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.

We’ve got rain today, which is good for everything but out-in-the-yard farming.  Having no opportunity to prep the few areas that still need prepping frees up a moment to think back on the last four — and eight — months that my wife and I have been trying the things we’ve been trying.  Good eats, but good grief.

The chart never lies.  It doesn’t take a statistician to make sense out of the numbers we’ve cultivated so far, nor any kind of education, really, to see that we’re a wee bit off the mark.  In the face of such shortage, I have to defer to Vonnegut’s oft-repeated wisdom: So it goes.

In the last few months my objectives have shifted like a political alliance — driven by convenience.  For a time, the cold-season crop seemed a boon (and really, any amount of steady food would seem so in the context of last summer and our first four months at this) and I hoped for 2-percent-plus by the end of March.  But salads and carrots and beets only cemented our understanding of how calorie-poor healthy food can be — hence the “healthy”.  By the end of February, though still able to harvest something from the yard any time we wanted, I had adjusted to the certainty that we’d at least eke our way to our first big percent: 1.0.

Not quite.  But we are more than halfway to that mark, and I’d like to think that the past eight months have shown us what the hard half of a percent can look like.

We’ve had some great successes since December 1, a highlight being the Anna Apple grafts, both of which have taken and begun flowering and leafing out.  We’ve also made some good moves for the future, chiefly the construction of a coop and the raising of four chickens.  Additionally, we planted a Haas Avocado and a Hall’s Hardy Almond, as well as several perennial fruits and vegetables: a blackberry and three raspberry plants, including an Anne; a blueberry bush; a Chayote Squash; and several plots of asparagus.

And, we’ve got warm-season sprouts pushing through the soil all over our property, with more planting yet to come.

All we have to do is get those little spits of green to fruiting.  Easy, right?

Winter’s been good so far.  We’ve been able to eat a variety of vegetables from the yard fairly regularly: Bull’s Blood Beets, Autumn King Carrots, Little Gem Romaine Lettuce, Marvel of Four Seasons Butterhead Lettuce, Correnta Spinach, Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard, Mammoth Melting Sugar Peas, Green Sprouting Calabrese Broccoli.  It’s all tasty good stuff, but it doesn’t add up too fast when charting calories.  And, we’re looking at another lull in production, just like at the start of our cool season crop, with nothing really ready to eat for a little while.

We achieved the .5 percent Saturday night, sharing two soups with my parents, sister, and grandpa.  We cooked the split pea soup we made a month or so ago (see “A whole meal of food”, posted Dec. 8), and we tried a new potato-chard soup.  Chard is the only crop we have in abundance, so we’ve been eating more chard than I ever imagined — which is easy, because I never imagined anything about chard.  We have also experimented with a sauted chard and look forward to trying a chard-tomato casserole in the coming week.

Hopefully the chard will sustain us until the next round of winter crop comes in.

Sunday we decided to finally do something with a few of the Delicata Squash that have been ripening in a bowl on our counter for about four weeks.  I have been extremely skeptical of how edible they’d turn out to be because they were grown way out of season, and for the last few weeks of that time they sat on plants sickened first by a massive aphid infestation (see Convergent lady killers, posted Nov. 17) and then by powdery mildew — the same pest that kept all the other out-of-season winter squash from producing and killed them (see Death by a billion spores, posted Oct. 15).

So, I harvested these squash not because they were ready, but because the plants were dead or dying.  Not a confidence builder in terms of quality.

We cut a few of them up, and they looked and smelled like squash should look and smell.  The recipe called for carrots, which we were able to pull from the yard, too.  And we threw together a salad made from greens from our garden as well as from Paul and Amy’s.  It turned out to be a flavorful and hearty soup, more so than the split pea we made a month or so ago (see A whole meal of food, posted Dec. 8).

I have never been reticent about sharing the food we grow, but since I started this calorie-counting effort, I can’t help but to — just for a second — think of the shared food as calories lost.  The thought never lasts because I enjoy giving food I’ve grown (especially when it tastes good).  In truth, the people receiving the shared food have been more hesitant in accepting, often saying, “But you could be eating this!”  Friends also counsel us to just count the calories anyway toward our 15 percent (actually, until last night my wife had no idea we weren’t doing just that).  However, what other people eat doesn’t really have anything to do with our annual calories and where they come from.  It has to do with theirs.  But if they’re eating from our yard, it’s definitely local and raised responsibly — so it should be counted in some way.  Where everyone’s food comes from and how it is grown matters.  And, sharing the food we grow is part of the community side of this effort: people getting together to grow as much of their food as they can, eat it, and share it.  Ultimately, it’s not just about what I or my wife eat.

So we’re going to count shared calories, separately, as a way to acknowledge that responsible food that gets eaten is never wasted.

This leaves the question of the other percent.  We’re shooting for 15 percent from our yard, so for us the other percent is a big 85.  What do we do about that?  The answer to this question is as important as any decision we make about what grows or how it grows on our property.  If we satisfy this big giant number of calories irresponsibly, or without the ideals that we apply to our own home growing in mind — then what’s it all about?  We could easily overshadow the global benefits of our super local effort by satisfying the rest of our calories at McDonald’s or stocking our freezer with CAFO meats from 1,000 miles away or filling our bellies with international fruits and vegetables.  And we’d be missing our own point, which is a decidedly unattractive quality in a person.

So, what do we do?  Support local farmers who share our ideals and the markets that sell their work.  And the restaurants that cook with their foods.

We’ve been enjoying a nearby farmer’s market these past few months, and we intend to make it a regular part of our week.  There is something fundamental in shopping a place where all the food’s not pretty.  In San Diego there are dozens of farmer’s markets we’ve yet to try, but want to, particularly one that we’ve heard specializes in meats in cheeses.  We’re also planning on buying into a CSA with a few friends, which will support growers and give us access to local, seasonal produce — and challenge us to cook with ingredients we’re not used to.  Each of these options eliminates costly intermediaries between food and people, in the same way that growing at home does, and requires a more thoughtful relationship with what’s being eaten, how it’s being grown, and who’s growing it.

In terms of related New Year’s resolutions, I’m resolved to do better with the foods I buy, particularly concerning their place of origin.  I’ve been doing well the past few months in buying organic produce and range-fed meats (and in making meats a side rather than a main dish), and I’ve been shopping and supporting a market that shares some of my philosophy, but I could do better with figuring out how local the food is.  Distance takes some of the responsibility out of responsibly raised.

I’m also resolved to add a little foraging to the menu.  And by a little, I mean one act of foraging.  I’m keeping my effort minimal because this is way beyond my skill level and comfort zone.  But, I’m inspired by the author of Fat of the Land, which is by far the best food blog I’ve read.  And, foraging is a pretty ecologically sound way to go in terms of consumption.  What will I forage?  I have no idea.  I guess we’ll see.

With the other percent in mind, I’ve added two widgets to the blog (see sidebar at right).  One maps out all the farmer’s markets in your area (and there are probably more than you are aware of, with different specialties; this was true for me).  The other helps you find local and responsibly raised foods at a number of different places, including restaurants.  These will be permanent additions and will hopefully help anyone who is interested find a route to better eats — a supplement to the home-raised bit of calories, no matter what percent that adds up to.

It’s hard to predict where this leaves us in terms of our annual goal.  At first glance it seems to project a final achievement well under one percent and far from the 15 percent we envisioned.  But hidden in that fraction of a percent is all the knowledge gained to get there.  Many one-time mistakes exist in so grandly and grossly missing a benchmark (off by about 95 percent).  And knowledge forged in such calamity is a tenacious knowledge.

Besides the pests, we also had something else working against us: fruits and vegetables.  It may seem obvious that the majority if not all of the calories from a typical suburban yard would come from these two food groups.  But before attempting this home-grown effort I failed to ask an even more obvious question: What percent of our total calories come from fruits and vegetables?  The answer is 5.8 (fruits) and 13.2 (vegetables), for a combined total of 19 percent.

What does this mean?  Well, if I’m trying to eat 15 percent of my calories from my yard, and those calories only take the form of fruits and vegetables, then what I’m really doing is trying to grow 79 percent of my annual fruits and vegetables at home.  Since 81 percent of our daily calories come from something other than fruits and vegetables, getting to the 15 percent goal would be a lot easier if I could diversify and get some of that “something other” from the yard, too.

Let’s just be honest and say that milking and meat off the bone probably aren’t going to happen.  But grains are a possibility, and we are zoned for up to 25 chickens.

The tiny .25 also hides what we have accomplished.  It suggests we’ve pulled little from the yard, when in fact we’ve eaten Cherry and Beefsteak Tomatoes, Strawberries, Grapes, Asparagus, Garlic, Basil, Mint, Purple Viking Potatoes, Gala Apples, Carrots, Chard, Mesclun, Butterhead Lettuce, Snow Peas, Straight Neck Squash, Peanuts (only four, but still), Broccoli, and Oranges.  And with some of these we’ve only begun to harvest what’s there.  In the next few weeks we’ll add Romaine Lettuce, Bull’s Blood Beets, Tangelos, Delicata Squash (fingers crossed), and Spinach to that list.

And it’s all so good.  And it comes with learning, which I appreciate.

So we celebrate our .25 percent.  There’s a lot going on in that little number.

There’s something to that feast or famine adage.

So, what does 1,000 calories really add up to?  It’s about the same as drinking six cans of Pepsi.  Or eating two Big Macs.  Or three Snickers bars.  However, because homegrown food is so damn healthy, the calories accumulate at a bit slower pace than processed food (I’ve really missed an opportunity here to infuse everything with corn).  To reach this milestone we ate six strawberries, 10 grapes, 27 Husky cherry tomatoes, two asparagus, one clove of garlic, five basil leaves, one Beefsteak tomato, four small Purple Viking potatoes, and three-and-a-half medium-sized Gala apples.  We shared half that last apple with friends, enthusiastically.

I am happy with our first month’s calories, even though they fell short.  Potatoes, again, are a trip to pull from the earth.  And satisfying a snack-time craving by stepping off the front porch and snapping a ripe apple off our tree has a sense of heritage to it, and excellence — especially in the afternoon, when the apple’s sun warmed but crisp and tastes like chewing cider.

It’s been a tasty first thousand.