Eat The Yard

What does it mean to have harvested and eaten 1,000 calories of food from a yard?  It’s a dubious milestone in the context of my overall objective.  Why?  Because it took most of August to get there, and to be on track we should have consumed somewhere in the neighborhood of 19,065 calories by now [...]

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This objective has all kinds of oddities wrapped up in it – little efforts I never imagined engaging in, not even up to the moment of doing.  Take today, for instance.  In trying to reduce the percent of our property covered in grass, I spent part of the morning removing a rather modest square-footage from [...]

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Following the advice of a Guide to Growing Delicious Vegetables, Fruits & Herbs, I dug up some spuds for which the green tops had died back.  I’d planted a few rows of Purple Viking potatoes late in the season (end of May) — not ideal.  However, the foot-high plants were one of the few things [...]

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We had my folks over for dinner a few days ago.  I served up a Caesar salad with Husky cherry tomatoes from the garden, which went well alongside my wife’s excellent meat loaf and baked mac and cheese.  But my mom one-upped us with her homegrown contribution: a pie stuffed full of Anna Apples from [...]

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At the Del Mar Fair with some friends back in July we spent time perusing the landscapes local businesses enter in competition each year.  A good place for ideas and to escape the blazing heat that dominates the otherwise exposed fairgrounds.  One display emphasized edibles and grew everything off the ground in containers — a [...]

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It’s harder to hurt a rabbit than I thought. Since the biblical devastation of our spring/summer crop I have been talking all kinds of tough about the creatures that share this fifth acre with my wife and I — taking aggressive stands against all manner of animals that are completely hypocritical since I’ve been preaching [...]

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My wife and I moved into our first home about a year ago: A little 1950s Ranch that clocks in at just under 900 square feet and sits on an 8,250 square foot lot, which is right around the American median in terms of land.  Less than a fifth of an acre.  Great view.  Lots [...]

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