The challenge

Avoiding the grocery store

The challenge, To stop eating anything storebought.  To see how long you can go on foraging , dry provisions from last years garden, preserves from your own trees or foraged fruit. And of course the garden.

It is an amazing thing to unhitch from the food system. Such an easy thing to do and enlightening if attempted for one’s edification but truly terrifying under any other condition. But my wife and I have tried , now twice ,to eat from the pantry what I have stored away.

Dent corn, field dried, and properly stored in drying racks , dry beans, wheat, spelt, amaranth, holm and cork oak acorns. The pantry is a freestanding building with aviary wire over all the vents. It is as rodent proof as possible, with ten years mouse free storage. So the list above is in the shed leftover from last year, and just starting to restock with this years wheat and a new major effort into buckwheat.

My wife and I don’t usually eat a diet exclusive to my dry stores but we have. The first time on a whim as a New Year’s resolution . My stores have been much better planned after that first effort when we really did get by mostly on acorns and eggs. The whole point of this story is what a revelation it was to live without sugar . Right away your body/mind notices the change and frankly doesn’t like it. Your mind keeps telling you it wants sugar, you tell it no!  So then a few days more and the mind gives up on sugar and says, give me a heavy starch, give me a potato! But I have none. And then the mind says give me alcohol and you relent just a little but very little. A little bit cheating the project but after two or three weeks without sugar a bottle of wine is deserved. We went a month that first “Challenge”.  The revelation was what a physical addiction sugar really is and how your mind pulls you back in , just like any other addiction.

I have always gardened, I think every year a garden somewhere for 60 years now. Sometimes as willing labor for my aunt Shirley or my mother who both kept gardens, and for a few years with my friend Chad but usually alone. I have grow a garden large enough to fully stock a ( for profit ) vegetable stand three months of the year. I still live where I ran the farm stand but I garden now for my own amusement which for several years has been dried staples. How to crop them, harvest them, and dry and store them in volumes to provision a small family. How to use them in everyday kitchen recipes.

As a gardener the drying shed is also seed storage for the next season or two . I try to rotate out the older seeds and maintain a fresh batch for planting. All the standard vegetable seeds can store for next spring , they take little room . Potatoes are in the shed right now but around here they won’t store so I don’t depend on them as staples. Summer is bountiful and kinda hot but picking, drying and storing staples is required work . Buckwheat has been a daily effort of late, it is a new crop for me . I hand pick it and spread it out on a big tarp for drying, threshing, and winnowing on the windy days. Working towards a fifty pound sack of cleaned buckwheat, and about half way there.

There is a standard garden with something going on year round. Not much during winter but artichokes and winter brassicas are welcome fare.  Chickens and some pigs but another whole story ,the pigs. A very dedicated forager could probably forage for a pig or two but they eat about a ton a year. I have been able to forage two or three months of acorns to finish a couple pigs but I have never been able to feed them year round that way.

Having the chickens seemed critical to maintaining the challenge. Chickens hate acorns so if they are kept in a coup require grains and corn. If you can let the chickens range they require far less food but invariably get picked off which requires minding the incubator every once in a while . Chickens are worth every effort to keep going.

I gained some confidence by actually taking the plunge and proving to myself that I could provision a small family. We went one month the first time and then three months the second time we gave up the grocery store. I always keep a stash of acorns in the drying room. Hundreds of pounds some years and the pigs are happy when I get ambitious but the shed always has dried acorns, they keep well over a year and whether I get around to making flour in any volume is only constrained by my willpower to grind through it. Otherwise, happy pigs. I also keep a couple different dent corn crops and add things like the buckwheat I added this year .

  As for this years effort

the garden is progressing nicely. I composted several tons of oak leaf mulch and spread it over the winter cover crop with my electric tractor . The corn, beans , squash, and tomatoes are coming along nicely . The spring carrots and beets are on the way out and the onions and garlic I spring planted are about done. It is nice the buckwheat is ready this early because fall gets busy with corn and bean harvesting  and drying. Also drying conditions are better now than in late fall.

The apricot is cropping right now so Blenheims need canning. There is a volunteer peach with its first set of fruit. There is walnut volunteer and a grafted tree I planted a year ago. The pears as usual have a heavy crop and I have the very first acorns set on a holm oak I grew from seed.

Oaks are their own subject but briefly I have Holm oaks , and Emory oaks planted and several full grown Coastal live oaks as well as two young Valley oak trees. I will be adding about a hundred live oaks this spring .

  Ten years the farm electrics have been solar / battery. Well water for home and irrigation , refrigeration, A/C and all other farm use is from the 8500kWh the solar produces each year plus about 500kWh from the grid.  The tractor is electric and about as powerful as a walk behind rototiller but it does help me move compost around. It is always easy to think of how nice a bigger horsepower tractor would be but kinda like sugar it just an addiction and getting away from it is tough.