Monday, January 2, 2012

Eating your own Harvest!

One of my families main goals for 2012 is try to grow 50% of our the organic food we eat. There really is nothing like serving a meal to your family when you know that you all had a part in putting that food on the plate.

Now 50% for a family of 8 is a lot of produce and we are not fully expecting to be able to do that right away, maybe not even this year, but we are working towards that goal. There are things that we will never be able to produce like rice, wheat, or of course things that don't grow in our climate. In saying that our goal is the try and change our eating habits, so we eat less of what we can't grow and more of what we can grow, when we can grow it.

We are starting a new habit in our house at the moment, were the children, my husband or myself, take a bowl, bucket, basket into the yard in the morning and see what is growing and ready to pick. Then we take it inside and start to plan what we can make for the days meals. The children are loving it, as am I. Today for example we found that our chickens had laid 16 eggs! (We have twenty chickens). Which was Great! So the children and I started planning what can we make with those eggs. My children always want boiled eggs, but I managed to convince them to try something else. We were given a leg of ham for Christmas, so decided to make a double recipe quiche with ham and other veggies that we found growing in the garden, such as silver beet, onions, purple dragon carrots, and add some corn from the freezer.

Then they found some butter beans and I had broccoli in the freezer, so we make and butter bean and broccoli salad, which is always a favourite in our house. It went down a treat! Everyone was satisfied and so were our spirits knowing that most of that food was grown or given to us. What a feeling!

Now not everyday can be like this. Tomorrow there will be no butter beans because they were all picked today, but there will be beetroots, and the tomatoes are starting to grow and even a few are ripening, the corn is growing so fast, and soon we will be eating that.

Also with all this harvesting go on, we must remember to aim for planting at least one thing a day, so that in months to come there will be other things in the garden ready to harvest.

What an exciting journey we are on. I totally love that idea of getting more and more away from the supermarket. If only I didn't need to buy toilet paper. Oh well, maybe if I order that online and get it delivered I can skip that stop on shopping day.

Happy Gardening, and I would love to hear your food or gardening goals.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a great adventure! How is it going?

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    1. Hi Erica, We have had some mixed success. We have enjoyed loads of potatoes, raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini, and a few other salad foods. However we have learnt that our soil here is quite poor so we need to spend time healing it, to make it productive. So lots of loads of horse poo are needed. All so my father had cancer earlier int he year and passed away about a month ago, so we have let it slide a bit. We are hoping to get it all back up and running in a month or so, and plant ourselves a GAPS garden. :0) Thanks for reading.

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