[Fantasy] [Low-Tech] Crops with extremely short cycle and low yield

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Hmm. Indeed I haven't put much (any?) thought into proportionally reducing the work required.

I'm basically looking for a way to create a setting with much shorter harvest cycles - numbered in days, or at most weeks.

Oh, and I intended the seeds/fruits to be as long-lasting as normal ones.

You might want to consider a tree crop, or at least something perennial. Instead of growing an entire new plant in days, which is pretty extreme, it grows a new crop of seeds, nuts, fruits or edible flowers. And of course ever-blooming plants are a fantasy tradition.

You may also want to think about what the plant gets out of doing this. Cycling your whole body this fast seems totally useless unless there are severe seasons that will kill you on the same sort of timescale, or weekly fires that devastate the ecosystem. Continuously fruiting at least might give you some sort of reproductive advantage, though you need a really good seed dispersal mechanism to make it pay off for anything this fast. Maybe the fruit ripens into balloons....