Typha latifolia called cattail, reedmace, and other names is a plant we have evidence was eaten in prehistoric Europe. What if Europeans manage to cultivate it?
Growing without help is the exact opposite of cultivate. If you don't need to work it, then...you don't.1. Growing without help seems like a benefit, less work for the farmer.
Well first, rice have an insane productivity : so there some motivation to work on it (and is one of the explanation why China had pre-industrial Europe equivalent techniques in agriculture since the Antiquity).2. How do other cultures that use water agriculture, like rice in Asia, deal with the problem?
They have many uses, but outside food it's less interesting after the Prehistoric era : helps to ignite fire, useful to clean a place, can serve as putting in tents or houses on the ground, etc.3. Off hand it seems like cattails would be more productive, just from the variety of uses. I've looked before and haven't had much luck finding direct comparisons though.
And then German or Poles colons, that are ready to drain and use these lands, came and outnumbers or assimilate Old Prussians.But what if the Prussians, say, (the original Baltic speakers) converted to Catholicism much earlier and stayed on their swampy land. In that case marsh plants like cat tails might have been useful.
Does anyone know if any dishes can be made from cattails that taste good?
Why do you think that?Cattail based agriculture might have been a lot less portable.
Why do you think that?
They need at least damp earth, but considering how wide spread they are they don't seem difficult to establish somewhere.
A newspaper article: http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...Uw1ZAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UkYNAAAAIBAJ&pg=1086,798268
Dr. March could harvest 140 tons of rhizomes per acre, which is 32 tons of flour. I presume this is with modern equipment and intentional management, other references I've found are 6,475 pounds of flour per acre. And that's a giant difference.
People before roman times weren't only mindless brutes clothed with bear furs, and as you can see Baltic Europe had access to agricultural features even before Atlantic coastthen, is there a way either to stall the expansion of grain based agriculture, or propping up a Marshbased one at approximately the same time as it arrived? (~Roman time?)