Getting to one percent feels like getting a point in a game that would have otherwise been a shut out — and despite the tasty food we’ve harvested sporadically in the past 10 months, there have been many times, even recently, that I’ve felt aced by the yard, certain that we’d come up not just short, but so short as to risk insignificance. One percent feels like something got done.
Today we celebrate having grown, harvested, and eaten 1.009 percent of our annual calories from our suburban, less-than-a-fifth-of-an-acre yard.
To get to one percent (15,000 calories), we grew 33 varieties of 21 different foods. Among those edibles, we ate 72 Husky cherry tomatoes and 14 heads of Little Gem Romain lettuce; 85 Snow Pea pods and 39 cups of raw Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard (netting just 272 calories — it’s worth more cooked, we’ve found); and four kinds of tomato, three kinds of carrot, and three kinds of potato. We tried 12 varieties of vegetable we’d never tasted before.
We made jam.
Nearly a third of our overall calories, about 4,000, accumulated in the first half of June, a month in which we consumed bags of potatoes — with more still at the ready. This month we’ve also eaten carrots (Purple Haze and Pink Dragon), green beans (Contender and Kentucky Wonder), Early Crookneck squash, a few strawberries and Anne berries, Mulberries, and Roma tomatoes.
And it all came without the baggage that trails industrial agriculture, the questions of where from and how dirty and at what cost. Our property’s better for our sowing and growing, and with any luck our dent in the world’s ecology got a bit shallower.
Perhaps shallower still in these remaining weeks.
Congrats on reaching the 1% marker! I’m certain that the first one percent is the most difficult. Once those chickens start producing eggs and Charlotte settles down, you’ll really be in business.
This is seriously impressive. Nice job.