Greene Thumb Thursday: Feeding our Family

It's officially past "tax day" and here in Tennessee, that means it's time to plant our gardens! In honor of finally making it to this point in the spring planting season, I'm starting a new series that will follow my efforts to grow our own food this summer. This should provide some very interesting posts, considering that I have grown nothing but two small children and one obese cat in my quarter-century of occupancy here on Earth.

So for today's post, I thought it would be appropriate to outline my reasons behind starting a garden and lay out my ambitions for the coming months. I hate making New Year's resolutions, but I find that time is good for slate-wiping and attempting to change things, even by just a little bit. However, having a one-month old at New Year's makes it hard to concentrate on anything but taking a shower and trying to eat at least 2x a day. So this past January, Mark and I decided to make a healthy change in the way we eat. "Diet" is a four-letter word. But we both wanted to get healthy and hopefully, as a consequence, lose some of our spare flesh at the same time.

We started with a trip to our family practitioner's office for some advice. The answer? KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Fresh foods with fewer than 3 ingredients. That, literally, along with some vitamin supplements, was her answer. It's a lot harder than it seems. Our lives are so dominated with packaged foods, and until you really start looking at them, you just take it for granted that they are fine to consume. (Which, they are. This is NOT a "you need to eat healthy or we can't be friends" kind of lifestyle change for us. It's personal, and we aren't trying to project on anyone.) A quick comparison of homemade bread vs bagged bread from the store is a great example. When I make bread, I use 5 ingredients (water, flour, yeast, sugar, salt). The average bread label includes over 15. What IS all that other stuff?

So as a natural progression of trying to eat fresh foods, the idea came about to have a little garden this summer. We decided to ask Mark's grandparents if we could use a little space on their land to plant our crops, in turn being able to hopefully also provide them with fresh foods to eat during the summer months. As we talked about our initial plans, we decided that we should grow "enough" to be able to preserve a lot of it to eat during the winter months as well. As this is our first attempt, we are incredibly unsure of what "enough" really translates into as far as plants go. For the past few months we have been making preparations and getting ready for April.

The time has come to plant the garden. Only, our plans have changed a little. Mark's gparents are the sweetest in the world and they would never say "no" to any request by their family members. While this quality has given them some amount of worry and grief over the years, they are hardened in their resolve to provide anything they can for their family (did you read yesterday how his Granny still packs a lunch for his grown cousin living with them? She did the same for Mark when he was living with them, and insisted on doing so). But, as the time drew nearer to planting, we became accutely aware that possibly, they did not exactly like the idea of us having a garden there. So rather than go ahead and do it anyway (they would NEVER tell us that we couldn't), we started looking for other options.

So on to plan B. Have it at our house? While we do have a little over 3 acres of land, most of it is wooded and our yard is a wonderful rocky red clay mud mixture that has trouble growing grass. Asking it to grow veggies is probably out of the question. The solution, we think, is to build raised beds for our crops. I've been reading like mad about the square foot gardening method and I think this will work for us. Hopefully so.

As I learned in school and then really learned from experience in the "working world"...a project is only worth what the outcome proves. So, from the get-go, you need to have measurable goals to really tell if something is successful. There are 2 main goals for this adventure:

1) To grow "enough" food to supply our family through the summer months AND provide for preservation through the winter months. (This is not yet measurable, as we have yet to determine what "enough" really is. That's this weekend's chore)

2) To save money by growing our food instead of purchasing it. This seemed easily within reach when we were planning to have a row-by-row garden at Mark's grandparents' house. Now, we have to calculate the cost of the materials to build and fill our beds, and the added cost of the water throughout the summer to keep them moist. Keeping an expense journal as well as a weekly price estimate (based on grocery prices and farmer's market prices) for the veggies is a must. So is recording the amount of produce we actually harvest and use.

Will we meet these goals? Stay tuned for the weekly play-by-play and please feel free to comment and leave suggestions or tips for success!