I'm slowly morphing into a freaky back-to-the-land woman. However, I just have no desire to live in the country. I really love our city house and lot. My intention with this blog is to keep track of our progress as we attempt to grow a lot of what we eat this year. And to also chronicle how I attempt to figure all this out. I've never tested our soil. I've never counted how many potatoes we eat in year, or how many onions we go through in a week. What started all of this madness?
This past fall I read Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle . She and her family went for a year of eating local. They grew most of their own food, gave up some of their faves (bananas, olive oil, etc) and stayed within 100 miles of their home for everything they ate.
Now I'm reading a great book called Plenty, by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackison. They are in Vancouver and have also written about a year of eating within 100 miles of their home.
In both of these books, the writers have started their year of eating local in March. Neither of them live in a place that is very warm in March. But March brings the first day of Spring. I've decided our year of eating local will start June 1st.
We've had snowstorms in May in the past. I don't want to be living on eggs and asparagus for 3 months.
GROW YOUR OWN?
I've always been interested in food. I love food. Food, beer, sex, laughing until my sides ache with people I love truly sustain me. I'm not interested in depriving myself or my family for the sake of proving something. However, I would like all of us to realize how much we eat in year, how varied that can be if we eat local, and to realize what it means to be self-reliant. The other major perk is that we will drastically cut down on the thousands of gallons of fossil fuel used to deliver our kiwi fruit, bananas, olive oil, Ranch dressing, you name it.
The pictures above are of our yard in different place. Our garden is sleeping right now. It's 500 square feet of somewhat sandy soil. We've gardened in it for the last 7 years, some years more so than others depending on how pregnant I was or how small the kids were. I've never grown food with the intentions of getting us through the winter, with the exception of canning some pickles, tomatoes, or squash.
There's a picture of 3 lanky trees. I hate those trees. They are an invasive type of Maple whose name escapes me right now. But the damn things re-populate so easily and so quickly that we are in constant battle with them. They also produce too much shade. They are also guilty of ruining the retaining wall that surrounds them. Those 3 trees will be coming DOWN this Spring. This will allow more sunlight and hopefully I can plant a dwarf peach tree. Little S votes for a pear tree too. We shall see. With those trees gone, we can perhaps make our garden bigger, stretching into more of the back yard.
The front yard is tiny, but gets all the sun. My husband finally agreed that we should make use of the good light (and crap soil) by planting raised beds in the front. I'm thinking mostly herbs and perennials.
We also grow hops (2nd picture, dead hops vines against garage) for our homebrew beer (which we haven't made for quite some time). I tinctured hops this fall for my birth bag (it's a nice relaxant), but that's about all. The hops look lovely in the summer and they grow up the side of our garage and also on a fence near the garden.
So we shall see what we end up with. Will my children come to love weeding the garden amidst pesky mosquitoes? Will we fall in love with various types of greens that we've never had before (sans the Ranch dressing?). How LOCAL is local? Will my family hate me and end up in the Mc Donald's drive-thru by July 15th? We shall see. Hopefully I can document this journey along the way with words and photos.
For now, I'm drinking tea on the sofa every night, surrounded by seed catalogs and all sorts of back-to-the-land and gardening books. Dreaming of when we can get busy in the mud again.
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