Ever since my surgery last fall, my various health issues have been in a flare. The stress of the holidays didn't help, but honestly, it's really been the awful so-called winter weather we have had this year here in Michigan. My body is very attuned to barometric pressure, wind, and temperature changes, and we have had a plethora of those this winter. Temps swinging wildly from the teens to the fifties in just a day or two, massive storms rolling through with very short periods of high pressure, and lots of wind.
I've gotten to the point that I've even started a trial of the Autoimmune Protocol, a dietary and lifestyle change designed to find my food and lifestyle triggers for my various health issues (the autoimmune ones, in particular). Now, I've done elimination diets before, and I already know I have several food allergies, but I'd been "cheating" and eating those almost daily, so I'm doing a modified version of the AIP in order to see if I'm allergic to other things in those food families and a few other things. The biggest issue has been breakfast, to be honest, with the second biggest issue being just how much cooking and meal prep I have to do with so little energy. Still, it's important to see what I really need to cut from my diet to make sure I have the energy and low pain levels I will need this spring to put the garden in. One of the foods I'm testing is duck eggs. I know I'm good with duck meat (tried it, actually felt better for a day or so), so we are planning to do meat ducks this spring and summer. I'm not looking forward to butchering ducks (they're so cute!), but this way, we will know what they've eaten and that they have been cared for well so they should be safe for me to eat. I don't think I'm allergic or have bad reactions to duck eggs, though Robert thinks he might, but if I'm going to make them a more frequent protein (I need to up my protein levels to keep my kidney happy), I can't take the chance. So, no duck eggs for all of Lent, and then we'll see how I handle the reintroduction. Same with chicken eggs, to be honest, just to see. Eggs are such a common allergen that it seems silly not to double check. I've already started some seeds with more to do this week and every week from here through May. We ended up with three new ducks (rescues--a friend of Robert's is moving and can't move with the ducks), and they are just lovely, wonderful ducks. Here's a video:
0 Comments
Firstly, I would like to apologize for not having written a blog post or updated anything for awhile. I have been fighting some serious health stuff, and with that on top of Thanksgiving preparations, it's all been a bit much lately. My plans are to get to the point of a weekly update, but we'll see how my health goes.
I have been involved in some heated conversations on Twitter lately about veganism and would like to explain my thinking a bit more thoroughly. Veganism isn't just about not eating animal products of any kind, for what it's worth, but instead a total lifestyle change focused on causing as little harm to all life as possible, and I honor those who can do it. I'm disabled, and I have a lot of health issues, at least some of which seem to stem from having weird genes. This means that what works for so many people, either in diet changes or medication, doesn't work for me. This also means that I don't tend to recommend everyone do what I have to do to manage my health because it definitely is a more personal set of behaviors and choices after years of trying things only to find they don't work. With my combination of allergies and health issues these days, I eat some meats, some forms of dairy (preferring sheep's milk when possible) in small amounts, and eggs. My husband and I have been talking more and more about the monetary costs of meat as well as the environmental costs of meat, and we are looking for ways to raise or hunt our own as well as cut down on consumption but not to a point where it negatively impacts my health. When I was much younger, I developed massive pain, and all the doctors agreed that it was endometriosis and that I had to give up meat, possibly dairy, too, in order to manage my pain. So, I did. I was ovo-vegetarian for ten years, and while it helped with my pain (that was due to chronic appendicitis, not endometriosis at that time) and allergy load, it caused other health problems that no one knew what to do about. I tried various variations of vegetarianism, but honestly, I didn't get better until after I reintroduced meat into my diet. My doctors didn't understand it, I didn't understand it, but the lab numbers didn't lie. The theory at the time was that, for whatever reason, my body wasn't processing things quite right. That theory has been the most consistently correct one ever since, as we've found that my body doesn't process medications the way they're designed to be metabolized, not to mention the weird allergies that have shown up here later in life. All of that to say, I respect those who choose to be vegetarian or vegan, and I honor that they are doing what is best for them and their lives as well as the global environment. I wish more people would choose that path, as we know that the costs of eating meat, in terms of personal as well as global costs, are just too high. For some of us, though, we cannot stop eating meat and other animal products if we want to live or be functional. There are many disabilities/health conditions/diseases that make going vegan an impossible thing, and that needs to be respected, too. On our mini urban farm, we raise ducks and grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Our ducks are rescues, starting with our first duck, Peep (the white Pekin drake). The ducks joined our mini farm last spring in an effort to try to cut down on the huge numbers of slugs in our garden. They eat the pests that cut down on our garden yields, we feed them from that garden as well as a supplemental feed to make sure they are healthy, they (well, just Petunia so far) lay eggs that we gather and eat, and we make sure they are safe from predators and have fresh water aplenty. It's a symbiotic relationship, and we plan on them living a long time. While we have been thinking of getting more ducklings in the spring to raise as meat ducks and help with the worst time for pests in the garden, we have not moved forward with those plans just yet, in large part due to zoning laws as well as concerns about whether or not I could handle the extra work. The kids and my husband hunt, and traditionally, we have fished as well. No one has gotten a deer yet this year, though they have tried, but in the event that they do, we will butcher it as a family and use every bit as respectfully as we can. We aren't the "take the horns or head for a trophy and leave the rest" hunters, and those people frankly sicken me. Hunters are to respect all of the life in the area they hunt in, and we are to honor those we kill by thanking them for giving us what we need to eat and then making sure nothing is wasted. Same with fishing. This spring, we plan on changing our pool over to a natural aquaponics pool, stocking it with local fish as well as plants. Yes, if all goes to plan, we will be harvesting both the plants and fish for food for our family, and if we have enough, we will sell some locally as well. The use of chlorine and other chemicals to keep the pool the way it's supposedly supposed to be has become more and more disturbing to my husband and me, especially given how many frogs live in and around the pool, and by eliminating the use of those chemicals, we hope to provide local wildlife with a safe water source and our family with another sustainable food source. What we are working hard to reduce is our consumption of factory farmed meats, dairy products, and non-local plant foods. To be honest, the money situation makes this complicated, but we are working on putting the funds together to buy meat from local small farms that raise their animals ethically and humanely. The costs are much higher, but the quality is better, and it's better for the local environment. We definitely want to support local small farms instead of the massive factory farms that damage everything around them, from the animals to the workers to our lakes and waterways to nearby lands. In our opinion, factory farms need to be eliminated even though that means overall prices will rise. Monoculture farming, especially as it is done now, also needs to be completely changed, and it is our opinion that local, small farms using organic, sustainable practices, especially urban and suburban farms, need to be given priority status. It is very possible to feed our population as it is now with smaller farms using permaculture practices, but that won't happen until we break the big ag businesses and monopolies. Humans have, throughout history, generally been omnivores. We domesticated some wild animals millennia ago, in part for meat, but in all reality, most of the animals were not eaten on a regular basis. The British Christmas goose tradition, for example, was just that: one goose was slaughtered for the Christmas feast on the small farm, but most farms had more than one goose. The modern practice of some farms to slaughter all their birds in the fall is a recent one. Most farms kept most of their animals all through the year, only slaughtering what they needed and only the animals they could afford to lose. Meat sources were diverse depending on the local environment, but most people did not get meat every day or even necessarily every week. Farmed animals were supplemented by local fish and wildlife, if that was allowed, and even things like cheese took a lot of time and resources to make even a small amount. The modern diet of meat and/or animal products in every meal is a very recent thing and definitely a more American thing. Most humans historically couldn't afford to eat that much meat that often and instead treated meat as a special thing to have once a week or once in awhile and more as a condiment than as the main focus. We know now due to overwhelming evidence that putting such a huge focus on meat in our diets isn't healthy for us overall, and it definitely has far too high a cost for our environment. It's time to go back to time-honored practices when it comes to diet and lifestyles. In general, we all need to cut down or eliminate our consumption of animal products, and we need more small farms that use sustainable, organic practices. In his book, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, Jonathan Safran Foer makes a strong case for going back to smaller, sustainable farms but more especially cutting way back on meat consumption or cutting it out entirely. One idea he has is to make meat a part of just one meal a day, perhaps dinner. In reading the book for the community read this year, my husband and I have been talking about how this probably would work for my health issues and also be far more sustainable for our family and the environment. There are still details to work out (especially with a teen on the high school swim team eating enough for another 2-3 people), but we feel this is for the best for all of us. We are working toward growing, raising, foraging, hunting, and fishing for what we need and cutting way down on our consumption of anything from factory farms or imported from far away. While I understand that, for many, being vegan is more about ethics, morals, or faith, for us it isn't possible due to health problems. We respect and honor those who chose to refuse to use animals at all, and we hope that others can respect our way of life and our choices as well.
There are many different terms for what we do, and there is a major reason why I use the term "urban farm" even though we don't entirely meet that definition. Let's take a look at some of the terms used for what a great podcaster calls "the farmish kind of life."
First of all, we have to define what kind of life that is. For a lot of us, this life is about sustainability, feeding our families, trying to do better for the environment, health issues, tight budgets, and more. This life revolves around gardening, raising small numbers of animals (not factory farming, in other words--I am not judging you on the number of ducks or chickens you have), preserving food, foraging for foods at certain times of the year, crafting, and more. Everyone does it differently, but these are the common threads in most discussions. I do want to say that people choosing this lifestyle come from all areas of the political spectrum and live all over the world, though there are many myths about who chooses to live off the land, buy less, and follow old traditions. Not only do we not all agree on the politics, but we don't all agree on what to call this lifestyle, either. Most people use "farm" to mean any kind of business that raises or grows foodstuffs for money. Most people mean those bigger operations with many, many acres of fields or many, many animals, but the real bottom line in the definition is that farmers are people who do it for the money and as their profession. Traditionally, that's not what it always meant, as it meant anyone who grew or raised food, even subsistence farmers (a term that isn't as much in use these days). Subsistence farming is about growing and/or raising your own food for your family and maybe selling whatever extra you have, and it's a term with a lot of poverty undertones. Then again, these days, it isn't like family farms are making that much money, but I digress. Many people use the term "homesteading" to refer to this particular lifestyle and call their home and/or land their "homestead." This particular term seems to be the most popular, but it definitely comes with a bad history here in the US. The Homestead Act was a law that saw many white families moving into First Nations territories and stealing their land, and we still live with that colonialist, genocidal history. Now, I have seen people push back against that historical reality in social media, especially those who are carrying on a family tradition of farming, saying the land was empty. The land wasn't empty. Even in the Little House on the Prairie books, Laura describes seeing Native Americans (in really racist ways, but I digress), and that's because her dad actually moved them at one point illegally onto a Native American reservation. This continent was populated by hundreds of millions of people before the Europeans came to colonize and take the land, and they were killed off through disease and planned genocide. There wasn't just one Trail of Tears, in other words. This makes using the term "homestead" problematic. While it is accurate in that almost all of us are living and growing/raising food on stolen land, it is a term that drips in blood but has been whitewashed over the many decades since. I can understand why others use the term, though, especially since it is more accurate in many ways if families are living that more traditional life but not selling their animals or crops. An older term that I remember being thrown around when I was a kid is "hobby farm." It encompasses the raising of animals and growing of food but diminishes the money aspect. It also is often used in a demeaning way: a hobby farm isn't a real farm, not really, just a bit of a hobby. Anyone who has done any level of farming knows that it's hard work, and many of us with serious hobbies know that they can take up a lot of time and resources. Connected to this term is what my stepmom used to call my dad, "gentleman farmer." It has the same feel--someone who farms for fun and isn't about making money and therefore isn't that serious about it. A newer, amalgam term I have seen used a little bit is "farmstead." It is usually used interchangeably with "homestead." The people I've seen use that tend to use it more to say that they live there, they are mostly working on feeding their own families, but they do sell a bit of their surplus or to help the family's bottom line. This one, though, still has those colonialism hints, and I really haven't seen very many use it, definitely not as much as "homestead." Personally, while I occasionally use "homesteading" to describe our lifestyle, I prefer calling our home a "mini urban farm" even though we haven't sold anything yet. I guess we're more subsistence farmers or hobby farmers, though we are quite serious about feeding our family with what we grow and raise. We have a tight budget and teens to feed, so we haven't sold any surplus, but the back garden, the ducks, the kitchen garden, what we forage on our property, our garden containers around the property, and our herb beds take up a real place in our family budget and plans. Should we be able to go forward with our plans to turn our pool into a natural pond and grow food and raise fish in it, not to mention raising more ducks for meat next summer, there is the possibility of being able to sell some extra, and the money would be very helpful. I'm not sure anyone would say we had gone beyond "hobby farm," though. While we aren't as "urban" as we would be a few streets over, we still are within the urban area of our city, and we grow and raise food for our immediate and extended family. In my eyes, it makes more sense to call our home a mini urban farm, then, given where we are and the current size of our operation, than to use the term "homestead." It also is a reference to something my 17 year old son said when asked to help with the back garden: "Mom, I don't do farming." It's become a bit of a family joke. Side note: "Permaculture" refers to a particular kind of farming/gardening, and I find this particular website is the most helpful in understanding all that that term entails and learning more. We use a lot of permaculture techniques, and we believe in their main tenets, especially that of caring for the people, all people (one of the three main tenets, the others being "fair share" and "care for the earth"). Permaculture has many facets, but the main goal is for humans to live in a sustainable way that enriches the planet. As seen in the link above, many people use "permaculture" and "homesteading" interchangeably. So, in the end, what does this lifestyle really look like, regardless of what term you use? Basically, it means that we grow as much of our own food as possible; raise animals for food and services (like pest control or weeding); preserve that food and any other food we have hunted, foraged, or bought as much as possible through canning, freezing, dehydrating, and root cellaring; and provide for as many of our own needs as possible. This means that anyone anywhere can do it. Even if you're in an apartment, you can grow herbs or have a plot in a community garden, can vegetables and fruits you buy or barter for, knit or sew as much of your own clothing as possible, and as always, support local farmers in every way possible for you and your family. For us, that means garden beds all over, plants in containers in various locations, four silly ducks, and lots of work that my husband, with his long work hours, and I, with my disability issues, do the best we can to finish in time. I'd like to say it's a cheaper way to live, and it is in the long run, but it isn't cheap. I'd like to say it's simpler, but since I'm still dealing with the harvest from this fall, I'm not so sure of that. It is an enjoyable and highly satisfying way to live, though, and in the end, it is more sustainable for our family and the planet. The weather has been particularly brutal for my fibromyalgia last week and this week so far. That means that I haven't been able to do half of what I've needed to get done. I've finished a couple of knitted items but not what I've needed to get done before Saturday. I've strained some herbal tinctures and oils and made a couple of things but not everything on my list. I haven't cleared the gardens and prepped them for winter, which has to be the biggest sin of all.
Next week, we might even get snow! It is almost Halloween, the leaves are already carpeting everything around on our farmstead, and I don't have all the beds prepared for winter. The garlic is planted, sure, but the old plants aren't all out, the leaves haven't been collected and spread around on the garden beds, the weeds in a few places haven't been chopped and dropped. I haven't even cut back the hibiscus. All I can do is a little bit every day, and that's just going to have to be enough, I guess. I still have more canning, too, and freezers to clean out in preparation for hunting season. Oh my, is my to-do list a mile long! What is still on your fall to-do list? Fall is decidedly here, a bit earlier than we would have liked. Last night was our first frost advisory of the fall, and there was a rush to protect and grab out of the garden what we could. Fall is one of the busiest times for any farm of any size. It's harvest season, so it's time to grab everything out of the fields or gardens and get it put up for the year. Our mini urban farm is no exception. Since late summer, we've been drying and freezing and canning everything we possibly can from the garden, and now, most of it is in (still getting some green beans). Apples are in, and I'm in the midst of putting up enough to last us through the year. My son and I went to Schultz's Fruitridge Farm in Mattawan, and we got a half bushel of honeycrisps, a half bushel of galas, a peck of mutsus, and a peck of jonagolds. This blend of apples has made for great apple pie jam, apple pie filling, and apple butter. The dried apples have survived the kids so far, but I won't bet on that staying true for long. I have hidden some deep in the deep freezer in hopes of being able to line my apple pies with them or cut them up into homemade granola. We are overrun with squash, so I have been making dried pureed squash and squash butter, and as good as the squash butter was, I have to make more of that. One pint of that plus one cup of cream and two eggs make a pumpkin pie, supposedly, which I haven't tried yet but want to. Too bad I can't can it and have to freeze it instead. Either way, we have more than enough squash to make more of that as well as pressure can some for various recipes this winter. The ducks have been very happy with the cooler weather, and Petunia is still laying an egg a day while the two Rouen ladies just haven't been laying at all. Petunia is quite the vacuum, eating constantly if she's awake, which makes sense considering how many eggs a week she's putting out. She's been skipping the pool some days, but the other day, it was cool, and I was out there long enough that she decided to take a quick dip and get cleaned up in between voraciously eating everything in sight. The rains have started really hitting, though, in a way we like to call the Michigan Monsoon Season: Fall Edition, and frosts are around the corner. The temperatures are slowly trending down, and it's already hunting season. It's time for comfort foods, more canning, and putting the gardens to bed. That's coming up this weekend, the beginning of the serious effort to put the gardens to bed for the year while building soil.
We utilize a blend of no-dig methods, and this fall, we are trying the Bokashi style of composting (in an effort to control the smell and make it easier for me to do). My husband will be creating more wood chips this fall as well as running our piles and piles of leaves through the chipper to break them down a bit before putting them on the many garden beds. Ultimately, we use a variation of the lasagna gardening method and put layers of different soil builders down, which really cuts down on weeds and gets us seriously amazing yields. The Chesnok garlic I ordered is coming in tomorrow, and that's getting planted in a new bed this weekend. It's time to get that in before the real frosts hit, and we are planting much more garlic this year so that we truly have all of our own garlic for a whole year. While we have fallen short of having a year's worth of food for the whole family this year, we have far more in storage than we did a year ago, and the kids are already happy with a lot of what we've put up. Here's hoping we at least survive the winter with two teenage boys! It can be hard for me to remember that not everyone knows how to do a lot of what I do. I've been hanging around the homesteading groups more and more online, mostly on Facebook, and sometimes, I am surprised by some of the questions or laugh at the lists of skills every homesteader needs that pop up over and over again on Pinterest. Today, it struck me, though, that I don't think my kids have the skills that I was raised with, that most people don't.
I grew up on what, these days, would be called a homestead at both homes. My parents divorced when I was very young, remarrying soon after, which was just not done in the late seventies, early eighties. Not in our rural area of Michigan, anyway. Both families, though, were homesteading types, from Dad wanting to raise our own beef cattle and hogs (just a few times each but enough to really help the food bill) to Mom having horses, from my stepmom putting in a massive garden in an effort to feed all four of us kids (my three older brothers were all in sports and growing like weeds--let's just say I would have done the exact same thing) to my ex-stepdad actually working on the big family farm. It was just how things were, not to be questioned (though all of us kids questioned it more than once, especially when weeding the massive garden). My stepmom had been a home economics teacher (what today is called Family and Consumer Science or Life Skills), and she was better than Martha Stewart. I don't say that lightly. She didn't have the money or the massive staff that Martha does, and she still managed to outshine that woman in every way except in cooking. My mom was a high school art teacher who had grown up on a chicken ranch in southern California, and not only is she still the best cook I know, but she taught me all kinds of things that, when I was a kid, I thought were normal, that everyone knew. I resented the perfection my stepmother required, and I didn't want to learn so many of the lessons she drummed into me, but these days, I thank her for all those tears and periods of sulking anger. I figured out early on that I just didn't have my mom's artistic talent, but Mom, bless her, always kept trying. Mom taught me how to draw, use inks and paints in various ways, throw a pot or make pinch pottery, do calligraphy, cook, dry herbs and apple slices, freeze sweet corn, ride and care for horses, garden, and so much more. My stepmom taught me how to do crewel embroidery (my first 4H project at the age of six), do country arts painting (of which she's a renowned teacher), iron properly, arrange flowers, sew, bake, can, freeze foods, clean things just so, garden, what so many wildflowers and trees are, the different songbirds, tin punch, and so much more. My tin punch skills are horrid, and I cannot paint in any style well at all. My mom taught me how to knit when I was twelve from what she remembered her aunt teaching her as a child, and when I quickly exhausted her knowledge, she took me to the five-and-dime in town and got me a Leisure Arts pamphlet and real knitting needles. I taught myself the rest and then taught myself how to spin yarn when I was 14. I took the required home ec class in seventh grade and signed up for it again in eighth only to find that I already had a lot of the skills and got in trouble, thanks to Eric listening to me and agreeing with me, when our group's tacos (not cooked exactly as told) were considered the best tasting and the most popular. I'm not great at sewing (hand sewn or machine), but I can and do okay. My embroidery skills are all right, and I indulge in those, mostly during the winter, even though what I produce isn't perfect. So, I put foods up from our garden, and while I always read up on things and do a lot of research, a lot of what I do is just what I learned growing up. Taking care of the ducks' bedding isn't much different than mucking the stalls in my parents' barns growing up. I can sew a little, enough to get by, and I bake our family's bread at least once a week. Every season, I change the decorations in the house, including the kitchen towels, silk flower arrangements, and door wreaths (making new ones if needed), just because that's what we did growing up and my house doesn't feel like a home if I don't. Honestly, even though I've tried to show my kids how to do all this and they've helped from time to time, I really don't think they would know how to have a small homestead or mini urban farm. They would be like so many others, turning to social media to ask questions from those of us who were taught by parents and grandparents and have been doing it for years. A lot of it is that I didn't want to force anything on them when they were young other than the most important skills, but a lot of it is that I didn't want the surly pouting or the anger at being forced to learn something they didn't want to have anything to do with. While they enjoy the jams and pies and eat entire loaves of bread in a day, they don't want to know how they're made or where they are from. Which is a bit sad. I do wonder about the future. When times get hard, and they will again because they always do, how will my children and their friends make it? Will there be a Victory Garden program to teach them how to grow their own food and preserve it? Will I still be around to help them learn how to keep a sourdough starter alive and bake their own bread or know when to pick the squash and how to pressure can it or make pumpkin butter? I do wonder, though I am heartened by so many Gen Xers like my husband and myself returning to this harder-yet-simpler life and so many Millenials jumping in feet first. Maybe I will find a way to pass along these skills yet. We're looking at getting our first frost in less than a month's time, and this weekend, we start ripping out the old plants and getting the garden ready for late fall and winter. That means that I've been gathering data and reviewing plans for next spring already, especially in figuring out what to plant.
Last winter, when I was planning our expanded garden areas, I got stuck on figuring out how many plants of each kind to put in. Okay, I first got stuck on what to plant. It's all those gorgeous garden catalogues! They tempt me with pretty pictures of this and that. I think I finally figured out a system that has worked for us. Figure out what you eat--and what you might. This is the real starting spot. Yes, it's really fun to grow spring peas and watch something in your garden grow fast and be all pretty and edible quickly, but if no one eats them (*coughmykids*), then they're a waste of money and garden space. I sat down and went through old shopping lists to see what I wrote down over and over again. That not only helped me figure out what to plant but about how much we went through in year. Then, you need to think about what your family might eat. Start with something in the same family. If they like kale chips, they might like collards. If they like cherry tomatoes, they might like eating tomatoes (Brandywine, my all-time favorite, was the first fresh tomato I could get my husband to eat). Honestly, only try a couple of new things because you don't want to end up with tons of something you have to put up only to find out the family hates it. I put in zucchini for the first time in forever this year only to find out just how much my family doesn't like it. Good thing the ducks like it! That, and I found an amazing zucchini-tomato salsa recipe that my son absolutely loves (the picky son who doesn't like much of what I can). Start with a chart. I used Melissa Norris's chart for figuring out how much to plant, and honestly, I scaled it down a touch from her numbers. I knew that, being disabled, I would love to grow enough to feed us all for a year, but that's just not happening. Not with having to feed three teens! There are other charts available on Pinterest and around the internet, and if all else fails, it's fun to see what was recommended in the old Victory Garden pamphlets. One thing that I found with the charts is that they can be based on more than you usually eat. If you don't do several tomato-based dinners every week, then you might not need to put up quite that much sauce. That's where starting with your old grocery lists really helps. Jump in and plant. In all reality, once you have some decent numbers, just run with them. Plant your seeds and seedlings, making sure to plant a few extra due to some not making it, and go with it. In reality, some things will go wrong while other things turn into weeds. That's gardening. Whatever you plan, understand that Nature will mess with that plan a lot. This last summer, I planted 16 broccoli plants and lost all but one (I took notes, and I have plans for next year on that!). That was seriously disappointing, but that's gardening. I also planted my usual 3 squash plants per hill, and the buttercups and pie pumpkins went weed-level wild. I had no idea that squash could grow quite like that! We got a bumper crop of squash, but the brassicas all got devoured before I could save them. Gather data along with crops. Now, if you really want, you can keep exact numbers, but I've just been putting on my garden spreadsheet how much we've been harvesting from each crop (massive, a lot, decent, not much, a little). That's helped me document what grows well where since we were experimenting a bit with a few new beds, and it's helped me figure out which varieties grow best here. Our roma tomatoes just never flourished. Never really grew big, didn't seem happy. Our cherry tomatoes and brandywines, on the other hand, grew like weeds and have had amazing flavor. Put up your harvest, and put it in a spreadsheet. This is my new trick this year that I'm really excited about: harvest spreadsheet! As I've been putting foods up, from canning to dehydrating to freezing, I've been tracking how much I've been making. Then, I'll keep track on when we run out. That way, I can plant more accurate numbers next year. So, for example, I have put up 14 pints of tomato sauce so far this year (I know, not the most impressive numbers, but I had surgery this fall, and that's really slowed me down). Now, I figure that we make spaghetti about three times a month, so I would need 36 pints of sauce for a year's worth. I'm curious to see how long these 14 jars last, though. If they get me halfway or more through the year, then I know my 36 pint number is wrong. Same with all the other produce I've put up. Have I frozen enough green beans? Probably not, but this way, I can see how long they last and have an idea of how much more to plant next year. Complicating this figuring is that my sons tend to be blind when looking for stuff in the pantry or freezer, so I'm also going to take into account any serious lag when they don't use up the last jar because they don't see it or think they'll get in trouble if they do. Even taking that into account, though, I should be able to figure out how much to plant and put up next year. Always, take time to self-reflect and ask for feedback. This is the stage I'm in right now this fall as I start putting up apples. I've been asking all three kids what they would like more of all year, and I've pretty consistently been hearing that they want more apple pie filling (and the pies to go with that), apple butter (that one was a surprise to me), more jams of all kinds, and pumpkin butter. Getting feedback and taking notes on it, particularly with the zucchini salsa being such a hit, has been an important part of the process this fall. The bigger part has been self-reflection, though. What have I been able to do? Nowhere near as much as I'd hoped last winter and spring, that's for sure. What have I regretted? Losing so many of the plums I bought, losing the dang broccoli. What would I do differently? Plant the potatoes differently next year and plant more. It's important to make notes of these kinds of questions and what the answers seem to be. I have a garden binder with worksheets, planting calendars, and lots of notes, and then I have my Google Drive spreadsheets so my husband and I can both add to them as needed. I really recommend having a garden binder or journal where you can write down your data but, more importantly, your self-reflections and realizations. So, we'll see how the rest of this gardening season goes and how things end up next year. Post in the comments any lessons you've learned from this year's garden that you'd like to share, even if it's something as simple as never plant broccoli and other brassicas you don't plan on spraying every day to save from the dang cabbage worms. |
CarinaI'm a 40s something disabled mom living the life on our small urban farm. Archives
April 2022
Categories |