I'm going to do something I'm going to regret...

So living in a residential area, I'm limited to the type and number of animals I can keep.  Therefore, while I can have a couple hens for laying, I cannot raise a couple dozen chickens for food.

I just found a local farm that sells chicken that was pastured on grass, and you receive the chicken the day after it was dispatched and dressed.

I've never had meat that fresh.  So while I'm excited about getting to try it, and thrilled I can support a local farmer, I know it's going to spoil me forever until I get my own farm where I can raise my own meat.

Why?

I've had a few friends and family members ask why in the world I want to farm and grow my own garden, and, eventually, raise and eat my own livestock.

Personally, I find it hypocritical of anyone who eats meat but is unwilling to kill the animal themselves.  I feel, as a whole, people are too disconnected from what goes on with their food.  I think that it's appalling that livestock are kept on feedlots knee-deep in their own feces; or in tiny cages with no access to the outside or to sunlight, without room to sprawl or stretch their legs.

No, I am no PETA enthusiast.  In fact, I abhor the organization, but that's another post.

It means enough to me that the animals I eat for food get space, grass, sunlight, the best feed I can afford, and love.  Because it is that important to me, I'm willing to do everything I can to move away from commercialized meat and dairy products.

It means enough to me to have fresh fruits and vegetables, untouched or modified by Monsanto or their ilk, that I'm learning to grow my own food as organically as I can.

Furthermore, I have very little faith in this country remaining stable in any meaning of the word for much longer.  I pray I'm wrong, but my gut tells me that I'm not.  Besides, on a much less dramatic scale, it wouldn't take much to disrupt the flow of food to the supermarkets.  A gas shortage.  A trucker strike.  A natural disaster...

I feel that the more I can provide for myself and my family, the easier and more comfortable we can survive anything that's thrown our way.

While we don't have a farm yet, The Architect and I will make the best of the acre we have until we do.

Maybe I can't save the world, but I CAN save my part of it.

Bread!

I am pretty new to this whole baking-bread-from-scratch thing, but I absolutely love to bake bread when I have time to spare.

I got this great recipe from Mother Earth News, and the magazine is pretty tattered at this point from me referring to it. I use this recipe for both bread and for pizza dough.



Rather than use the full recipe*, I cut it down to 1 cup of water, 1/2 tablespoon (1.5 teaspoons) each of yeast and salt, and two cups of flour.


I've found that special-ordering yeast is a better option than buying packets at the grocery store, since the stuff at the store tends to be really stale. The Bread Beckers are of reasonable driving distance from my house (and they do internet orders, too), and I got a pound of yeast for like $5. I keep it in my fridge, and even though it's a year old, it's still quite viable.


This is a no-knead recipe, so you just add the ingredients together, then stir/smoosh it together with a spatula or spoon.


Let the dough rise for about two hours... I cover the dough with a moist towel to keep it from drying out.


Pop in a hot oven for half an hour, and viola!









*also: The REASON I don't use the full recipe is that I don't have a big enough bowl to contain it. I did not know this the first time I attempted making bread, and without prior knowledge to how much bread dough actually rises. When I returned to the dough two hours later, it had crawled up and out of the bowl, across the table, and was beginning to drip down onto the floor. It was like something out of a horror movie.

A harvest!

At left is the produce I brought in today from my OWN garden.

I have to say, this is a huge, vast, amazing, spectacular improvement over what I did with my garden last year (er... one edible tomato).

Part of me doesn't even want to eat any of this; I want to frame it.

That cantaloupe? Is the size of my head.

And because I have NO idea how to determine a melon's ripeness, I kind of went by the fact that both the dogs made an absolute bee-line to the garden this afternoon when I let them out for a potty break after I got home from. They were both sniffing hungrily at this melon. They never go into the garden.

I took it as an omen.

I brought the melon inside, and Blaze absolutely would not stop following me around, trying to get to the melon.

So, uhm... I have to admit... I teared up a little bit after I cut open the cantaloupe. It WAS ripe. And beautiful. And I'm kind of humbled that I was a part of it. Planting, fretting, watering, transferring to the garden itself, weeding, fretting, more watering, fretting, encouraging (I might talk to my plants. What of it?), more fretting.

I cannot wait to expand my garden so that I can do more of the same.

I am sad, though- now that summer is drawing to a close, I have only one more melon to harvest and just a few more tomatoes. I wish I'd planted more.

I am, however, super-excited about having an autumn garden of broccoli and salad greens. This, coming from a girl who thought "stuff" only grew in the spring/summertime just a few months ago.

Home grown.

So I just cut open that big ol' yellow tomato I picked last night.

It is absolutely divine. I am now planning on doubling the size of the garden next spring...

Bok bok bok

Down the road from where my best friend, Crash, lives, is a family who raises their own chickens and sells the eggs for $2.50 a dozen.

Recently, I'd switched to buying "cage free" eggs at the grocery store - for $2.70 a dozen. If they're of the organic variety, they're $3.40 a dozen.

Though I realize that the chickens who provide the "cage free" eggs aren't TRULY cage free, it's worth it to me to pay the extra money. The eggs taste SO much better than the store-brand 69-cent-per-dozen eggs, and although I'm the last person to sympathize with PETA, I prefer my eggs to come from chickens who aren't crammed on top of each other. At least the store "cage free" chickens get more room. Because, I'm sorry... there's no way this is, in any stretch of the imagination, humane...



Living in Suburbia, I'm not ENTIRELY sure if we can have chickens, although after having eggs from A's neighbor's mini-farm, I'm going to be forced to call Animal Control and see if they can tell me if I can have them.

I mentioned the farm eggs to my mother, who launched into an interrogation about if I had to refrigerate them and if how they have to be cooked... in case farm eggs are totally different than any other...

...and then she asked how much I paid for them.

My mother then launched into a gentle berratement of how ridiculous it was to pay that much for eggs, and that the 69 eggs at the grocery store were fine.



The Architect and I later talked about how depressing it is that most of the people in this country are SO. OBSESSED. with cheap - quality be damned.

That how it's the good-ol'-boys who beat their chests, sing "God Bless the USA," scream "Amurrka! Love it or leave it! Keep our jobs here in the US! Stop sendin' our jobs to China and India!" and then run to Wal Mart (the single largest importer of foreign products in the US...)

Sixty-nine cents for a dozen eggs. Less than six CENTS per egg.

If people were actually forced to pay the true price for their food, we might be able to do away with over crowded chicken barns and feed lots.

Cheap food via subsidies.

Less subsidies, less obesity, lower the population, cure cancer, global warming (which doesn't exist anyway, but none of those yayhoos ever propose that people stop breeding...), etc, etc. In a perfect world, anyway...





(images courtesy http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/)

El Jardin

Last year, I tried in vain to grow a quad of tomato plants in un-tilled, un-limed, unfertilized Georgia red sandy clay.

Two of the plants died. The remaining two barely clung to life. One plant gave me one tomato. The other, gave me two. They were small, and their skins were like leather.

My friend, Bubba, who has a heckuva green thumb, sat me down and explained some of the finer points of gardening to me.

In January, I ordered some heirloom seeds from Baker Creek ( http://rareseeds.com/ ). Bubba and the Architect tilled my garden plot and we laid down some organic garden soil. It was too late in the season at that point to lime, and I didn't fertilize, but my garden is doing immensely better than last year's attempt.

I was unaware that melon (whose variety I don't know- it was labeled "Melon-18") needs its own county to grow. Yeesh. I kept pulling it back into itself to make sure it didn't run off into the neighbor's yard.

My solitary stevia plant has been almost completely overrun by the melon. Oops.

I have six tomato plants now, each with about 3-7 tomatoes.

The largest at the moment, and the prettiest, is this Golden Monarch, just about ready to be picked (I'll likely grab it later today or tomorrow).

I have a couple red Beefsteak tomatoes about ready to ripen, but the near-ripe ones are fairly small. I forgot to cull a couple baby tomatoes off that vine when they first formed on that particular plant.

I was told that you tend to get get larger tomatoes if you remove one or two as they form on a bunch.

I had planted a pair of cucumber plants, but they lasted half a week before they disappeared.

Yes. Disappeared.

Not wilted and died. Disappeared.

I'm not sure what happened. Do rabbits eat baby cucumber plants?

I do know that they eat basil. I had two plants. Though both had been nibbled on, one has been completely decimated.

...putting up the rabbit fence probably would have been a good idea...

Last night, I picked what was left on the viable plant for a pasta dish I planned on making for my friends:

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2010/07/grilled-chicken-with-lemon-basil-pasta/

I had only a fraction of what I needed for the recipe, but my friend Kitty came to the rescue with some of her basil from her patio garden.

You get an overwhelming sense of pride when using your own personal plants in your cooking.



I can't wait to have a bigger garden next year...



(pics © me )