A Year of Homegrown Food and a New Goal for January

Around new years last year, I made a goal to grow all of our vegetables from the garden for the year. May 2017-May 2018. So far, I'm at about 90% veggies from our garden and 10% from the store.  It has been so worth it to learn lots of new things.

[Little Gem lettuce on the left. Turnips on the right] November 27 2017

I think the main thing I've learned is to be a better steward of all the life, plants and animals, that God has given us. I waste way less food than I did before. I realized all the labor and money that went into every plant. We butchered our rooster this year and ate the meat. Butchering our own chicken helped me to be more conscious where the meat comes from and I think I naturally started to eat less meat in general. (Someday I hope to do more meat chickens but our current location won't allow for it)

[May 20th 2017]

Another bonus of eating our own veggies only has been savings on the grocery bill. We are consistently saving $700 a month from last years average grocery bill. That is no exaggeration.  Even though using our own vegetables helped us lower the spending, going to the store less (twice a month) was a major savings. We didn't have a chance to impulse buy. The other thing that came out of eating homegrown food is I cook way more from scratch and that cut down the grocery budget as well.

[Arugula November 27 2017]

Even though gardening is fun, another huge motivator for me is health. I still struggle some health problems, acid reflux being one of them. Conventional medicine barely makes a difference in the pain level but consuming more veggies and less processed food seems to be helping. 

As long as my hoop tunnels hold up, I think we'll make it to spring (2 degrees is the low tonight!). 

[Mulching leaves to put in the garden. Noelle was happy to come along for the ride! December 4th 2017]

[December 2 2017]

I really like having a goal to strive for and because I'm not crazy enough, I decided to do a no grocery shopping month for January. My sister Amy has done this many times before and I haven't been brave enough to try it until now. We don't like going without fresh food- especially fruit! But since I'm already halfway there not shopping for veggies, and I have lots of canned applesauce and peaches, plus frozen fruit, I figured why not give it a try. We haven't been to the store since before Christmas so if I make it to the end of January it will be extra cool!

Fall Garden

 One last picture before our first frost (which was last Friday night)

Salad makings!

 

 Me scrambling to get all my frost prep done last week. This was the first half of the tomatoes and peppers. Also, I dried some of my thyme and oregano.

Good mother stallard beans. These are really good in soups. They were about double the size of the other types of beans I grew. I'm a sucker for the pretty pattern too.

Winter food storage

Garden: June, July, August

Thankfully my iphone has the date when you take pictures so I can update garden progress from 3 months ago haha!


Halfway through our family reunion in Branson in at the end of June, I came back home to take care of my garden. Since we are really only living off vegetables from our home, I felt like it was important and I'm glad I did. I picked these beans, and ducted taped off a hundred squash bug eggs. I like to be diligent with the squash bugs at the start of the season and thankfully it has paid off. We are still getting yellow lemon squash like crazy. Maybe 10 a day. The boys made $10 selling them to neighbors last week haha!

June 28

July 1- Lemon squash, homemade pickles, tendergreen cucumbers, calima beans, black vernaissage tomatoes, danvers carrots, and I can't remember what variety of red carrot.

July 8- Kian is very proud of his sunflowers- The kids had their own garden again this year.

July 17- from my back deck. Do you like our clover field in the front? We had plans to put in grass this year but that didn't happen. There's always next year!! Haha!

July 17- Back portion of the garden. (Left to right)Growing up the back is pole beans,  butternut squash, cushaw squash, ledmon watermelon, blueberry bushes, melon patch, asparagus

July 17- I took this from the bathroom window upstairs. Who needs a drone when you have a tall house?

July 17

July 17- Noelle took this picture and I found it on my phone! Baker creek seeds sends free varieties each time you order. I got black vernissage tomatoes as a free seed and decided to try them out. Aside from the cool striping, I did not like them. They have a soft mealy texture, even when perfectly ripe.

July 18th- Yukon Gold potatoes. My first time growing potatoes. The best part was digging them up. It was fun!

July 20th- The front bed is where I just dug up potatoes. I companion planted them with green beans and it worked out well. They repel each others pests!

July 24th- Dax was really excited to find this carrot

July 30th- In progress dinner by Cam. We had a neighbor over for dinner and Cam grilled everything while I baked some of our potatoes we had just dug up.

August 2nd- Lucid Gem tomato by Wild Boar Farm seeds. This one is a keeper.

August 3rd- Hales best Melon. Love this variety

August 3rd

August 3rd- We've been eating cantaloupe each morning

August 5th- Biggest Cushaw winter squash so far this year. 

August 8th- Started the sweet potato harvest

August 8th- Corn harvest. We ate all of these one night for dinner :)

Augusta 12th- More sweet potato harvesting from another bed

August 12th- Leeks and more corn.

I made a potato leek soup Saturday night. It has been a weird August here. Unusually cold and wet- which has translated in my garden to blight on tomatoes, and powdery mildew on the winter squash leaves. Luckily, I got a good harvest from the squash already. My tomatoes haven't done great this year. I'm still working on a better system for staking up tomatoes and I think I finally figured it out. 

Next year I will add some more homemade compost to beds and stagger my planting. I did that this year (though not on purpose). Tomatoes planted May 1st and June 1st. My June 1st planted tomatoes are blight free and producing well. The plan is to do a May, June, and July planting of tomatoes  next year. My cucumbers I planted end of April and another batch mid June. My April ones are all bitter and died off, and now the ones planted in June are producing! Yay.  

Its been nice to have enough space to stagger planting dates. It's the way to go in this humid, buggy, climate. 

Kitchen Progress! (#2)

Just a little reminder of where we started. Drop ceiling and not enough room to even walk around in the kitchen without walking into the island.

Cam took out the drop ceiling

 Then he took out the wall.  The oven moved over to the other wall and the island took the ovens spot. It is a good temporary fix until we can get cabinets.

The electrician came and and cleaned up all the wiring. We had 6 new can lights wired. Lots of switches moved around. Soon after we had the sheetrock guys come for a quote. We have had them before, and they are always great, so we said yes to the bid. They said they could come the next day!! We had a bunch of things to do... because the kitchen was as you see above. Cabinets emptied and removed, the rest of the wall down. And the real kicker was Cameron had to install the vent pipe for the oven. We were up till 4 am that night.

 The sheetrock guys came. And here is the first step.

Then all the mudding got done, and Cameron primed the walls. We need to paint it the same color as the living room next (Horizon gray BM)

I seriously love it without cabinets above. We utilize the counter space so much more. We need some storage space though so we are going to try out the open shelving. If we hate it, then we figure we could always put cabinets in that location later.

We will do upper cabinets next to the oven on the opposite wall and over the refrigerator. We are also keeping the pantry and replacing the framing and doors.

It will be a few months until we get cabinets and counter tops. We are saving and waiting for a sale to come up. I'm excited about the progress so far though!

Kitchen Demo- Yay!

It's finally happening! My horrible, suffocating kitchen drop ceiling came down. I can hardly believe I lasted as long as I did with it like that. One day, I just couldn't stand it anymore and took a hammer to some of the sheetrock. For a long time, I wanted to do a beautiful expansive pinterest worthy kitchen remodel. But I came to my senses eventually and realized that would take many years of saving... and a continually depressed self as I spend so much time in there.  So we are opting for the more budget friendly version of a remodel. We are keeping everything the same layout but removing the drop ceiling, and removing the top half of the wall to connects to the dining room. I'm considering doing open shelving next to the window. I have never really loved open shelving but I like the idea of more light from the window bouncing around the room. Those are the immediate fixes. It will be a little more time before we do the cabinets, countertop and backsplash. But I'm so excited with it already!

 I should mention here that though I started it, Cameron did all the rest!

It's gone- yay!

In the Garden: Fruit, veggies, and a new chicken run!

This has been a fun month as we have started to get fruit!! Seriously, it is like a dream come true. I can't wait for future years as the plants get bigger and we have even more!

 I started to get red cabbages earlier this month.

They were so beautiful, I didn't want to pick them! This week I'll be making some sauerkraut with the harvest.

 My first year growing shelling peas. They are so good.

 And my little helper

 Two weeks ago, we harvested the rest of the kale and planted more sweet potatoes in it's place.

 I put some bird deterrent ribbon above my blueberries. It is working really well although the view from the street is not so pretty anymore :)

 And this is a happy day for my blueberry loving self.  It's race to see who can get the blueberries first each morning.

 We finally finished the chicken run. It is off the back of the garden and I love it. No more babysitting chickens for us. They were getting too brazen as they walked to the front yard all the time and in the street on occasion. I will post more pictures later, but this is the only one I took so far. We moved our chicks and chickens together as we completed it. Dax still loves the chickens so much, he is in there everyday.

 First blackberry!!