Capsicums are hard to harvest
They're easy to grow, but I keep losing the fruit to grubs that live inside the fruit, where my wasps can't get them.
I was going to rant on about ways to defeat the little buggers, but it occurs to me that this is a cost/benefit issue. I have no trouble harvesting vast quantities of basil and lettuce, now that my wasps are on patrol. What else can I grow that's easy to bring to table? This is all about eating when there isn't a community to produce food for me.
I sometimes think about the production of seafood too. If it were just me and a small community of people concerned with eating well and having a clean dry place to sleep, potable water and not having to work terribly hard to keep all this, then there are a few obvious options.
The introduction of robust food organisms like Nile Perch to waterways that are already screwed up, such as the lower Fitzroy, would mean no-one would have to eat catfish. There are other issues here. Lake Victoria in Africa is a very pertinent study on the ecological side effects of this strategy.
You could also get systematic about harvesting: rather than slinging a net across a creek, what about a big semi-rigid plastic grill? Fairly big mesh; you don't want the tiddlers. All on a big cantilever, with a sort of mesh bucket on the bottom. You'd soon learn when and how long to set it down.
The key here is husbandry. You don’t want to maximise the harvest, you want to harvest no more than you can use. The harvesting mechanism is so effective that it is very easy to fish the creek out.
Economics (I don’t mean the bullshit with money that they teach in universities, I mean the management of ecologies) is complicated and difficult. You are trying to control dynamic balances in what is essentially an emergent system.
Heavy fishing may reduce fish stocks, but this has the desirable effect of inhibiting predation and parasitism by limiting the food supply for parasites and predators. This can actually increase the harvest tonnage. On the other hand, the parasites and predators may serve other purposes in the local ecology. Also, reducing predator populations will boost the populations of all of their prey species, which may in turn produce a spike in predator populations.
It’s all too complicated. The only useful conclusion that can be drawn is that it’s a bit like carrying a shallow bowl of water: move slowly and gently. Natural damping will sort out the complex ripples.