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| Cutter and Penelope' |
A little history lesson first.
Now Erin and I had decide to "Go Organic" back when we were pregnant with Luke, so since then we've been drinking Organic milk, vegetables when possible and generally swearing off heavily processed foods and things with hydrogenated oils in it. We've also really limited our High Fructose Corn Syrup intake, but that's a story for another time.
A few years ago we watched a movie called "Supersize me" about a guy who ate nothing but McDonald's 3 meals a day for 30 days. It was quite enlightening to say the least, but it kept referencing a movie called Food Inc. We watched that one via Netflix and WOW!!! It totally opened our eyes to the corporate agriculture model which America uses today. We learned about big names in this movement of "back to landers" like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms and his happy pigs that lived in the woods. He raises chickens on pasture where they can display their God given Chicki-ness. Joel believes in keeping food simple, and allowing the animals to have a good life, even up until the end when they give their life for ours.
And this is where we jumped in. While living in Sicily we met our wonderful friend Emilio and Mariska of Azienda Agricola Infantino, they introduced us to olive picking and pressing, making homemade lye soap, the importance of not just the food of a meal but the experience of the meal with family and friends. We spent many a night at their little house on the Mineo hill eating pasta ragu and fresh artichokes and sipping wine he had made earlier in the year, sharing each others culture. That was when Emilio told me something to this day I still feel is profound. I had asked him how he does it, financially, when it seemed he worked very little in town, unemployment in Sicily is very high. He looked me in the eyes and said, Casey it's not so important what ($) comes in, it's more important how much goes out. It made perfect sense. He had a modest garden on that hill, but he harvested wild asparagus up the road, picked porchini mushrooms and snails on the roadside, his drinking water came from an artisan well up the mountain from his house. He did everything he could with reusing, repurpose or bartering. He also introduced us to the wonderful local markets. While still in Sicily, I experimented with growing a few things in containers like peas, carrots, potatoes, and hot peppers. It was more of a "proof of concept" than anything else, but it wet our appetite for gardening.
Flash Forward to July 2010 when we moved into our rental house, our last rental house in the Navy, we asked the landlord if he minded if we put in a small garden. Of course living in the rural Eastern Shore Virginia, closest stoplight is 16 miles away, he said no problem. We dug up 6 plots each 4ft X 8ft. It looked like we were burying bodies in the backyard. We chose this way vice a traditional row garden because we wanted to try Square Foot Gardening. It seemed well in concept but unless you make your growing soil like Mel Bartholomew recommends, it's troublesome. Our first season, we planted tons of small tomatoes, beans carrots, lettuces, cukes, and even a watermelon. We learned a lot with that first season. Like weeds still come, even when the mosquitoes keep you from the garden, carrots of any other color besides orange generally aren't as sweet, our dirt was pretty poor, and apparently there is this thing called mulch that really makes gardening easier. I grew buckets of small cherry and roma tomatoes, that I made in to sauce, ketchup, tomato soup, and pasta sauce.
Come April of 2011 we took another step in the direction of self sufficiency. We got chickens. With the amount of baking that Erin does, and free range organic eggs at like $5 a dozen we decided some layers would be a good addition. Once again we asked the landlord if he would mind if we got some chickens. he mentioned something about a neighborhood covenant against livestock, and a rooster wouldn't be on the shopping list would it? We decided to risk it, after all, our landlord lives down the street and has horses, and everyone else has dogs roaming the road, and there was a rooster somewhere I could hear through the woods. We decide we'd get 6 laying hens. We chose 3 Buff Orpington and 3 Speckled Sussex. Both breeds are great dual purpose birds, both laying well and dressing out nice on the table as meat birds. We didn't want to order from a big chicken house, we've heard bad things about mail order chicks. We also wanted heritage breeds and from a local source. Needless to say no one around here had them, but we did find a small hatchery in Holly Springs that expected some to hatch soon. My mom agreed to pick them up for us and deliver them next time she came up. I built a small 4x8 chicken tractor, which would allow them protection and the ability to move them around the yard to have fresh grass and forage daily. Our six girls arrived as a surprise to the kids, we let them name them. We welcomed Molly, April, Gypsy, Rose, Penelope and Cortana to the family. They were 3 day old chicks peeping their little hearts out in the cardboard brooder we made to keep the warm till they could go outside. We lost Rose while she was still a week or two old. Molly and Cortana quickly outgrew the others, they were so cute. When we finally moved them outdoors it became apparent when Cortana began crowing, badly, that we had some explaining to do with the neighbors. No one seemed to mind.
So this year we added 3 pickup truck beds full of manure to our beds, extended them and put wood borders around them to keep the weeds out. Currently we have seedlings under the grow lights in the kitchen trying to get a head start on our tomatoes and peppers. We'll see......
