Jan 2010 tally-ho

The total for produce from the garden (ok, it was just eggs this month, but .... ) is 8.9 pounds. They're done with molting and the sun is shining more, their egg production is starting to increase. I'm getting about four eggs a day.

I'm really looking forward to the garden this year. I really want to figure out how to get more tomatoes from my own garden. I've always grown them but some years I get tons and some years it is pretty piddly. I'm inspired by the amount of food others are getting from their gardens.

Eating from our own land is so basic to what I want to be able to do. Since we live on a small suburban plot of land I'm going to farm it as best as I can. I've wanted a small farm since I was a kid. I read way too much Laura Ingalls Wilder and then, as a teenager, I discovered Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living (both of which are still in print BTW). I've always wanted that sort of life. I'm 50 now and still do not have anything approaching a small farm. On the other hand I doubt I could handle a small farm. No one else in the family feels the drive for simple living the way I do. So I've been given this plot of yard and I'm turning it into a farm. It's past small, it's micro. And it's about as much land as I can handle on my own. We get amazing amounts of food off of it. I'm hoping to vastly exceed my "tally-ho" totals from 2009. If the apple trees produce the poundage will go way up. Some years they produce bushels and bushels. Last year we got four (apples, not bushels, four apples, period). Even if the apple trees don't produce wildly I want to grow a lot more from the yard this year. It's a fun battle-- how to get more food out of the yard each year.