A novice's attempt to get 15 percent of his food from his suburban fifth acre
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 31st, 2010
We will end the year having raised and eaten 1.22 percent of our annual calories on our suburban, less-than-a-fifth of an acre — and while it’s not the final percentage we’d hoped for, it’s a fitting and fine number. Besides healthy-in-every-sense fruits, vegetables, and eggs, the number represents the lessened demand we placed on land [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 30th, 2010
I expected a thoughtful discourse in response to my July 22 post, “What Price edibles?”, which dealt with my decision to poison a few squirrels on our property, among other topics, and I appreciate the suggestions that came with that debate, some of which I’ve addressed in “What Price edibles?” or other posts as to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 29th, 2010
Egg salad and fried egg sandwiches, brownies, several batches of chocolate chip cookies, and lots of pancakes: Since our chickens started laying on June 28, we have collected 37 eggs — and for the last 11 days straight we’ve gotten at least two each day. It took a few weeks of fits and starts for [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 22nd, 2010
I have tried many things to keep safe this latest round of edibles, so it’s hard to say which of the many worked best, which was the bellwether of our current good fortune. Likely, our flourishing garden results from a confluence that would be hard to parse. Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 12th, 2010
Despite industrial agriculture’s co-opting and subsequent diminishing of the descriptor “free range”, it is rewarding to be able to describe our chickens as such and mean it. They aren’t limited to a euphemistic “access to the outdoors” — typically a meager chicken run meeting the minimum USDA standard and meant to dupe consumers. Our pullets [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 6th, 2010
How many iterations can a single season’s garden have? Since sowing our first sets of Contender bush beans on March 12, I have reconstituted our warm-season plantings four times, resulting in a landscape completely different than that of early March — and certainly one far removed from what I conceived in winter, when all there [...]