Spring Harvest:

• Broccoli - The broccoli did surprisingly well. We harvested quite a few good sized heads and numerous side shoots for several weeks. I froze most of it, but the small amount we did eat was delicious.
• Cauliflower - These took a little longer to harvest, but I’d say they were also pretty successful. Each plant produced a medium sized head. I only had 2 of them, so next time I need to plant much, much more.
• Radishes - The radishes grew to perfection. My only regret was that I didn’t plant more. They were beautiful! These were the first vegetable we harvested, and it was really encouraging to get such good results.
• Lettuce - I sorta went overboard here. I planted 8 romaine lettuce plants. That’s way too many for our family of 3! We do enjoy a summer salad, but not everyday and that’s pretty much what we could have done with all the lettuce we grew. We gave quite a bit of it away to my grandparents and then ate what we could. Then the summer heat took over, and it went to seed.
• Cabbages - These took forever to harvest, but we did manage some small heads. Sadly, we did not eat them since at that point we had abandoned the garden due to our new cat using it as her litterbox (more on that in a bit). I grew the Early Jersey Wakefield and Savvoy Cabbage. Both seemed to do quite well.
• Onions - Ok, I totally failed on these. It wasn’t that they didn’t grow, they were just very very small. I really had no idea how to grow onions and also had no idea how to know when they were ready for harvesting. They became ready soon after our new cat took over the garden, and I assumed the fallen over stalks meant they were ruined. So I left them there. All summer. Lots of weeds. LOTS and LOTS of weeds. I think the biggest onion I got was 2 inches in diameter. I didn’t know you should cut off the flower stalks to encourage bulb growth either. But now I know! And next year I definitely will be trying these again.

Season notes: We had a very wet spring. The far left bed had trouble with water-logging, so we didn’t plant much there. Hardly any sunlight meant our crops were slow to harvest. But we didn’t need to worry about watering! Oh no- we had that one covered with the rain! This was a blessing since I was in my first trimester of pregnancy and constantly sick throughout the spring though.

Summer Harvest:

• Tomatoes - I planted 8 plants, but I didn’t get them in until nearly mid-June, so the transplants were a bit pot-bound and wilted by then. Nevertheless, I was determined since I really wanted to do some tomato canning come harvest time. Soon after the first fruits appeared, our cat arrived and we stopped watering the plants. Perhaps this is what did them in. Although they still produced quite a bit of fruit, they had all the signs of blossom end rot. Many of the tomatoes would not ripen either. We did manage to harvest some and cooked a brilliantly flavored tomato soup, but most of the fruits went to waste because of heat related diseases. By the end of the growing season, the fruits had all cracked – even the green ones. It was a very hard summer on tomatoes, and not watering them certainly did not help.
• Peppers - I think my biggest mistake with the peppers was not realizing how long it takes for them to harvest. I guess I thought that they would be ready with the tomatoes, which is not true at all. Only in the past week, in October, did I manage to harvest some decent sized green ones (the red ones never turned). I think perhaps the lack of watering had something to do with this as well though. The fruits were all misshapen too, which was really weird. I have 4 sitting in my kitchen waiting to be washed and chopped, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
• Summer Squash - I planted 2 plants, really thinking they would do well. How can you go wrong with summer squash? Well, once again, the horrible heat of the summer likely did them in without additional watering to help them. I harvested ONE squash. Two other fruits appeared and quickly rotted before I tore up the entire bed in preparation for amending the kitty litter soil.

Season notes: It was HOT. The fourth hottest summer on record to be precise. Little to no rain for long periods of time. It seems we got all the rain in the spring this year and none in the summer. Gardens did bad everywhere. Local apple orchards abandoned their crops completely. Farmers are in a bit of a bind from late planting due to the spring rains. So I feel better knowing I wasn’t the only one with troubles this year.

Fall Harvest:

• Turnips - This was the only fall crop I managed to plant. I even opted for a container rather than planting in the litter-infested vegetable beds. I planted in mid-September, a bit late for this area, but so far the frost has held off and Indian summer has enabled them to thrive. It has been a nice change of pace to grow in a container, and I’ve been sure to water them. In a few days, I will have quite a few turnip leaves ready to harvest, and I’m hoping by harvesting the greens the bulbs will be encouraged to grow. We’ll see!

Season Notes: It’s been a good season for fall crops, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to grow any more than the turnips. We’ve be working hard to construct actual raised beds in place of the vegetable garden beds and will be filling and cooking the soil over winter for a hopefully successful spring. We’re also trying to fix the cat problem by putting chicken wire over the soil for now.

How did your vegetable fare this year? Were there any challenges you weren’t aware of before? What was the biggest success?

I planted the garden on a sloped portion of the yard, so despite the terrible rain, it managed to drain fairly well.

Are you just getting started in your journey towards eating more real food? Do you feel overwhelmed and are unsure how to implement it into your busy family life? Real Food for Rookies is a 12-week class hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop, a premiere real food blogger who tells it like it is and helps you “pull out the cuffs on fake food”.

In this class, you’ll learn how to talk to farmers, how to read food labels, how to choose fats in your kitchen, how to save time with batch baking as well as receive numerous breakfast, lunch and dinner recipe ideas to help get your started in your real food journey. Valuable video and audio interviews with authoritative figures such as Sally Fallon Morell, Tom Naughton and Dr. Kaayla Daniel offer insight on how diet plays a role in health concerns such as hyperactivity, learning disabilities, thyroid issues, headaches and heart disease.

And if you sign up before May 7th, you’ll get a promotional price of $25 off!

Still unsure if Real Food for Rookies is for you? Preview the promo video and see for yourself all that the class has to offer!

Ingredients:

• 1 green bell pepper, diced
• 1 large onion, sliced into rings
• 1 pound of cooked chicken
• 1 pound of cooked Italian sausage
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 2 tablespoons Italian seasoning
• 1.5 cups of tomato sauce

Instructions:

1. Layer ingredients in order stated above.
2. Set on low for 8 hours.
3. 1/2 hour before finished, remove lid to allow sauce to thicken.
4. Serve with fermented veggies or fresh Kombucha.

The best part about this meal is that the ingredients can be prepared ahead of time, utilizing leftovers and thus creating a “dump and go” meal!

The radishes I planted from seed are also sprouting seedlings, though just the beginnings of them. I can’t wait to see what they look like a week from now after more sun!

I am thinking about planting a few other spring vegetables since we have the space for them (after reading up more on the correct spacing of the ones I did plant, I ended up filling up an entire extra bed and a half, leaving just one half of a bed! If we keep this up, we’re going to have to build another one in the not so distant future!).

So, readers, help a gal out. What spring vegetable would you plant? Let me know in the comments section below!

Today we added topsoil and composted manure to our garden beds. We have three beds inside a roughly 10 by 15 garden. It looked so pretty once we had tilled it all! We also added 2 walkways to divide the beds, filling them with mulch and stepping stones. I’ve decided to work with some seeds as well as transplants since this is my first time attempting a vegetable garden. Today I planted…

• Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
• 45-Day Cabbage
• Packman Broccoli
• White Cloud Cauliflower
• Romaine Lettuce
• Purple Plum Radishes
• Texas Sweet White Onions
• Marigolds
• Rosemary

This was enough to fill 2 of the beds. But after some more research, I think I may need to go back and space them apart some more, so the 3rd bed might be partially filled as well. I will post a picture sometime soon! It was wonderful to spend the day out in the garden, working on growing our own food. I can’t wait to see what this harvest will bring!

Katie, from Kitchen Stewardship, is currently hosting a new series called Eat Well, Spend Less. 8 different blogs will be posting on how they manage to keep the budget in check while still providing nourishing, healthy food for their families. This is just the first week, and I am so impressed with all the different ideas out there for saving money!

Here are some of my own tips for keeping food costs down in our family:

• Buy cheaper cuts of meat. This means whole chickens, not boneless breasts; ground beef and stew meat instead of steaks and ground pork in lieu of sausage patties.
• Do the chopping yourself. We buy whole, 5lb bags of carrots and chop them up for carrot sticks or slices for meals. Same for celery and other veggies. I often will chop a lot all at once and freeze individual portions of them so that it’s just grab and go for a quick dinner. When you do more work yourself, like chopping vegetables, you can save quite a bit of money.
• Shop the farmers. At our local farmer’s market, there are always farmers competing for business. This means prices are not always the same. They may flunctuate by 50 cents or even a dollar, so I always check out the prices of items I need (pastured eggs) and try to go with whoever is cheapest that week.
• Menu plan. This is the single most important aspect of saving money while eating real food. You can easily spend hundreds over your allotted budget if you’re not careful with your planning. I really don’t enjoy menu planning, but when I do it, I am always grateful I have. I’ve found that one-week menu plans just don’t work for my family, so we recently started month long menu plans. I can strategically plan leftovers and help maximize our budget better when we do this.

The other ladies in the Eat Well, Spend Less blog series have so many other excellent ideas (which I didn’t feel needed repeating), so I encourage you to poke around and see for yourself!

What about you? How do you manange to keep your budget in check while eating real food?

Today’s Guest Post is brought to you by Mary, who blogs over at The Simple Hearth, about all things real food, featuring posts on practical food how-to’s, kitchen experiments and self improvement. 

Make 2 cups of tea, using 1-2 tea bags and 2 tsps of sugar.
After it cools completely, pour it into the jar.
Add your bottle of raw, starter kombucha.
Cover with a towel or a lid that is not air tight, but keeps bugs out.
Put in a warm, dark place (I put mine on top of the fridge and cover it with an old T-shirt).
Wait for 2-4 weeks (this largely depends on how warm it is in your house). It’s ok to peak to check on it every few days.
 
At this point, you should have a 1/4 inch thick, funky-looking thing called a SCOBY chilling on top of your tea. If it’s not 1/4 inch thick, let it sit a while longer to grow. This is where the magic happens. This plasticy, slightly slimy disc is what you’re going to use to make your kombucha.
 
Making the Drink — Almost There!  

Make a gallon of green tea, using 10 tea bags and 1 cup of sugar.
Once it cools completely, add it to the jar.
Cover the jar and return it to its resting place for about 1 week (again, it’s ok to peak/taste test because this part varies so widely from house to house). Once it tastes how you like it, you’re almost done.
Either you can just put the whole jar in the fridge and ladle some out of the jar every time you want some, or you can do one more step to make it more carbonated / portable.
 
Second Fermentation — Add a Little Fizz.  

If you like a more carbonated drink, you can choose to do a second fermentation.
Take your small glass bottles, add about between 1/4 and 1/2 a tsp of sugar into each jar for each cup of liquid it can hold.
Carefully pour your tea into the bottles, reserving 2 cups of liquid in the 1 gallon jar to start your next batch and keep your money-maker alive and kicking.
Cap bottles very tightly. Gently shake until all the sugar is dissolved.
Put in your warm, dark place for 1-4 days, depending on how warm it is. Check it every day by tasting from a different bottle each day to see how carbonated it is.
 
**Be careful not to forget about them. These are living, growing organisms and if you leave them too long, it could even potentially burst a jar from the pressure.
 
Voila! You now are set up to enjoy your very own kombucha at pennies on the dollar for what it costs to buy it from the store.

(note: the below video is just over 2 hours long, but I encourage you to at least watch the first 15 minutes.)

The WAPF guideline booklet, Healthy 4 Life,is the recommended alternative to the USDA’s horrendous food pyramid. It consists of bright, colorful pages with instructions that are easy to understand and implement, as well as countless recipes and meal ideas to help your family finally achieve sound nutrition.

Finding local food sources is not always easy. It takes a little extra time and effort, but the end result is always worth it. Not only are you buying food grown and raised locally and up to your standards, but you also are helping to support these farmers and are in turn, voting with your dollar. Establishing relationships with farmers and local food producers is a wonderful way to combat the ever-growing industrial food chain, and we’ve found it is not only rewarding nutritionally and environmentally, but the community connections help foster a greater sense of social involvement beyond the friends and family sphere. 

  We currently buy all our meat, cheese, eggs and milk from local farms. This was not an overnight process, and it took some time to  find the right sources. Thankfully, we belong to a buying club that helps bring most of these items together in one place, but even if you don’t have a buying club you can still manage to get a lot of your food locally without too much effort! 

The article , How to Find Local Food Sources, touches on many different resources you can tap to get into the local food market. These are the same resources that helped us get involved with different farmers, and no matter where you live you can always use these same principles to find local food for your family too! I promise it will make a world of a difference in how you view not only your food and family’s health but also your community.