outside people's homes. A plug device could act as a tap.

(Containers: Do they have metal-working at all? Or residual metal objects that are now very valuable? Otherwise, wood or clay, which would need to be fired. Or baskets caulked with clay.)

When you start to think about it, almost any type of urban dwelling as we recognize it requires connections to an external environment.

Wood would probably be a major resource - for building, boat construction, carving domestic objects. Bamboo would be handy, since it's very versatile and regenerates rapidly.

2Wheels · Nov 23, 2008

Check out these links:
http://www.rediscovermachupicchu.com/agricultural-terraces.htm
http://www.rediscovermachupicchu.com/moray.htm

North American indians maintained soil nutrients by growing the three staples together or in rotation: soy, corn and beans/and or squash.

FennelGiraffe · Nov 23, 2008

(I typed most of this a couple of hours ago, then got interrupted while proofreading. I see some other responses have come in meanwhile.)

Your setting has some similarity to a medieval economy, so you might find medieval demographics somewhat useful.

Everything your villagers do is going to be labor intensive. One reason so few can be spared to go exploring is that so many are needed for basic subsistence.

Root vegetables store well--google "root cellar"--to supplement winter diet.

Tree crops: fruits and nuts. Your valley has limited flat area, presumably surrounded by steep slopes, but manually-harvested orchards don't need to be on flat land.

If they had no advance warning of the big catastrophe, they didn't have a chance to stock up on seeds (or anything else) that would be useful. So they are limited to crops they were already growing, including personal vegetable gardens. Most of what was on hand, though, would have been commercially produced hybrids. Those usually don't breed true. When they save the seeds off that first crop for use in subsequent years, those wouldn't have produced the same varieties, so you can't expect modern crop yields. If you're really lucky, someone was into heirloom vegetables. On the other hand, in 600 years they will have been able to breed new strains of some of the native wild vegetation that has food crop potential.

What kind of medical resources do you have? Much of modern medicine is heavily dependent on infrastructure. Even if they retain the knowledge, they won't be able to produce all the drugs and equipment. This is important because it interacts with population density. Even if you solve the sewage problem, the higher the population density, the faster diseases spread, and the faster they mutate. With a limited choice of antibiotics, that means a higher death rate, which reduces total population.

I think you are significantly underestimating the amount of land you need to devote to non-residential uses. Don't forget industry. Six hundred years is a long time; what kinds of things wear out and need to be replaced?

What material are houses going to be built of? How many stories high will that material allow? That will limit the population density.

A lot of nutrients are lost in sewage. With such a small area, they are going to have to be very serious about recycling. A big first step is separate collection systems for urine and feces: see here, here, and here. They don't need the special toilets described in those articles; separate toilets will do, as long as the population is motivated enough to comply.

Also consider funeral practice. Just like sewage, dead bodies are caught between sanitary concerns and recycling of essential nutrients.

StephanieFox · Nov 23, 2008

Someone mentioned greens and I agree. The best thing about greens is that they are like grass. You cut them down to eat and they grow back, so you can have a number of crops. Many greens are fairly cold tolerant, especially collards and kale. Kale can sometimes be dug up from under the snow. Plus they are very tasty and very healthy to eat, filled with vitamins like A and C.

IanMorrison · Nov 23, 2008

....haev I mentioned you guys are awesome?

Izunya said:
A minor thread derail, but is anyone else suddenly thinking of Nausicaa?

For those of you who don't know from anime, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds is a movie with exactly this sort of background. It is the one post-apocalyptic movie I know of where the deadly wasteland is absolutely gorgeous. Still deadly, but gorgeous.

Also, the salvage party dynamic would make an awesome RPG hook.

Izunya

Nausicaa wasn't the original inspiration, but yeah, a ridiculous number of parallels there (and hey, I DID like the movie

). Truth be told (and this is a little embarrassing to admit), the original inspiration WAS an RPG... specifically, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for the gamecube. I like the isolated settlements that needed constant expeditions out into the "Miasma" in order not to die off, and the undertones of tension between the four different tribes. To be entirely honest, the first pass was embarrassingly derivative, though four years of iteration in my head has rendered it almost unrecognizable. I've still got four different races and mystical trees in there, though!

For me, the salvage party dynamic is more a way to get my characters out into the world without attaching them to a trade party, and to add a bit of pressure (ie, everyone is relying on you) to keep them moving.

@Keyan

The catastrophe in this case is now 600 years old... by this point, they've got coping with the situation down to an art, especially since the blight hasn't gotten any better in the meantime. The original settlement was actually just some backwater fishing village... it only became a major town from the huge flood of refugees.

They do have metal and metalworking, and they even gained a bit of a reputation for making very fine weapons and tools with them. However, supply is a major issue for them... they only have the expertise and trade secrets. Most of the metal they have is either salvaged or traded from the one haven that still has a mine.

I'm not quite sure I want to give them bamboo, but they'll definitly have access to a lot of wood in the surrounding area. Trees inside the haven are preferred for quality and strength, but most have been cut down for space by now. The stuff from the blight is poor quality, but it's cheap and plentiful. Harvesting it is a health hazard, of course, but it's generally worth the small risk involved.

@FennelGiraffe

For medical resources, they are almost completely cut off from the preexisting infrastructure, and any stockpiles of medicine have long since run out. On a technological basis, they're limited to what they can handle on their own. However, medicine is one of those areas where I get to do a little bit of hand waving with the magic system. The magic in this universe is ubiquitous and (prior to the catastrophe) well understood, but not that dramatic. It was more of a "force multiplier" for traditional technology than a powerful force by itself. For medicine, I'm thinking this will mean that healers will be able to give a boost to immune systems, speed natural regeneration of tissue, and manipulate metabolisms to an extent. Nothing that removes the problem of disease or injury, mostly just augumenting and exploiting what the body already has available.

This doesn't remove the problem of disease or injury outright, it just makes it a bit easier to manage coupled with a relatively modern understanding of how infection and disease spreads (so they'll know enough to wash up before handling a wound, for instance). I'm also thinking that the town defenses would involve compartmentalizing the town somewhat in case of a breach in a perimeter, with the added advantages of being able to contain civil strife and quarantine sections of the town when the need arises.

In general, I'm trying to use magic as a fudge factor instead of a way out of a problem here. Crops might be a bit more productive as a consequence, etc, but mostly it'll just go towards making them a little more advanced than their technology would suggest.

The available materials for construction are primarily wood, stone, sand, and earth. Wood would probably be the cheapest for them, but would it be unreasonable to expect them to be able to manage masonry on any large scale (and would the land in a fjord make for appropriate foundations?)

Oh, and thanks for the medieval demographics link! I think I had it at one point, but lost it. It's already given me a fair number of ideas as to how to distribute occupations.

FennelGiraffe · Nov 23, 2008

IanMorrison said:
I'm not quite sure I want to give them bamboo, but they'll definitly have access to a lot of wood in the surrounding area. Trees inside the haven are preferred for quality and strength, but most have been cut down for space by now. The stuff from the blight is poor quality, but it's cheap and plentiful. Harvesting it is a health hazard, of course, but it's generally worth the small risk involved.

...

The available materials for construction are primarily wood, stone, sand, and earth. Wood would probably be the cheapest for them, but would it be unreasonable to expect them to be able to manage masonry on any large scale (and would the land in a fjord make for appropriate foundations?)

Factors influencing what they use as a construction material include both how much timberland is accessible and how much wood they need to dedicate to shipbuilding. If the fishing fleet supplies a significant portion of their diet, they may not be able to afford to use wood to build houses. Or at least not good quality wood.

The mountainside rising up from the fjord should provide a fairly good source of stone for construction, but you're probably right to worry about foundations. I suppose (on no real evidence) that one-story structures with stone walls and wooden roofs would be safe enough, though.

A related issue is what they use for fuel. How do they heat their homes, cook, etc?

IanMorrison · Nov 24, 2008

Hmm. Ship building windusould be important, especially since the best candidates for trade would be the ones that could be reached by ship, since that'd be the only way to safely and cheaply transport large quantities of goods. Those kinds of ships, though, would probably be pre-catastrophe, along with a fair number of the fishing boats (I don't think all of the refugees would have come in from the mountain passes). Except in rare cases, they probably only need to be periodically repaired. That should limit the amount of wood they'd require, even if they would look pretty beat up after a few centuries despite having every piece of them replaced at some point or another.

Still, with wood requirements for the fishing fleet cut down a fair bit, how much fuel are we talking here? The need for heating the houses would be limited, since the winter weather would be reasonably mild (even if the volume of snow is huge). Primary fuel requirements are cooking and industry (specifically, running the forges for building and repairing valuable metal equipment).

What they'd choose for fuel is a problem, though. They could use dried animal dung, but that reduces how much they can fertilize the crops. They could use the low quality wood from outside the safe zone, but there's only so much of that in close proximity (and cost of harvesting is dependant on the amount of time that individual workers need to be given protection against the blight).

Leva · Nov 24, 2008

Hi Ian,

Check the soil temperature needed to grow rice. Your climate may not be warm enough to support it. Rice is a warm-season crop which is not frost tolerant, AFAIK, and is generally grown in subtropical to tropical climates. Not many of them get substantial snow.

In a climate like you're describing, the staples would likely be:

-- Potatoes -- which store well through the winter, but have significant problems with disease

-- Cabbage -- which can be harvested near year round, surviving even light freezes and snow, but also stores well either fresh or fermented into sauerkraut. (Sauerkraut is almost idiot proof -- I've got a pot of it bubbling away on my shelf right now. And it was made by lots and lots of different culture.) Cabbage was also fed to livestock.

-- Beets/Mangels -- which also store well. Mangels are watermelon sized beets which were traditionally fed to livestock in places where hay was hard to grow (or store -- hay doesn't humid conditions; root crops store better in cool, humid places)

-- Turnips, rutabagas, carrots, parsnips, and other root crops, which were often preserved either in root cellars, by piling up in fields and covering with straw, or, iirc, pickling/fermenting.

-- Tomatoes

-- Apples, other fruit trees (though apples don't like a huge amount of snow or stormy springs -- they have a bad habit of blooming and then the blossoms get frozen off by a late snowstorm)

A note on livestock, in relation to farming:

Top of the hierarchy in a farmyard is the milk animal -- either a cow or a milk goat. In a climate like you're describing they'd probably have cattle over goats; cattle deal with the deep snow and wet better. (They could keep goats -- it'd just be a bit more of a challenge in winter, as goats seriously object to being wet and cold and cows sorta go, "Mooo ... whatever ...")

The cow would be fed hay (if available) or allowed to graze on a common green, or turned loose on a pasture, depending on the culture. Feed would likely be supplemented with (quite possibly cooked) mangels, cabbage, root veggies, etc. Cows need to be milked twice a day, so the cow would be brought home for milking.

From the cow you get milk, whey, cheese, yogurt, etc. You also get a draft animal (a milk cow can pull a plow or a cart, though she'd give less milk if worked hard) and a yearly calf or calves (because calves need to be bred every year to stay in milk) that could be sold or butchered for meat. In a climate like you're describing with lots of snow, think small and shaggy for the cattle -- look at Dexters or Highland cows. Jerseys or brahmas, not so much.

("Not very cold" and "lots of snow" can be more miserable than "really freezing cold" because the snow melts a bit and everything gets wet.)

Whey, and excess milk, would either be fed to animals lower down the food chain: pigs, chickens, etc. as well as consumed by people.

Chickens would also be fed food scraps (including meat), veggies, rotten food, and would scratch through the manure of the cow for undigested bits of food. (Gross as it sounds, I know stables that keep banty chickens around just because they kick apart the manure and it breaks down faster.) They also keep the bugs down. Of course, they produce meat and eggs -- a good hen will produce two or more clutches of six to ten chicks a year.

Chickens in this sort of climate would probably be fat and large bodied, with lots of feathers.

Pigs eat everything chickens do, except possibly small insects, and, additionally, can be turned out on harvested fields to find any root veggies the people missed when harvesting. And they leave fertilizer behind! Plus, pigs will eat and thrive on things like fish guts and bones, dead chickens, chicken entrails, last year's mummified root veggies, etc. You could raise a couple of pigs a year from the whey left over from cheesemaking from one cow, plus tablescraps, vegetable peelings, bad veggies, etc.

Pigs are the farm's garbage disposal. They get fed all the garbage and turn it into usable meat.

They would probably also keep sheep, for fiber, milk/cheese, and meat, if they had fields for grazing.

Most farms would also have at least a couple of dogs; I can't imagine having a farm without them. You need dogs as burglar/varmit alarms, to deal with small predators and raise a huge fuss if there's a big one, to kill rats, and to round up livestock. A couple of barking dogs make it a lot easier to convince a loose pig to go back in his pen, know what I mean?

Keyan · Nov 24, 2008

Actually, rice is grown in Japan, which has a topography and climate reasonably similar to the one described. (Including snow.) IRL, Japanese rice apparently doesn't have to be flooded; but since this is a fantasy, you can flood it if you want to.

Potatoes would be good, too. Though from what wikipedia says, they're not as easy to harvest and store as rise is.

Leva said:
Hi Ian,

Check the soil temperature needed to grow rice. Your climate may not be warm enough to support it. Rice is a warm-season crop which is not frost tolerant, AFAIK, and is generally grown in subtropical to tropical climates. Not many of them get substantial snow.

In a climate like you're describing, the staples would likely be:

-- Potatoes -- which store well through the winter, but have significant problems with disease

-- Cabbage -- which can be harvested near year round, surviving even light freezes and snow, but also stores well either fresh or fermented into sauerkraut. (Sauerkraut is almost idiot proof -- I've got a pot of it bubbling away on my shelf right now. And it was made by lots and lots of different culture.) Cabbage was also fed to livestock.

-- Beets/Mangels -- which also store well. Mangels are watermelon sized beets which were traditionally fed to livestock in places where hay was hard to grow (or store -- hay doesn't humid conditions; root crops store better in cool, humid places)

-- Turnips, rutabagas, carrots, parsnips, and other root crops, which were often preserved either in root cellars, by piling up in fields and covering with straw, or, iirc, pickling/fermenting.

-- Tomatoes

-- Apples, other fruit trees (though apples don't like a huge amount of snow or stormy springs -- they have a bad habit of blooming and then the blossoms get frozen off by a late snowstorm)

A note on livestock, in relation to farming:

Top of the hierarchy in a farmyard is the milk animal -- either a cow or a milk goat. In a climate like you're describing they'd probably have cattle over goats; cattle deal with the deep snow and wet better. (They could keep goats -- it'd just be a bit more of a challenge in winter, as goats seriously object to being wet and cold and cows sorta go, "Mooo ... whatever ...")

The cow would be fed hay (if available) or allowed to graze on a common green, or turned loose on a pasture, depending on the culture. Feed would likely be supplemented with (quite possibly cooked) mangels, cabbage, root veggies, etc. Cows need to be milked twice a day, so the cow would be brought home for milking.

From the cow you get milk, whey, cheese, yogurt, etc. You also get a draft animal (a milk cow can pull a plow or a cart, though she'd give less milk if worked hard) and a yearly calf or calves (because calves need to be bred every year to stay in milk) that could be sold or butchered for meat. In a climate like you're describing with lots of snow, think small and shaggy for the cattle -- look at Dexters or Highland cows. Jerseys or brahmas, not so much.

("Not very cold" and "lots of snow" can be more miserable than "really freezing cold" because the snow melts a bit and everything gets wet.)

Whey, and excess milk, would either be fed to animals lower down the food chain: pigs, chickens, etc. as well as consumed by people.

Chickens would also be fed food scraps (including meat), veggies, rotten food, and would scratch through the manure of the cow for undigested bits of food. (Gross as it sounds, I know stables that keep banty chickens around just because they kick apart the manure and it breaks down faster.) They also keep the bugs down. Of course, they produce meat and eggs -- a good hen will produce two or more clutches of six to ten chicks a year.

Chickens in this sort of climate would probably be fat and large bodied, with lots of feathers.

Pigs eat everything chickens do, except possibly small insects, and, additionally, can be turned out on harvested fields to find any root veggies the people missed when harvesting. And they leave fertilizer behind! Plus, pigs will eat and thrive on things like fish guts and bones, dead chickens, chicken entrails, last year's mummified root veggies, etc. You could raise a couple of pigs a year from the whey left over from cheesemaking from one cow, plus tablescraps, vegetable peelings, bad veggies, etc.

Pigs are the farm's garbage disposal. They get fed all the garbage and turn it into usable meat.

They would probably also keep sheep, for fiber, milk/cheese, and meat, if they had fields for grazing.

Most farms would also have at least a couple of dogs; I can't imagine having a farm without them. You need dogs as burglar/varmit alarms, to deal with small predators and raise a huge fuss if there's a big one, to kill rats, and to round up livestock. A couple of barking dogs make it a lot easier to convince a loose pig to go back in his pen, know what I mean?

Leva · Nov 25, 2008

Keyan said:
Actually, rice is grown in Japan, which has a topography and climate reasonably similar to the one described. (Including snow.) IRL, Japanese rice apparently doesn't have to be flooded; but since this is a fantasy, you can flood it if you want to.

Potatoes would be good, too. Though from what wikipedia says, they're not as easy to harvest and store as rise is.

Is rice grown in snowy areas like Hokkaido, or just the warmer areas? (I honestly don't know.)

That said, that's why I suggested checking the necessary soil germination temperature on rice. Am suspecting it needs "warm" -- which Japan gets.

Remember that a coastal area is going to tend to be moderated by the water temperatures off shore. If the water's icy cold, the land will have cool summers. If the water's warm, the winters will be warmer, possibly to the point of not freezing.

Potatoes are commonly grown in cool, wet, snowy areas. And besides food, you can also ferment them into vodka, which has all sorts of uses.

BTW, for fuel/heating? Easy solution is a coal seam. Environmentally friendly solution would be hydrothermal, i.e., hot springs, though that has its own issues. Potable water can be an issue in an environment with hot springs and associated volcanic activity.

Don't underestimate the amount of wood needed in a "mild" climate. If it's freezing outside they're gonna have fires going. If it's snowing and cold enough for the snow to stick and accumulate, by definition, it's staying below freezing -- and it's gotten cold enough for the ground to freeze. (Otherwise the snow will eventually melt.)

-- Leva

Crops in a self sufficient coastal town

The Provocative One

ubiquitous

Who's going for a beer?

Well begun is half done...

Down Under Fan

Ah-HA!

Is the random.

It Takes All of Us to End Racism

Well begun is half done...

ubiquitous

ubiquitous

Anachronista

It's green they say

Maybull the Bulldog

It's green they say

ubiquitous