January in the Garden

Today is home-grown and home-made meal day at our house. This morning we had eggs (from our chickens), sausage (made Saturday), biscuits, and milk (from our goats).  

Tonight we are planning Rosemary-Lemon Chicken, roasted cabbage, snow peas, butternut squash, and our home-made soft-drink.  Oh, and home-made ice cream for dessert! All food ingredients but the squash were harvested in the last few days or will be later today. The squash was harvested in summer. The ingredients for the soft-drink are not home-grown, but we do make it ourselves. The vanilla extract in the ice cream, is not home-grown, but it is home-made.

Several cabbages are ready to harvest, which means that we'll be making sauerkraut in the next few days.

January is time to plant garlic, onion, and shallot bulbs.

It's time also to prune roses. By the way, if you have plants that have been damaged by frost (like our kiwi vines), do not prune off the damaged parts. They may be ugly, but they'll help protect the rest of the plant from further frost damage.


Rake your lawn and/or your neighbors' lawns for leaves for your compost pile.

Once all the leaves have fallen from your fruit trees, you can prune them. While you are pruning your deciduous trees you can also trim your conifers.

Purchase and plant bare-root roses, fruit trees, vines, and veggies. Camellias and  Azaleas, too. 

Spray your roses and deciduous trees with a dormant spray.

Order seeds and supplies from seed catalogs (more on that in the next post).

A Fairly Normal Saturday

Several have asked about what a typical workday on our mini-farm might look like. First, in the spirit of full disclosure, there aren’t very many typical, or normal days. While we do have routines and schedules, life the way God created it has its variables, particularly in regard to when things need to happen.

Our goats need to be milked everyday, and so are central to scheduling whatever else might happen on a given day. The goats and all the other animals must be fed and watered, their shelters and bedding tended to, and whatever other husbandry needs to happen--like the daily egg collecting from chickens and ducks, daily watering and weeding in the garden, daily checks and adjustments in the fish farm.

Then there are the additional chores for Saturday: harvesting poultry and fish, making soap, making soda pop.

There are also chores related to the garden harvest which we like to be continual, but usually come in waves. Harvesting and preserving the harvest is the most labor intensive aspect of the farm. For example, when the Roma tomatoes are ripe, we have just about a week to get them all picked at their peak, and then comes the processing for canning or drying. It is a good thing for us when this work can happen on a Saturday, but it doesn’t always.

When possible, we plan for the “extra” work to occur on Saturday. Our weekdays are pretty well used up with the daily farm chores, school, work, and a few extracurricular activities. Sunday is the Lord’s Day, and we try to devote ourselves and our energy more completely to Him and His work and worship on His day. So that leaves Saturday.

Saturday is the day we can all work on projects together that take more than an hour to accomplish. On weekdays we set aside an hour in the morning and an hour at midday to do our farm chores. Each takes his or her turn to feed and milk the goats, weed and water the garden, tend the poultry, feed the dog, sweep the porches, mind the baby, and so forth. If we need to put up a fence, or to build raised beds,  do some plumbing, or harvest some poultry, Saturday is the day.

So far with today about half over, we have harvested four chickens, made 5 pounds each of Italian and breakfast pork sausage, picked snap peas and cauliflower, changed a wheelbarrow flat, took down the last of the Christmas lights, and started work on some new raised beds. After a break for some refreshments, we'll see what else we can get into: possibly haircuts, making soap, and/or making toothpaste.

Time to Make Compost

In our Southern California garden there are always things growing and things to do, even in the middle of winter. We have cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and snap peas ready to harvest as well as oranges, tangerines, limes, and avocados. Soon it will be time to plant bare-root roses, fruit trees, and berries. In a couple of weeks, we'll be starting seeds indoors for plants to set out after the danger of frost has passed (usually around the first of April).

One thing we like to do in January is to look through the seed catalogs and garden books for ideas. Another is to add to or begin compost piles. Compost adds nutrients and organic matter to the soil. It will improve any soil over time, even if you add no other amendments. For us January and February are great months to make compost because of the availability of leaves. We have them, our neighbors have them. We get them from our neighbors for the asking (and the raking).

There are a number of different ways to make compost for the garden. Some are labor intensive, others not so much. We prefer the less labor intensive sort when we can get away with it. However, the less attention and work you give your compost, the longer it will take to be ready for your garden.

The easiest way to make compost is to make a pile and let it sit for months until it is finished and/or you are ready to use it. Pick a spot in an out of the way corner of your garden to make your pile, keeping in mind that you will be hauling stuff to and from the pile. (If your garden is in the near part of your yard, you don't want to build your compost pile in the far part of your yard. Unless of course, you enjoy using the wheelbarrow or carrying a bucket.)  After you've chosen a convenient spot, scratch up or turn over the soil that will be under the pile. Then, add your yard and kitchen wastes to the pile, mixing them together as you go. You could build a bin out of wire or hardware cloth, or other materials, but this is not absolutely necessary with this method.

Add kitchen scraps (but no meat or fats) and yard trimmings to the top of the pile over time. You may need to sprinkle a little water on the pile once in a while to keep it moist but not soggy.  When you are ready to plant your garden, remove the top layers of unfinished compost, setting them aside for starting a new pile. The finished compost will be at the bottom of the pile. Collect it into your bucket or wheelbarrow, put the unfinished stuff in its place and head for the garden with your finished product.

You can dig the compost into the soil as you plant or you can use the compost as a mulch, or both.

There are other ways to make compost that require more effort, but produce a finished product in as little as two weeks. Duane and Karen Newcomb's book, The Postage Stamp Garden Book: Grow Tons of Vegetables in Small Spaces has an appendix devoted to various methods of making compost.

We don't have much kitchen waste that makes it to the compost pile because most of it goes to the ducks, geese, and chickens (oh, and the rabbit, too). We do use bedding from the goat pen and yard trimmings. You can read here about Our Composting System that goes on right in the garden beds.

One of the best books we've found to help us understand the soil is Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition, by Lowenfels and Lewis.

Edible Curb Appeal?

Remodeling the front yard to be primarily a vegetable garden with curb appeal offers some unique challenges.

The most efficient approach seems to be to begin with the structure of the garden--the planters, the trellises, the fountain (?), the fences--with an eye to the crops and plants that will live around and in these structures.

Should we use a fountain as a feature in the front yard? Should that water feature be a central focal point or should it be tucked into a corner to be discovered by the visitor? Should this and all other elements of the garden be placed to please those who look out from the house or for those passersby who look in from the street, or for both? A little of each, perhaps?

A picket fence across the front seems to be the consensus at this point. Trellises will do the work of fences along the driveway. Raised beds will be common throughout, even for the perennial plantings, and walkways will be covered with either bark or gravel--no mowing, and little if any weed whacking.

The citrus will remain as foundation plants, while an olive and a macadamia will be added. Artichokes come to mind as an additional perennial.

In the summer months, nasturtiums, sunflowers, and cucumbers will add some color, as will the complementary yellow and purple flowers of okra and eggplant over the sea of squash and melon leaves.

In the fall, peas, favas, kales, cauliflowers, and cabbages will add their variety, as will lettuces and other "greens" like beets and chard.

We're learning as we go. There are several good books available to show you how. Our current favorite is Yvette Soler’s The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-Less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden.

Making Turkey Stock

Once you remove all the meat from your Thanksgiving turkey, put the bones on to simmer right away to make stock to use in soups and sauces for the rest of the holidays and after. It may help keep you and your family from getting the winter colds and flu that always come around.

Homemade stock offers three nutritional benefits that are in readily digestible form:

1. Minerals calcium, magnesium, silicon, sulphur and phosporous and critical trace minerals.

2. Gelatin which is good for many tissues of the body -- cartilage, bones, joints, skin, digestive tract, and muscles including the heart. Gelatin also boosts immunity. The majority of our immune system is located in our gut, and gelatin soothes and heals the intestinal mucosa.

3. Glucosamine and chondroitin sulphates, good for joint maintenance.

Making turkey stock is very easy. Put the carcass in a large pot (1-2 gallons) and cover with water. Add 1/4 cup of vinegar (this will help to release minerals from the bones and cartilage). Bring to a boil over medium to high heat. Reduce to medium to low heat and simmer for 24 hours. Skim off any foam that forms on the surface while simmering. After 24 hours strain out the bones. You'll have a gallon or two of yummy stock.

Easy, healthful, and tasty.

A Little Less Ambitious

As self-sufficiency expert John Seymour wrote, “You do not need five acres and a degree in horticulture to become self-sufficient ... self-sufficiency is about taking control and becoming an effective producer of whatever your resources allow.”

Many (or even most) writing about self-sufficiency make the assumption that all of us who want to be self-sufficient want to do so primarily because of environmental concerns, global environmental concerns, like sustainability of food production, reduction of pollution, and so forth.

Our thinking is a little less ambitious. We do want the best possible environment in and around our home to allow each member of our family to thrive, both physically and spiritually. We have found in the process of improving our immediate environment by avoiding unnecessary chemicals--cleansers, herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, preservatives, and sedatives--that traditional ways (natural, homemade) are most often less expensive than purchasing the commercial, chemical products.

In other words, we’re not becoming more self-sufficient to save the planet, we are becoming more self-sufficient to save ourselves. We trust ourselves to take care of us, not the government--local, state, federal, or global. We have found that being self-sufficient, while in the short run is more costly in terms of time and labor (and sometimes money) than relying on others, in the long run is less so. Growing our own food veggies and fruits for the cost of some seeds and a little water is cheaper and cleaner than buying our food at the grocery store. That’s a short term savings. In the long term, we expect to save much more in terms of health and well-being in the future. Those are long term savings.

"Sustainable" for us means that very little, if any, input is required to keep a system going after the initial investment. For example, saving seeds from open pollinated vegetable varieties means that we don't have to purchase seeds or plants each year. Or, keeping a rooster will provide chicks for us whenever we need replacement layers, or meat birds.

The investment we make now in terms of time and money has an incalculable return on investment in the near and distant future, both for ourselves and future generations. For those that feel the planet is in need of saving: the solution is not in buying carbon credits, or driving an electric car, or eating lots of tofu. Just do what you can for your immediate environment. If everyone did the same, the global environment would improve substantially. Start by growing something that you like to eat--tomatoes? peppers? salad greens? Add a couple of chickens to your yard and they will eat your table scraps and bugs in your yard, and give you eggs to eat and manure to put on your garden. Less packaging goes to the landfill, less diesel for food transport is burned, and you will be producing a good bit of your own food.

Dreams and Goals

It has been our dream to have an efficient, "sustainable" means of food production. For us, it started with the garden and has expanded steadily over the past few years.

In an urban or suburban setting, it is difficult to imagine a completely sustainable mini-farm. It is not difficult to imagine a mini-farm part, just the sustainable, or completely self-sufficient part. But we can approach those goals.

On our mini-farm we have the animals we need to provide manure--chickens, ducks, geese, fish, and goats--so there is no shortage in this department. We have at least three or four compost bins and piles going at any given time, as well as some worm bins to turn the manure, garden trimmings, and kitchen wastes into usable compost. We plan to add a bin for black soldier fly larvae next year to help deal more quickly with the kitchen waste and to provide grubs for the chickens and fish.

The snag for us in becoming self-sufficient or completely sustainable is that we are having to bring in feed for the chickens and goats. While our poultry are as free-range as we can make them, there just isn't enough "range" to completely provide for them just yet. We need to find the balance between available forage and number of birds.

The ducks and geese forage for themselves with the occasional treats of leftover fruit and greens from the table, and an occasional sprinkle of grain.  Our chickens have free access to a couple of compost piles, so they get whatever leftovers from the kitchen they want along with all the grass, weeds, seeds, and bugs the can find, but they still need extra feed to maintain egg production. The goats are given grasses and hay from bales we purchase in addition to the garden and tree trimmings and other home-grown forage we provide. We grow sunflowers specifically for the purpose of feeding the seeds to the birds (and goats) and the rest of the plant to the goats. We  also have grown mangels specifically for goat feed.  Swiss Chard is a hit with just about everybody on the farm, except some of the people. Kale, too.

To be able to eat fish from our farm once a week throughout the year, we have to purchase fish food. The black soldier fly grubs will help here. We have also been experimenting with other available foods. Tilapia have been reported to eat raw scrambled eggs. We have not had success in getting ours to eat this, but will keep trying. We do grow duckweed to feed our tilapia, but not nearly enough. More pond to grow it in would be nice, but not practical at this point.

Now to the humans on the farm. We can grow for ourselves all of our fruit and vegetable needs. We have eggs, milk, meat and fish in enough quantity to meet our needs most of the time.  We can and do make our own yogurt, ice cream, and cheeses. But if we want beef, pork, or grains we have to buy them. Do we need them? No, at least not all of the time.  So it is entirely possible for us to eat well with only animal feed coming into our farm. This is one of our goals. We'll start with a week or two and go from there.

At this point, we don't make many trips to the grocery store. We buy our staple goods in bulk.With these we make our own bread, soaps, and soft drinks. We can make our own pasta, toothpaste, shampoo, cleaners, and deodorants. Does all this save money? It sure doesn't save time, and time is money, right? Well let's see.

We spend about $300 per month on animal feed, and about twice that much on staple goods (organic if possible). We have a family of eight. That works out to less than $1.50 per person per meal. Our food is real food, no additives or sedatives. No chemicals you can't pronounce. No GMO. Our homemade cleaning and personal care products are the same way. We spend less than two hours per person per day working the farm and the kitchen.

We have a way to go, but we're getting there. Some say that the journey is more enjoyable than the destination. We're having a lot of fun getting to where we want to be. If we can do it, so can you. Start small as we did, working your way up. Start now.