The meal could only have been the remains of the stores brought on the =Mayflower=, for Bradford added, “or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.” But with the memory of the past winter painfully fresh, the Pilgrims could ill afford to rest and rely on providence to supply them. It was critical that they produce a crop to insure an adequate surplus for the coming winter. To this end they planted their fields with a mixture of English and Indian crops. Twenty acres were put into Indian corn, after the planting advice tendered by Squanto, and also some six acres of peas and barley. As the summer progressed, the troubles that had earlier dogged the company seemed to threaten a return. The barley failed to measure up to expectations. Worse, the peas were a total disaster. “They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.” [Illustration: Planting crops] After the total failure of July’s pea crop and the disappointment with August’s “indifferent good barley,” the Pilgrims faced a real threat of starvation. This may at first seem strange, considering their assessment of wild foods: “For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter. We have mussels ... all the earth sendeth forth naturally very good sallet herbs. Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas, etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as damson....” However, none of these foods are high in energy, and the typical English farmer was accustomed to a diet that gave him almost six thousand calories a day. To get these calories, he ate a normal daily diet of one pound of meal or peas cooked up in a porridge, pudding, or bread, over a pound of butter and cheese, and a full gallon of strong, dark ale. Some dried or corned meat and fish were also eaten but usually only in small amounts—quarter pound a day. The Englishmen in the 1620s certainly did not live on flesh alone. William Bradford, for example, described a season of semistarvation, when “the best they could present their friends with was a lobster or a piece of fish without bread or anything else but a cup of fair spring water.” Simply to meet his daily caloric needs, a Pilgrim would have to eat a twenty-pound lobster at breakfast, lunch and supper. As they lacked dairy cows in 1621 and their peas and barley were insufficient, their survival hinged on the Indian corn. If this crop failed, so would the pilgrimage.