Roots N Boots

Have you ever heard someone say “I don’t want to know where my food comes from, all I know is that it comes from the freezer section”? Well, I grew up saying that as I would pass the cute cows grazing in the fields, and watch the occasional combine harvest a field. See, I grew up in the outskirts of Gaithersburg, in Maryland, which has some farm land but also has a lot of people and is a bit of a city. My family and I would go to Costco or Safeway, load up our carts with all kinds of food, be excited to find the ones on sale, or sometimes we would pick the cheapest of the selection, like eggs. It wasn’t until my husband came in to my life and started opening my eyes to the chemicals and GMO foods that have saturated our grocery stores. He would make it a point to pick out the Organic or Free Range eggs, get the yogurt with the least amount of added sugar, and wouldn’t shy away from grass-fed beef, even if it was several dollars more than the 70/30% selection. We started hearing about how Round Up causes cancer, and we have seen many people who struggle with mental disorders, that we wonder could possibly be caused by the chemicals injected in to our food; and I haven’t even started on food preservatives. So over the past few years, we have been pondering this and wondering what we can do about it, to at least protect ourselves, but hopefully extend to helping serve our friends and family with more natural foods.

Trevor, my husband, and I bought our 21 acre farmette in Maryland about four years ago. We have put extensive work in the place including renovating the house and completely changing the landscape, ridding it of dead trees, mostly killed by the Ash Beetle, and a lot of overgrown brush and weeds. We even had a small bamboo forest overtop of the septic system, so that was one of the first things we eliminated. But now that the house is complete, and we are actually living on the property, we are able to start using the property. It is currently February, so we have been weathering out the strangely warm winter for the past few months, but I am aware that we need to start thinking about growing some plants, tending for the new flock of birds, and preparing for some larger animals.

My goal for this year is to experiment with growing our own vegetables. I say ‘experiment’, because I have never grown more than 2 bell pepper and cherry tomato plants before, and that will not be enough to provide us with a decent amount of food. We are hoping to have about a 20’x40′ garden this year. Sure, it is small, but we have to start somewhere! I plan to grow tomatoes, peppers, zuccini, carrots, potatoes, onions, and lots of lettuce. I also want to start a herb garden somewhere where the chickens won’t demolish it. I plan to not use any herbicides or bug repellants. I am hoping to be able to avoid GMO seeds/small plants. Trevor believes it would be a good idea to start the garden with already established baby plants instead of growing from seeds, as it will be our first year. We have some chickens, ducks, and geese, so I will be using some of their manure to mix in with the dirt when we till the garden. I also have access to Alpaca manure, which is great fertilizer. The ducks will be allowed in the garden while I watch because they love to eat weeds and bugs, while leaving the actual plants until the weeds are gone…or so I have been told. I have already started doing some research on how to store vegetables over the winter without needing a fridge or freezer, but instead using a root cellar. I understand we will be limited on what can be stored, as it will mostly be root vegetables, and quite frankly, Trevor and I are not a fan of pickled foods. But that may change as we broaden our focus of foods in general.

Another plan this year is to try to grow some of our own meat. I bought 4 ducks a couple weeks ago, Muscovies, and they are known to lay large clutches of eggs, be quite broody, and raise their own young. The Muscovy duck meat tends to be around 98% fat free when processed, and they can be harvested at 10 weeks of age. I do not expect to have more than one or two clutches this year, as all four birds are around 1 year old, but I would like to see how it goes to essentially grow our own duck meat almost for free. I will probably send the birds somewhere to be harvested, as I am not quite ready to do that myself yet, but down the road, I would be interested in learning. We would both like to raise our own beef cows, strictly on grass and then feeding them corn in their last month before butchering. We might be able to get some cows this year, but that is still a bit fuzzy and I am not sure that we will be able to harvest any beef, but that is the future goal. We have hunted deer before, and we appreciated the leanness of the meat, and the fact that we figured they were eating relatively healthily. But then it occurred to me last year that the deer around us are eating corn and soybeans from the farm fields in our area, and those fields are being sprayed with Round-Up relatively frequently, so the deer theoretically have Round-Up in their system! That actually scared me, as we have consumed about 6 deer over the last 6 years. But again, our journey starts here and all we can do is learn from the past.

One more note on the beef cows is that we are possibly interested in having one or two dairy cows as well. I have been pondering having 2 dairy cows, and breeding them to a beef bull, so that the offspring will still be bigger built than a dairy cow, and will be a decent beef option. But, again, one step at a time.

So to wrap up this introductory summary, my husband and I want to live more naturally, learn from the old days when people grew, harvested, and stored their own food without modern technology and chemicals. I have to admit that I am currently not too interested in going off the grid, as I appreciate our running water and electricity, but I am hoping that we can lead a more healthy life, primarily with what we eat, but who knows what we will find on the way, as we may find that we grasp on to a healthier lifestyle as well, spending a lot of time outside, and working together to harvest the fruits of our labor.