Put your backyard to work with the books: The Backyard Homestead and The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals

Do you eat food?  Do you eat food every day?  I'm sure you probably do, or you wouldn't be reading these words.  Perhaps you're aware that the quality of your food is important to your health.  After all your body is built out of the nutrients in the food you eat.  What you may not know is the corporatized globalized homogenized pasteurized agriculture system that gives us the food in the mainstream grocery stores, well, that "food" lacks in nutritional goodness.

There's growing interest in local fresh food eaten when the food is freshly harvested.  There's a huge difference between the normal not-quite-food shipped from a zillion miles away, and fresh local food.  This doesn't have to be just a matter of shopping hoity-toity high end organic grocery stores, and doesn't have to mean bustling with the crowds at farmers markets.  You can instead spend months and months of drudgery in your back yard growing your own fresh food.

The drudgery part is one of those stereotypes about gardening that doesn't have to be true.  And the book being reviewed now, The Backyard Homestead, is here to make you feel like it would be extremely simple to plant a quarter acre of ground with gardens and/or orchards and/or livestock and harvest 1400 eggs a year, for example.

The book comes from Storey Publishing and says it was Edited by Carleen Madigan.  It's chock full of pencil drawings of typical garden layouts, advice on growing different plants, combinations of plants that are successful, typical growing areas and growing seasons, plus an extensive section on livestock that makes it seem impossibly realistic you could have a flock of chickens in your backyard keeping you well stocked in eggs and chicken soup.

The book weighs in at 360ish pages and is chock full of information, drawings, written advice, reference material, and so on.

Sections cover

• The Home Vegetable Garden
• Backyard Fruits and Nuts (grow your own orchard!)
• Easy Fragrant Herbs
• Home Grown Grains
• Poultry for Meat and Eggs
• Meat and Dairy (other livestock)
• Food from the Wild (honey, mushrooms, etc)

To go along with the Poultry section, the indices contain a list of backyard chicken laws from around the U.S.  In some areas it's subversive and even illegal to raise your own chickens in your backyard.  My friend who does raise chickens has a bumper sticker reading "My Pet Gives Me Eggs" .. think about it

An important section up front covers planning out your garden not only for the available space, but to minimize the work you do.  For example raised bed gardening is described as a big win because the plants are closer to you (you don't have to bend over as far) and the growing conditions can be better.  This section is also important to avoid the drudgery stereotype I mentioned above.

Speaking of which - every page in this book oozes with confidence that this is simple and easy stuff to do.  I sure got excited all over again about the thought of starting a garden or even having some chickens.

There's also a companion book, The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals: Choose the Best Breeds for Small-Space Farming, Produce Your Own Grass-Fed Meat, Gather Fresh ... Rabbits, Goats, Sheep, Pigs, Cattle, & Bees, which I haven't read but clearly starts with the poultry and livestock section of this book and expands on it in a huge way.  That book is also 360 pages and even includes a full color pull-out chart of something or other.

Together these books should help you "Put Your Back Yard To Work" so that you could not only feed yourself and your family, but perhaps earn a secondary income growing food to sell to others.  In these uncertain economic times this could be some personal resilience that could make the difference between life or death depending on how bad things become.  On the other hand earning an income is not quite so simple nowadays thanks to food safety laws that are being used to crack down on organic farming.  Check your local laws before committing to a business plan and buying equipment.

The books are highly recommended and totally excellent.  Backyards across the country could be a backyard local food agriculture resource.  There have been times in our history where this was a matter of national importance (Victory Gardens), and there may well be a time soon when this is again highly important.

Putting the cart before the horse, Businesses Pledge 'Healthier Choices' for Customers

NPR ran a nice story this morning about the obesity epidemic and a movement to ask Businesses to provide us with different, healthier, food choices.  To an extent the obesity epidemic is about food choices, supposedly, maybe, and just as supposedly different healthier food choices will decrease obesity.  Of course the modern food system is rife with ridiculous food-like substances and we as a culture have lost track of real food.  So I agree with the thrust of what they're talking about here - real food, good quality food, actual real enjoyment from real food, wonderful.

But I felt uncomfortable and eventually it clicked in my mind.  They are talking about this issue backwards.  The format is for Business to Change what it Does so that we have better choices available.  And, yes, Business plays a role because the choices made by Business do limit the choices we can make.

But this strikes me as a top-down approach to introducing Change.  The wave of Change in this case is bubbling down from on high, in this case First Lady Michelle Obama is the honorary Director of the Partnership for a Healthier America who organized the summit talked about in the piece below.  The PHA is a public/private/non-profit partnership (that is, Government, Business and Non-Profit) whose mission is to "broker meaningful commitments and develop strategies to end child obesity."

Uh.. sounds to me like an effort to build an organization that doesn't do anything meaningful, but to just create strategies and publish opinion papers or something.

What will make an actual difference is to change the habits of we the people.  Not just the food we eat, but the living patterns.  When they focus on food choices regarding obesity they're ignoring the sedentary lifestyle and its effect on obesity.  Obesity can be combated simply by getting off our butts and moving around more.  Instead of driving to work (sedentary) ride a bicycle instead, for example.  Or take a walk through your neighborhood every day.

Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment - open source distributed DIY solutions to gardening even in apartment buildings

Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.

To find out more about the project:  http://rndiy.com/

 

ooooby Box Scheme - community supported agriculture idea transplanted from New Zealand to Ireland

The ooooby (out of our own back yard) idea originated in New Zealand.  I first heard of it via the In Transition 1.0 movie about the Transition Towns movement.  This video shows a group implementing the idea in Ireland as a community supported agriculture system that's also a gardening training facility.

Part of this implementation is that backyard growers can sell their excess through the ooooby store.

 

ooooby Box Scheme from Tony Armstrong on Vimeo.

Cornucopia Institute

URL: 

Cornucopia Institute

Description: 

Seeking economic justice for the family-scale farming community. Through research, advocacy, and economic development our goal is to empower farmers - partnered with consumers - in support of ecologically produced local, organic and authentic food.

Sustainable Table

URL: 

Sustainable Table

Description: 

Sustainable Table celebrates local sustainable food, educates consumers on food-related issues and works to build community through food. The program is home to the Eat Well Guide, an online directory of sustainable products in the U.S. and Canada, and the critically-acclaimed, award-winning Meatrix movies - The Meatrix, The Meatrix II: Revolting and The Meatrix II½.

Sustainable Table was created in 2003 by the nonprofit organization GRACE to help consumers understand the problems with our food supply and offer viable solutions and alternatives. Rather than be overwhelmed by the problems created by our industrial agricultural system, Sustainable Table celebrates the joy of food and eating.

Gourmet Nation: The New American Cuisine

Gourmet Nation: The New American Cuisine is a podcast from http://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/ about food and a return to modern wholesomeness in enjoying food and eating.

The culture around us is basically Fast Food run amok. One of the speakers in the program talks about how the chain restaurants have somehow reworked food so you don't even have to chew, you just inhale and you've consumed your daily nutrition. They didn't refer to this but the image which came to mind was the Star Trek (original generation) episode where the alien species had these pills they ate which gave them all the nutrition they needed and there was no more need for regular food. The method they used to subdue these aliens was to expose them to food, the enjoyments of food and I especially recall the enjoyments of liquor.

Community is one of our core needs .. that is, real honest and lasting connections with other people.

Community happens when people get together for a common purpose.

Therefore it occurred to me that one of the forms of community is the dinner table and the kitchen. That in the kitchen or at the dinner table you have people coming together, daily, to have their common purpose and needs met, namely sustenance. But as a side effect it brings people together for more than just sharing nutrition, it brings them together for enjoyment, for sharing their heart with each other, etc.