In this post Wilma and I begin a conversation about growing our own food. Wilma says “I never gave growing all our own food much thought until John and I started doing it and John asked me to make a list of what I wanted and how much.
I love cauliflower so that was the first on my list with the question how many? Well not one to do myself short I wanted at least one cauliflower a week, so that would make 52 cauliflowers minimum!!!
The second vegetable was cabbage for sauerkraut. Oh dear and you can feel what is coming; 3 cabbages for one week sauerkraut supply, that is three times 52 which is 156 cabbages and I felt immediately overwhelmed. And I was only at the stage of making the list.
If making the list made me feel overwhelmed how would the actual activity of growing that amount of vegetables make me feel?
However common sense prevailed, we didn’t have to grow all these vegetables at once.
I do not want to discourage anybody but in setting out to feed ourselves beware of what you are actually letting yourself in for. John and I work together in the garden but even so we have our work cut out.
I am delighted that I can add weeds to the menu now I have learned more about them from you, Julia but still we can or do not want to live on weeds alone.
Julia, how have you fared with growing your own food over the years?”
Hi Wilma,
Feeding ourselves is certainly a huge challenge. I too like eating out of my own garden on my parents’ small farm and ever since I was a baby (which is quite a few decades ago) my Dad has had a vegetable garden. Now we garden together and we always have leafy greens and things coming on. At the moment we’ve got broad beans flowering and we’re eating sugar snap peas. The hardest part I find is keeping up with the planting to make sure there are always vegetables coming on.
I absolutely love seeds so I grow lots of things from seeds and I like saving seeds. On Friday 2nd October when the moon is in opposition to Saturn I’ll be sowing my spring vegetables like tomatoes, corn, zucchini and lots of herbs.
The challenge is that Dad and I have different approaches to the weeds but we manage to work around that. At the moment one of the vegetable beds is full of weeds and since we’re keeping it for the corn it can stay a weed picking bed until we need it. It does have along with all the ‘weeds’a self-sown Russian red kale which is doing very well.
What I’d love to hear from you is how you work out your ongoing planting.
Ah, ongoing planting…….you are right to ask that question Julia, because that is very important and does require a lot of attention. John and I have actually a plan for our garden using the Perelandra method from Machaella Small Wright and it is in the planning that we get to eat all year round from the garden. We sit down and plan the spring planting and then we sit down again to plan the autumn planting etc. I am not a planning person so it requires discipline for me to sit down and go through the whole ritual but so far it has been worth it. When planning I go through seed catalogs like the one from Setha seeds and select what I want to eat. We then ask the nature spirits as per the Perelandra method if they are ok about planting those plants and then we ask when to plant them. As a result we end up with a clear list of what to plant and when which is extremely helpful to keep us on track and keep the garden full.