What Growing My Own Food Has Taught Me

I've had a sort of internal dialogue running through my head for weeks. Spring 2014 was our first real and successful garden. I never knew that planting it would lead to the discoveries we've made along the way. It is highly gratifying to go out in your backyard and see life occurring around you, see it repeat itself, and even for the most part care for itself.

 Where I grew tomato plants this summer, I now find myself pulling up baby tomato plants that have sprouted from the seeds of fallen tomatoes. All. by. themselves. This is not a what you should be eating blog post. Certainly I have a lot of opinions on mass-produced food, big farming, pesticides, GMOs, and processed food, but everyone has the right to eat whatever they want.

 I like to go out to the garden sometimes and just watch. For instance, just a few days ago those baby sugar snap peas were not there. There was only a small white flower. It just amazes me.

 I love watching the bees work in the garden. If you've never taken any interest in the importance of bees when it comes to food, you should! Bees are completely fascinating. God created them to know how to do every single thing they need to survive. Their queen dies? The worker bees MAKE a new one. We don't need to interfere. Unfortunately, we have interfered, and now colonies are collapsing. There is a lot to be said about bees, but instead of hearing it from me, I suggest you watch Vanishing of the Bees on Netflix. My husband and I are currently doing our research on organic beekeeping, and will be setting up our equipment this winter to begin beekeeping in the spring.

 I love the fact that there is no ingredient list here. If there was, it would say water, sunshine, and organic "soil". I put soil in quotes because I actually don't use soil for my beds. I follow the square foot gardening method, and it is a mixture of organic materials such as peat, vermiculite, earthworm castings, cow manure, chicken manure. There are no weed seeds in it, like there are in bagged soil. Any weeds I get in my boxes are only if they blow in with the wind.

 Chickens have been our newest adventure and have kept me on Google nonstop. Sure, I did a lot of research before we got our chickens so that I'd know what to expect. What I didn't know is that eggs are seasonal. Did you know that? There are all kinds of things you learn when you buy from a local farmers' market or produce your own. Suddenly you realize things just don't appear on a shelf or at your fingertips. Someone put in effort for that food to be on a shelf.

Chickens molt in the fall/winter. After a lot of reading, I found out that means they will lose some feathers (some more than others) and will slow or stop completely producing eggs. This is a time of renewal for their reproductive organs, and will keep the quality of the eggs strong when they begin again, or pick up production. We have four hens. Before we got chickens, I thought that meant we'd get four eggs a day. Wrong. We have never had more than two eggs in one day. Granted we bought them in the fall, not even knowing anything about molting season. There are things some people do, to try to amp up production during this time or kind of "trick the hens" into thinking there is more daylight than there actually is. We've decided to just let it happen naturally. If God designed them to operate this way, it's for a good reason. They don't live to serve us. I can tell you one other thing I've learned about natural (healthy diet, no antibiotics, no hormones) eggs- the shells are thicker, the yolks are so yellow that they almost look orange, and the yolks are THICK. They don't easily break or run like typical grocery store eggs.

Nature is more interesting than you might think! None of this stuff is new, but it's new to me. Do people think we're weird? Probably. Wasting our time? Probably. Do I care? Nope. Growing my own food has taught me that food is precious. It does not come easy. It does not come quickly. Used correctly, it has all kinds of power to nourish our bodies in the ways I believe God intended when He created it.

Our Mobile Chicken Coop

I realize that I haven't blogged in FOREVER. This is the first thing I've felt like sharing in a long time. It must be because we're so excited about it! We decided to build a mobile chicken coop for our backyard. Believe it or not, we used about 80% recycled materials from around the backyard. We only bought the chicken wire, wheels, hook and eye door latches, and lag bolts. I even used an old can of paint to make it look like a barn! 

 The reason for our mobile coop is fairly easy to explain. We want them to be able to eat grass and not be stuck in the same place for their whole lives, but we need to keep them safe from our dogs and predators. The major bonus of this method, is that they fertilize the ground, and by moving the coop to a fresh patch everyday, should encourage new growth by the time we get back around to where we started. (We have quite a large yard) We water the patch of grass we just moved from to get the poop to get absorbed in the ground.

 I should mention that we are in no way experts on any of this. We have done a lot of reading and research, and we are also learning as we go. We didn't follow any plans for the coop, but looked at a bunch online and then drew out our vision for our own. It then took shape as we looked around for materials we already had. The shutter is something I saved from my days as a wedding decorator, and now it is our egg door.

 The door to the bottom is off of an old yard sale find. I have a cabinet that I remade into an entry table and I removed two of these light green doors and saved them. I'm glad I did! All we did was add some hinges and the lock.

 We already learned to hang the water higher, so that they don't get it all dirty. This is an early photo. The first night was hilarious as we sat outside to watch and see who would discover the ramp and top floor first. We all cheered on our own hens. Their names are Doris, Mabel, Mildred, Eleanor. I love that we can easily tell them apart based on physical characteristics. They each have their own personality and it's been fun to watch them these first few days.

 We really didn't know what to expect, as far as egg laying. We didn't know if they'd start right away, or if they had to get used to their new home first. We also didn't know if they would know where we wanted them to lay the eggs. The person we bought them from gave us two of their eggs and I decided to put them in two of the nesting boxes to give them a hint. The first day, it was so exciting to open the door and see this in one of the boxes! I should have taken a better photo of the house part, but there are four nesting boxes right when you open the egg door. This is a close up of one of them. You can see where the ramp comes up in this photo. The rest of the floor is chicken wire, so that their poop falls to the ground. So far, it has worked perfectly. We wanted minimal cleaning.

It has been really fun for our family to watch the hens and learn their routines. I always expected to go out early in the morning and find eggs, when in fact, our hens lay them during the day. I will look out the window and only see 3 on the ground, hear a bunch of squawking, then when there are 4 down on the ground I will go out and check, and there's an egg!