Principle Tsalal Crops

Principle Tsalal Crops

No discussion of Tsalal Agriculture would be complete without at least some recognition of the principle Tsalal crops. Over their history, the Tsalal have eaten and cultivated just about every edible part of every edible plant, and in fact have eaten a great deal that was not edible. The list of Tsalal cultivars is extremely long, and even the list of cultivars that have diverged significantly from wild forms is extensive. This does not pretend to be a complete survey, but merely a recognition of the staples.

Kadhash
a ground hugging leafy succulent roughly analogous to cabbage or lettuce, closely related to the Kerguelen cabbage found in OTL, the plant propagates through extensive, hardy root systems which endure the winters. The leaf clusters sprout early, grow quickly and are adapted to herbivores, regrowing quickly. Kadhash roots were found to be easy to propagate. The leaf clusters matured rapidly enough that heads could be harvested two or even three times in a growing season, and properly dried for long term storage, retained significant nutrition. Genetic typing suggests that Kadhash was the very first cultivar.

Kulka Root
A small, starchy, barely palatable tuber, which could be regrown from stems. Kulka had the advantage of being a durable widely spread plant which could grow in a variety of conditions and competed well against weeds, and needed almost no maintenance apart from planting and harvesting. It stored well. Kulka cultivation appears to be at least as early as Kadhash and spread quickly through the Tsalmothua. The modern form is considerably larger than the wild form, but remains a distinctly acquired taste. It has little currency outside Tsalmothua.

Pycha
a large, relatively nutritious and non-toxic root crop, somewhat similar to potatoes. It has a tall stem crowned with tough narrow leaves and propagates through rootlets. It co-evolved with the Shaghui, whose heavy claws were adapted to digging it out of the ground in winter, severing the roots and allowing new plants to propagate in spring. In Tsalmothua it rapidly became extinct as the Shaghui were hunted out. It was reintroduced twice from neighboring regions, but only became a successful and widespread cultivar with widespread domestication of Shagui.

Usk
An unrelated root crop, this one has tubers growing as nodules within the root complex, so a single plant may produce as much as two dozen tubers at various stages of growth. Only the mature tubers, usually 1/5 to 1/3 o the tubers, however, are edible. Immature growths are so alkaloid as to be toxic. If disturbed, immature tubers will rapidly put out new root complexes. The plants life cycle is about a decade, and it takes a tuber about three years to grow to proper maturity. Harvesting consists of uprooting and replanting.

Other Tubers
a large variety of root crops exist, some as supplements, some as local staples, either related to the identified species or representing completely different species, roughly analogous to Yams, Turnips, Sweet Potatoes, Onions, Turnips, Carrots, etc.

Windseeds
actually a generic term for a large number of cereal grains, tree seeds and bush seeds, almost all having the advantage of leaf extensions, allowing them to propagate by wind. Windseeds were popular cultivars and seem roughly analogous to grains in OTL societies. They are usually harvested just prior to ripeness, and are either ground to powder or boiled for consumption. In their natural form, they can be stored for up to ten years. Windseed agriculture tends to correlate to domestication of hive monkeys used for harvesting.

Spintree/Xhyqytozq
Not a true tree, but a sort of bush. The spintree wraps fibers spiralling around a central core, to produce a trunk and an explosion of branches. The plant produces nutritious berries which can be pounded to a pulp and then dried out for storage. The trunk can be unwound, and the long fibers separated out for textiles. This is usually done just after berry harvesting. Left unattended 'tree' portion, dies and dries out in fall, but the underlying root complex will live for decades. This cultivar was relatively easy to maintain, but difficult to propagate, and requires a period of maturation before it becomes productive. Over thousands of years, a large variety of subspecies have been cultivated, producing a multitude of berries and textiles.

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Interesting as always, but how are some of those names pronounced, especially 'Xhyqytozq'? Could you perhaps do a post on the Tsalal language with a pronunciation guide?

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I most certainly will not!

In keeping with Lovecraft, a number of Tsalal words are designed as if not made for human vocal apparatus. Not only do I have no idea how to pronounce them, but I've actively worked to make it so that the effort of trying to actually speak these words could be physically painful.

Plausible? Probably not.

Cool? You bet.

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Fair enough, I'll asume 'Xhyqytozq' sound something like a tortured cat scraping it's nails on a blackboard listening to death metal sung by someone who smokes 1000 a day then.

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Huh, 'Xhyqytozq' doesn't sound so intimidating to me. I imagine it sounds vaguely like "Jee-kee-tozk" but with kind of a more glottalal "j" and "k" sounds, like you'd find in Na-Dene languages. Then again, it probably only doesn't sound intimidating to me because I spent some time learning how to pronounce Tlingit letters.

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I suppose if I actually tried to pronounce it, it would be something like K!ikkitozkk where k! is a click sound and kk is a gutteral k sound.

Milk Tree
several related subspecies of thick boled, heavy rooted trees, water loving and usually found near rivers and lakes, notable for sap which can be tapped, somewhat similar to maple syrup. There are a variety of harvesting techniques, usually involving tunneling under the main root system and tapping. The sap runs only through the later part of summer, but stores well. The pulp of the tree is edible and nutritious, particularly in late summer and fall, but the trees take so long to mature that cutting them down for eating is discouraged. Milk Trees are another cultivar that became extinct in many areas before effective cultivation techniques were established.

Fphulul
the product of dwarf shrubs, producing a pod roughly analogous to peas or beans. The plant is an annual, dying each summer, with the pod beans drying out to become seeds which sprout in the summer. A natural cultivar requiring extensive labour and extremely wide spread, existing in very harsh locations.

Cluster Worms
not strictly a plant cultivar. These are relatively fast growing and voracious worms which consume decomposing water soaked leaves. Originally found in swampy pockets, their ability to consume otherwise inedible leaves and plant matter and produce protein lead to their adoption as a pseudo-cultivar. Typically, farming involves digging shallow 'worm pits' which are filled with vegetable matter, waste, 'night soil' and heavily watered. The pit is then sifted every few weeks and mature worms are harvested. In the winter, the worms survive by freezing solid, and reactivating when thawed. Eventually accumulation of worm wastes reduces the numbers and quality of the worms, the pit will eventually become so toxic that the worms within choke on their own waste products, and new pits must be dug.

Termites
Again, not strictly a plant cultivar, but treated as such. Termite cultivation seems to have been directly inspired by cluster worms cultivation, taking place in dryer more elevated locations. This is one of the rare instances where the archeological evidence of the relationship is unequivocal. Termite cultivation begins approximately a thousand years after worm cultivation becomes widespread and the techniques refined, earliest termite cultivation sites are all adjacent to extremely productive worm sites. And the earliest termite production techniques are identical to those used for worms, even down to specific tools. Only over time do production techniques specialize.

Yag Berry
the only cultivar which does not seem to be related to the Tsalmothua agricultural complex, the Yag Berry plant was a river shore plant growing annually tall stalk, producing seasonal flowers and a cluster of berries. Each berry contained a hard seed. The plant's reproductive strategy was to have the berries consumed by shoreline herbivores, who would then excrete the seeds in their travel. The Yag Berry is highly seasonal and sprouts relatively late in the year. The pulpy flesh of the berry can be dried and stored for extremely long periods, losing almost no nutritional value. In addition, the pulpy basal leaves are edible (though poorly so), and the stalks are used for textiles. Even the flowers are pollinated by specialized bees, which produce honey. The Yag Berry is labour intensive but responds extremely well to cultivation. To support Yag Berry's, the local cultures engaged in extensive water management practices, including building canals, flooding, ponding, ditching, etc.

Others
There are of course, a great many other cultivar plants and a few insects, including some local staples, but these are too numerous to list. However, a few comments are worth making. The Tsalal have almost no true cereal grains, and the few specimens they have seem to fair poorly. Although the Tsalal have specialized adaptations to handle the starches and alkaloids of their root crops, they are considerably less facile with the glutens of cereals. Tsalal prisoners have literally starved on a diet of bread. In addition Tsalal botany produces very little in the way of actual fruits. The few fruits found in Antarctica are relatively poor quality and have restricted ranges and limited productivity. During periods of international trade, foreign fruits (after pork) are the Tsalal's greatest import.

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Hmmm. Whattaya think? Too much? It's a relatively small continent to have so many staple cultivars or potential founder crops.

On the other hand, it seemed to me that with over ten thousand years of feast and famine lifestyle, the Tsalal would have explored the edible potentials of just about every plant around to obsessive degrees, and accumulated oral knowledge and traditions would have allowed multiple domestications.

I left cereals and grains out, partly because its done to death, and partly because I was unsure of the potentials in an area this isolated and extreme. At the same time, Antarctica didn't seem hospitable for fruits and fruiting plants.

Berries and small berry fruit are well established in northern hemisphere climates as far north as Svalbard, notably cloudberries and crowberries, so I figured they'd do well here.

Antarctica has consistent coriolis winds, so I assumed that wind born pollination and seeds would be significant. In this situation, I felt it would be reasonable to have wind seeds replacing grains. The tricky part would be harvesting in time.

Given Antarctica's climate and seasonality, I've speculated that plants would tend to store nutrients in root systems to get through the harsh winters. So it seemed to me that a lot of the agricultural potential would be in root crops, and that you'd have several potential species of root crops because the environment would drive adaptations independent of each other. Root crops would probably have by far the most potential.

The Kerguelen cabbage is a real edible plant, found on the Kerguelen Islands and, were those Islands not quite so godforsaken, might well have developed as a cultivar had the place been hospitable enough for colonisation. It, or a relative would almost certainly be in Antarctica, though I've pretty much fictionalized its underlying qualities.

The stuff about worms and termites I threw in there just to be disgusting.

In terms of the development of agriculture, I've taken some small pains to suggest that it was neither simple nor particularly straightforward, but marked by failures and reverses of various sorts.

Essentially, the idea takes hold, but the Tsalal, over thousands of years, find themselves forced to try different things in different ways, evolving multiple staples, rather than a history where a single staple dominates, like potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn or rice. Tsalal is a land of war of all against all, and that extends to biological competition.

The particular emergence of specific cultivars, the development of techniques, the specific areas of emergence and spread, and competition with other cultural groups and cultivars could be done in excruciating detail.

However, for my purposes, I've glossed over the first 18,000 years of hunter gatherer history, and I'd propose to move lightly over the next six thousand years of the agricultural revolution.

The eventual outcome is that during the Agricultural period, Agricultural practices spread over most of the continent, employing a variety of techniques and technologies and a variety of cultivars.

And during the late period, the Tsalal have an agricultural potential, and a commensurate population, much higher than we might have expected, given limitations of season and climate, simply because their biological diversity has been so thoroughly exploited.

Anyway, next up, the Tsalal history with domesticated animals, hopefully with some interesting wrinkles.