I decided to combine the wonderful Independence Day Challange with the once a month garden update for my monday’s main posts.
Plant something: Wheat for sprouts, radish sprouts, ginger root
Harvest something: Everything counts – Sprouts, Eggs, Milk- New for this week, Duck eggs are starting to arrive!
Preserve something: Yogurt, cheese, pickled eggs,
Waste not:just regular composting and closed loop feeding of scraps to either chickens or pigs.
Want Not: 1 spend day out of 5, all quiet on this front!
Eat the Food: See Food Storage Friday Report as a extra, made bread, made biscuits, cooked off extra meat, made mayo, made dressing, hard boiled eggs, pickled eggs in leftover beet juice, its march challange, so everything is coming from the pantry, freezers or the barnyard.
Build community food systems: Nothing, nada, but I did stop traffic on the road when I worked the cow..and I waved hi at them..
Skill up: Worked the draft animal, woodworking, tracking in snow, composting, breadmaking in regards to no kneed cast iron baking, cheese making, sauage making.
Its been a quiet week is many ways but filled with long hours and hard manual work, the days are passing fast and bed is calling me early, I am in tune at the moment with the light, up when it comes up and down when it goes down.. The whole flow of the farm changes when I am the main one at the helm and can eat when I am hunger, sleep when tired, and still find time to get all the must do things done.. its freeing in its own way!
Just another Day on the Farm 
My goal was to only shop once a week this month. I’m only in week one and I’ve already been to the store TWICE this first week. Well, in all fairness, I was able to catch a ride downtown with a neighbor. She was going shopping at Trader Joe’s. So I went and stocked up on organic beef and some sweet onions, because they’re cheaper there, than at Whole Foods!!! The meat went into the freezer as soon as I came home. Have a great week. Love and hugs from the ocean shores of California, Heather 😉
I saw your report this morning, and I thought you did really good last week on your shopping, and while you might have wanted to keep to your goal of one shopping trip per week, if the second trip allowed you to stock up and save money, that’s a good thing!
I always check all the local flyers and if something is really good in the sale department, I will make the point of going an getting a case or two of it for the storage pantry. Its a judgement call and it sounds like a good one.
I too, like it when I am home alone. I miss DH all the time, but settling back to my own routines has a certain pleasure to it!
With the wheat grass for shoots, do they need to be in soil or do they just grow with water like sprouted seeds?
thanks
Because the wheat sprouts is mainy for the laying chickens, and then coming back to me in the form of really good healthy eggs, I don’t put them in dirt, I just soak them and let them sprout and feed them directly that way. So the same way as sprouted seeds, if I did want to grow them for wheat grass for personal use, I might be more likely to put them on a light couple inches of soil.. but I don’t like the taste personally.
Where do you buy your seeds for sprouting? I’d like to try but I don’t know how to start.
Most of my seeds are now home collected, pea’s, radishes, broccoilli etc, as the costs of them were really high, but when I was buying, i typically at that time got them in large volume from stokes garden catalog, and then moved over to a more local source, being able to find some at my local health food store..
If you have the space and can afford to do so, let a few rows go to seed for winter sprouting, it will save you a ton of money to do so.
Hi there! Just wondering about the details on how you grow your Ginger Root: light, soil, water requirements? (Tried this a couple of times and I’m still not getting something right):
Thanks!
Sorry Deb, got to master plan on this one for you, wait till you have a peice of ginger sprout, put in regular potting soil in a self-watering indoor house plant pot, med sun and let it do its thing.. I have yet to get a good haul back from doing this, the few times I have tried it this way, I get really small messed up roots, instead of nice bigger peices, age maybe or something? Guess that’s something I shoud look into a bit more..