Grow Your Own

Day 15 of 365

Before we had chickens and ducks, we had a garden. The first time I ate a tomato from our garden, I thought I might cry. I didn’t even think I liked tomatoes very much. Then, I had a tiny sun gold tomato standing in our garden, and truly, it was like the sun had infused its magic into a tiny, delicious orange ball. 

I was hooked. 

I guess my husband was as well. Since that time 10 years ago, he has devoted himself each spring, summer, and fall to growing the food the feeds our family. Right now, if you count the garden, chicken and duck eggs, and the broiler chickens we raise, we grow somewhere around 60 percent of the food our family eats. Beyond that, we buy from local farms as much as possible, but we definitely do our best to grow our own. We do all this on about 1.6 acres. We are evidence that you don’t have to have a lot of space to do this. In fact, part of our property is still wooded.

It’s not easy work, of course. Outside of the epic work my husband does to start seedlings, plant rows (he grows perfect rows), compost the chicken poop for fertilizer, water in the most creative, water-conserving ways possible, and will the plants into beautiful growth, we have to focus our food preparation around the things we grow. 

This didn’t happen overnight. I grew up on Hamburger Helper, and though Ron had grown up on homegrown food, as an adult, he had also shifted his diet to the frozen foods section in the grocery store. And, as a cook, it took me some time to figure out how to use things like cabbage and beets. Additionally, even for the things I knew how to cook and use, like green beans, I had to find ways to use them a lot more frequently. We now eat a lot of green beans.  

Right now, our garden is just getting started, but the chicken and duck eggs are in full season. But we are eating greens every night for dinner (mostly spinach), eggs for every breakfast (and sometimes dinner), and I have learned to make several wonderful treats with rhubarb. 

My plan is to share some of the recipes I use that help us eat so well from farm to table. I have become quite efficient at cooking and storing food from the garden–from the spinach in the spring to the tomatoes and squash of fall. I think I can share some wisdom here. I mean, I’m going to try.

I’m going to start tomorrow with a little rhubarb recipe I kind of made up. I just don’t know yet if it’s a jam or a jelly. I think jelly, but I don’t want to steer you wrong and have to do some research. 

More on this tomorrow…

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In the meantime, on the Ruby front, all is well. She had eggs and toast for breakfast and drank some of her water. It’s very nice and cool in the garage, and the sun comes in well. She seems to be pretty content. 

I have also decided that Kate will be our next mama, but we are going to try something different. Because she has been broody awhile, instead of getting hatching eggs for her this week, the chicken breeder I am working with says he can just sell me some chicks I want next week. So, this is exciting but also adds an element of drama. It will involve taking eggs from under Kate and replacing them with live chicks at night. We have about a 98% success rate with this, but we had one failure, which means I always have anxiety. Still, I am hopeful. Kate’s a good girl, and this strategy works almost all the time. We’re getting some Black Copper Marans and maybe some Blue Marans. If we get some girls, we will then be able to add chocolate colored eggs to our collection, and my little egg rainbow will be complete.