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 the laying to become regular, and I don’t know when we might expect to start getting an egg a day from each of our four chickens (I think it took Bailey, our Rhode Island Red and first layer at least two weeks to become consistent). There was a stretch of five days in early July when our chickens laid no eggs that coincided with the first days of letting them range, so we kept them in the coop until we could determine that our pullets weren’t secreting eggs throughout the yard (They’ve only done this with one egg, left just outside the entrance to the coop).

But, despite not being up to full production, what we do get keeps us in eggs — excellent eggs.  What I initially took for tiny practice eggs turned out to be just eggs — our chickens lay in several sizes, from a tiny, just bigger than an olive variety, to the large eggs typical of a supermarket (though these arrive less often, and occasionally double yolked).  The eggs come in various shades of tan-brown.  Regardless of size, the quality is high, with firm, vibrant yellow-orange yolks so potent they color the pancakes we cook.  Definitely Grade AAA, a ranking that has little to do with size, though I always thought it did since at the market it seems to correspond with gargantuan eggs.

The biggest difference between our homegrown eggs and the store-bought kind is in shell strength: It takes a good, forceful smack to crack them enough to pry open.  This quality is essential since our birds continue to empty their nest boxes of all bedding so that they lay on bare wood.  The eggs end up dropping several inches and hit hard — but they all end up whole.  We’ve only lost one egg this past month, a large one I suspect Kate (the Dominique) of pecking open and eating.

The upkeep for our flock has become a bit more sustainable as the ranging allows much of their diet to come from the yard.  I’ve noticed a 25 percent reduction in their feed consumption … so in just four months the chickens have been able to meet and surpass my own eating-from-the-yard objective.  Perhaps we should consider bugs and grass as a bridge to 15 percent of our annual calories.  Perhaps.  Another perk to the free-ranging pecking is that the chickens take their waste with them and distribute it as fertilizer throughout the yard (and less beneficially on the porch), rather than concentrating it all in their coop, which means fewer cleanings.  And we get these funny personalities clucking around.

Lots of positives, but most of all good eggs, made fresh daily 50 feet out the back door.

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.

Apparently there is an art and, as one might expect, a science to composting.  To be clear, there is no art to my effort.  But I read extensively about the science of composting.  I chose a location that gets sun, but not a full day’s sun because here in San Diego that would most likely dry out the pile — and to function biologically, the pile needs to be about as damp as a wrung out sponge.  I dutifully watered my pile, and while I never checked the moisture content with anything technical, it never started stinking, which is an indicator that the pile is too wet.  I have also been pretty good with the carbon-nitrogen balance, not that I have ever weighed or measured anything I’ve dumped onto my pile.  The idea is, brown, dead plant material, ash, and newspaper are carbon contributors, while green clippings from the yard and animal waste (like chicken manure) are nitrogen contributors.  The C:N ratio is supposed to be 25:1.

I never turned my pile, but there are two schools of thought on that: in one school, you turn it; in the other, you don’t.  The Turning School of Compost Development says the turning evens out the composting process by mixing the less composted surface material with the more composted lower levels, resulting in a finer soil.  The turning also injects a burst of oxygen into the pile, which speeds up the aerobic bacteria and the composting process.  The Leave It School of Compost Engineering says that this very burst of productivity burns out critical components of the composting process, and disturbs basically every level of organism involved in turning stuff into soil.  Leaving it is doing it like nature does it.

But in my yard, nature hasn’t been doing it.

I have picked up a few tips along the way, little “oh, right” moments here and there.  The first came from a former student, Mike, who suggested I not dump oranges and orange peels into the pile because they are too acidic for some of the organisms at work there.  Great tip.  Stopped doing that.  Another good one: I read that two piles is essential because at some point I need to stop putting new stuff into the pile so it can finish.  That one seems kind of common-sense obvious.  I hadn’t been doing this, which might be why my pile still looks like a pile of debris.  I started a second pile last week.

Composting has many sustainable-living perks.  The two most relevant to reducing my wife and I’s impact elsewhere are the reduction in trash we send out and in the soil amendments we bring in.  The average American tosses 1,460 pounds of garbage into landfills every year.  Recycling helps, of course, but organics that won’t recycle will compost.  We throw out maybe one small bag of garbage each week (and it definitely does not weigh 70 pounds).  And even if the amendments we bring in are all organic and chemical-free, there’s still an industrial process behind whatever we add to our yard each season.  We’d rather make our own.

So, I think I’ll turn that pile this weekend.  Soon I should be getting some help stewarding the compost.  Apparently the chickens I just ordered will be a boon to the effort with their scratching and droppings.

The pile could use a boon.

Must read.

1. The Ominivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
2. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
3. The End of the Wild, by Stephen M. Meyer

Should read.

1. When the Rivers Run Dry, by Fred Pearce
2. Citizenship Papers, by Wendell Berry

Could read.

1. Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
2. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Skip it.

1. The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
2. Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan

This last book I’m working my way through now, and it’s a bit wandering and self congratulatory without imparting any real knowledge or sense of experience.  At best.  Which is disappointing because I had high hopes: It recounts a guy’s attempt to consume only what he can get from within 220 miles from his Arizona home (a bit far for “local”, but a great goal).

I have a “to read” stack on my desk that includes The End of Food, by Paul Roberts; Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman; Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser; and Second Nature, by Michael Pollan.  That’s where I’ll be heading next, trying to read as many as I can before the spring semester starts and my reading turns back to student work.

If there’s anything else I should read, or any of the above that I’ve misread — drop me a note.

But mostly what I did (besides grade final exams) was watch the rain run off things.  Suburban areas are pretty well waterproofed, with roofs, patios, driveways, streets, gutters, and slopes that ensure the water goes to a particular place — away.  For a drought-stricken area such as San Diego, it’s a strange objective.  Then again, this is a place where people have to be reminded to turn off their sprinklers when it rains and threatened with fines to adhere to rationing during the driest months.  It’s a mindset that comes from never having lived without water, and it’s luxurious thinking.

Watching the runoff made me think about rain catchment systems and wish we had ours.  We have plans, but that’s all.  For someone who intends to grow edibles here in July and August, saving the rain seems like the right thing to do.  Forget edibles — for anyone planning on growing anything in San Diego in July and August, it’s the right thing to do (unless that San Diegan is making trips with a bucket to the San Diego river — not recommended).  But I don’t know a single person who catches the rain.

The weekend storms twisted and tied my tidy climbing snow peas into a knotted ball, and the harsh winds and cold proved the final blow for the Delicata Squash, following on the heals of a massive aphid infestation and powdery mildew.  But the peas are still producing, and there are a few salvageable squash.  The leafy greens looked vibrant by Monday morning, so we ate some, and all the newly planted, second-round winter crop seems to have gotten a boost from the downpour — including the winter wheat fortuitously sown the day before the storms.

So not all the water went to waste.  We kept some.

It seems like the small and vulnerable stage would be hard to avoid since all creatures pass through it at some point; I concede that I have no trick for bypassing this early development.  But not everything has to do it every season.  I watched my Gala Apple tree leaf out, bloom, and fruit without the slightest disturbance, and I wondered how such resilience could be transferred from the orchard to the vegetable garden.  (In truth, if a rabbit or squirrel had been able to take out this 12-foot tall tree, we would have moved.)

The thought of going all orchard crossed my mind.  But you can only have so many trees on a suburban lot before it looks crowded, and we’ve already got a plum, an orange, a Bartlett Pear, and two Gala Apples in the ground, and three avocados, a tangelo, a pear, and an almond waiting to be planted.  And we’re trying to protect our canyon view out the back.

We already have grapes, strawberries, and asparagus established (and hopefully producing next year), but what about more vegetables that stick around and toughen up so they’re less likely to get taken out by pests?

Perennial vegetables form an interesting set of crops, at least those that can be grown in my region.  Many of them strike me as near-edibles, the kind of thing that Bear Grylls eats on Man vs. Wild, not so much by choice but to survive.  And many of them have potent adaptations — defense mechanisms that help them survive year-round.  In searching for perennial vegetables for my space, I passed on a number of options because they require special preparation or else they are poisonous.  For experienced cooks or bolder gardeners than myself, this challenge might not be a deterrent to growing a number of different plants.  For me, I don’t want to end meals by wondering if I just poisoned my wife.

Despite this hesitation, I like the “not your mother’s vegetable” quality that many perennials have, the fact that you absolutely won’t find them at Ralphs, and probably can’t even find some of them at the farmer’s market.  Sure, some that I’ll try are common like our asparagus.  I found that lima beans, runner beans, and sweet potatoes can be grown as perennials, and I plan to try.  In the coming months I will also plant nine star broccoli; chayote squash; winged and hyacinth beans; ceylon, sissoo, and New Zealand spinach; perennial cucumber; and Egyptian walking onions.

If I can find them, that is.  As we have become a common crop society, limited by ourselves and mono-crop industrial farming, we have consistently reduced the acreage devoted to fruits and vegetables that fall outside the mainstream.  But these are growing somewhere.  All I have to do is find the person with the seed.

My hope is that these perennials will become durable lifers, that if I can coddle them along to adulthood once, or once every few years, they will be able to hold their own against my local pests and I can move away from caged gardening.  That they will bring some stability to my edible yard in the coming year.

As always … we’ll see.

However, by having a clear idea of what we mean when we mean it, we can better determine for ourselves whether some product meets our standards, rather than being wholly at the mercy of some company’s label, the criteria for which they have defined in their interests, not the consumer’s.

I’ve been thinking about such things while trying to create a context for the food growing in my yard.  Below are links to two articles that have helped me better understand what I mean by sustainable eating.  Check them out.

“Twinkies Are Not Real”

“The Movement for a Sustainable Food System”

I like the idea of fewer intermediaries between my food and I.  This preference has many reasons behind it, but for the most part it boils down to a concern and a belief: the earth cannot sustain 6 billion (let alone 9 billion by 2040) people living a business-as-usual lifestyle; the actions of one person are not in vain, but significant, in dealing with global issues.

Business as usual includes consuming outside of seasons (a New Yorker buying summer oranges and winter asparagus) and regions (that same individual buying an avocado any time of year), and blindly supporting a massive industrial food machine that manufactures everything from McDonald’s to Wheat Thins to corn with little transparency and against which consumers have little recourse.  More on all of this down the line.

We’re coming up on something fast and the effectiveness of a single person’s actions in mitigating that something cannot be ruled out.  The degradation of the environment and the decline in the quality of life that accompanies it is a global problem that seems to require a coordinated, global solution.  But what is apparent is that people think in terms of themselves most often because that is a rational, practical way to get through the day.  Big solutions become daunting, hard to imagine and relate to, and can be defensively forgotten.  What is needed, then, is 6 billion individual decisions to live differently, to consume differently.  In this, the individual act is essential, and all hope and responsibility for the future is not diffused within the crowd of a city, state, country, or hemisphere, but instead rests about a foot above the shoulders of every person, where real decisions are made.

So, where do we go from here?  Where I go is toward producing a significant portion of my wife and I’s daily calories at home.  I’ve set 15 percent as my first benchmark, which seems low and high at the same time.  Looking at that number I can’t help but think of all the scenarios where such an achievement would be pathetic.  I can’t help but think about the other 85 percent of my food (a far more robust number) and where it might come from.  I wince at the usual channels that are most likely.  Some who stumble across this effort might wonder why I don’t shoot higher, try for 50 percent or 100, even.  Those numbers almost certainly start getting into grains and meats.  I have every intention of growing some grain — look forward to it, in fact — but it takes up a lot of space, and I just don’t have the room for a subsistence-level effort.  As for the meats, honestly, I can’t really see myself butchering anything — at this point — and I’m not sure I’m zoned for slaughter.

However, I do hope that the 15 turns into 20 or 25 percent.  But that’s getting ahead of the now.  Just hitting that first mark is going to be a challenge.