The more anyone can do to be more self-sufficient, the better, and gardening can play a huge role in that. People need to re-learn how to eat in season as well. We've all gotten spoiled and expect to be able to eat any fruit or veggie we want at any time of the year. This results in such things as apples being flown from another continent so we can have fresh apples at a time of the year when the apples grown in the USA aren't ripe yet. I cannot help thinking this sort of import/export/transport of produce makes little sense both financially and fuel-wise. Must we use fossil fuels to fly produce around the world? That never has made sense to me.

At our house, we eat what is in season while it is in season....sometimes every day. For example, when asparagus is ready, it is ready so you eat it and eat it and eat it, until the asparagus season ends. Because I grow too much of virtually everything, we still have plenty to preserve for future meals, but I'd rather eat as much of it fresh as possible. I am grateful we can eat the current harvest on any given day and still have extra to preserve for the future because it can take a lot of space to get those kinds of yields, and not everyone has that kind of space. Still, I'd hate to rely totally on only what we grow because there are some things that just do not grow well/yield well here in Oklahoma.

Sometimes I wonder if the economy ever really will stabilize again, or if we will see cycles of boom-and-bust occurring much more quickly than we did in the past. I look at produce prices in the grocery stores (and I do understand that produce prices are up quite a bit because of the California drought) and wonder how families who don't garden can afford to buy all the healthy produce they need to be eating for good health.

I hope you have some maters ripening. Fresh tomatoes from the home garden are one of the great joys of summer. During the growing season, we eat them until we are almost sick of them, but we sure do miss having fresh ones in the winter. I could almost live on just tomatoes in the summer. At the beginning of the season we mostly eat them fresh, but then once we are getting them in larger quantities, I like to make fresh soup, for example. What is better than tomato-basil soup you made for lunch from tomatoes and basil harvested just that morning? Or maybe Chicken-Tortilla soup using not only your home-grown tomatoes, but also your home-grown onions, garlic and cilantro? Or the ever-popular BLT sandwiches, to which Tim adds onions so he is having a BOLT sandwich. Or you can make and can pizza sauce and then make your own homemade pizzas with sauce from your garden (and use some of the garden veggies as toppings as well). It is fun to take what you harvest and make it into a meal. Maybe you add a side dish of boiled squash and have plums or strawberries for desert, and your whole meal is from the garden. Or, you gather eggs and add some home-grown produce to make a quiche.

I'm grateful I had a dad who loved to garden and cook because I grew up watching him harvest and then turn his harvest right into a meal. One of his favorite meals was just a homemade vegetable soup. Usually it had a tomato base and then he just chopped up and added whatever other veggies he had handy that day. Of course, being a pepper lover, he usually added a lot of peppers to his vegetable soup----so much so that we kids sometimes whined and complained that his soup was so spicy that it was like eating salsa soup. Other times, he'd chop up potatoes, okra, onions and sweet peppers and fry them in bacon drippings, adding cornmeal by just scattering it over the stop and stirring it in along with the mix of vegetables. I have a deep appreciation for what he did because even if he wasn't standing there and talking about how to turn your veggie harvest into a meal, he was teaching us by his actions.

He grew mostly veggies and fruits, but I also grow herbs and flowers and love having herbs from the garden and bouquets of flowers as well. It is so much more satisfying to me to cut flowers from our garden and arrange them in a vase than to just buy a bouquet at the grocery store.

yes! aside from making me hungry, you made me remember my bachelor buttons are blooming.

You're right. It's crazy. I just picked a pretty bouquet of purple and pink ones for little miss. GOAL ACHIEVED. She was so very happy.

I am so thrilled when I sit down to a meal as I am now and everything on my plate except the bacon is out of the garden. Salad, red cabbage, onion, yellow zucchini, cilantro. I did not grow up this way but I am so glad I am here now.
I agree we should eat locally what is in season. I study a lot of different things and the more I learn the more I want to go back to a simpler life. This years garden is really the beginning for me. I already have 20 bags of greens put up in the freezer and still eating swiss chard and collards. I may be getting tired of them now but I will sure appreciate them in a month or two.

Kim, If you've never read Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle", you would love it. It is the story of her family's move from Arizona, where you cannot grow enough in a family garden to sustain your family, to the Appalachian Mountains, where they undertake an experiment to eat locally, with very limited exceptions, for a year, and this includes raising as much of their food themselves as they can. I loved this book. In addition to eating what they grew, they tried to obtain locally-grown food to supplement their own harvest. They were quite serious about obtaining locally-grown food too, and went to a lot of effort to round up food items they wanted that were raised in their local area. They even included recipes, which I thought was a nice added touch. Of course, their climate there is rainier than ours most years, but I could see they face many of the same gardening challenges we face here. This is one of my all-time favorite books, and I read a lot so a book has to be great to make it on my favorite list.

Dawn

Thanks Dawn I will look for it at the libraries. it sounds like the type of real life type that I enjoy learning from. That being said I have learned so much from all of you and being encouraged to try things think outside the norm I am The only person ever known around here to grow cabbage carrots and broccoli in the spring. And I am loving it

Thank you for the peppers! I think they were yours, Dawn. The Black Hungarians are fruiting. Wonderful!

Kale soup, kale chips, kale salad, kale sautee.....
good thing I love kale!

We now produce, maybe, 95% of our own meat, close to 100% of our own eggs (Didn't buy any in 2014 or this year to date) and perhaps 85% of our vegetables. Fruit is another matter. We need to work on that. I think we're only at about 1%. We also produce all our own honey, though, we do still purchase sugar. And, we produce maybe 90% of our own milk and milk products.

It's been quite a journey to get to this place, and, I have to say it is a LOT OF WORK!

George

George, Y'all are so close to being self-sufficient that it is amazing. Well, except for the fruit. We are pretty much in the same boat on fruit, although we do grow plums, peaches, strawberries, blackberries, figs, oranges and lemons (with the citrus in pots that go into the greenhouse in winter, and not all that many fruit a year from the citrus trees). We also have young apple and cherry trees. One cherry tree produced 1 ripe cherry this year, but to be fair to the tree, it was only planted last year and we didn't then and still don't now expect to get a good harvest for several years. Citrus trees are more of a novelty since they have to stay in containers and their eventual height is limited by the size of the greenhouse.

I find it hard to get a good fruit harvest because every single living creature on our property (whether they live here year-round or are just visiting) wants to eat the fruit. Right now we are harvesting plums and I have to fight the squirrels, deer, flying insects, birds, etc. for every single fruit. The mockingbirds come and harass me when I am trying to harvest plums----I am sure they must be responsible for a lot of the pecked fruit and they likely think they are protecting their fruit from me. Another big challenge with fruit trees is that many wild animals will gnaw on the trees near the ground when they are young, and the deer here seem to select fruit trees to "thrash" almost to death during rutting season when they are feeling all territorial. Sometimes I think it is a wonder any of the fruit trees we have planted survive long enough to even bloom and make fruit.

We have tried to leave as many native fruit sources as possible growing on our land so the wildlife have a lot of fruit options, especially from native plants that produce various kinds of berries that humans don't eat, but the wild critters still prefer our cultivated fruit crops. The squirrels like plums, but they love peaches and mostly ignore the plums while waiting for the peaches to ripen. If they get the chance, they will take every single ripe peach we get. Figs are highly favored by wildlife, but no one except the coyotes will make a play for the native persimmons. Since the coyotes will eat green persimmons, they usually win that round of the fruit battle.

I don't know what the solution is because even with fenced-in trees, bird netting, etc., the wildlife go after the fruit aggressively every single day, and often do so well before it is ripe. I don't think we'll ever be as self-sufficient with fruit as we are with veggies, and we have to fight the wildlife much harder to get any fruit, much less to get enough to preserve to eat during the fruiting plants' off-season.

Dawn

I'm so happy for you, George. In admiration, too, because what little I did on the old lot was huge work. I cannot imagine the cows, milking, the ducks and such.

And when I thunk about it, fruit was the missing element. I remember thinking to supplement the vitamns with alternative veggies and herbs, like the molokhia, but that's as far as I got. I think I had determined that melons and cantaloupes and red bell peppers was going to be my sustainable source of vitamn c. And strawberries, which is still a pain to grow.

Man, I'm going to need to get creative over on the new lot. At least my bunnies are continually covering what little garden I now have