The bounty of the growing season has been good. Potatoes stored in the dark corner of the cellar. The freezers full: corn, rhubarb, green beans and pork. The canning rack sags under the rows of maple syrup, applesauce, pickles and canned vegetables.
Now, more than ever before, we are enjoying home grown meals. A typical fall supper at our house might include new potatoes, fresh picked broccoli, baked kale, buttercup squash and fresh goat's milk. Only the salt and the butter came from the grocery store. This year the kids really enjoy a meal they helped to plant in the spring, weed through the summer and pick fresh for the supper table.
Pulling a sweet carrot right out of the dirt and eating it on the walk back from the garden is hard to beat. It makes you really appreciate how we humans come from dirt, spend most of our life eating from it and eventually become dirt again when we die. A real circle of life.
This year we have stored away more food than ever before. Mostly it is our growing kids that remind us of how important our natural food is. We got a great potatoe crop from the 8 shared rows of Kennebec potatoes we planted in some new ground at the Old Homestead. Grammie & Grampa Wheeler spent lots of hours vacuuming potatoe bugs off the tender plants. Thats one way to avoid sprays. The carrots really needed to be thinned a little more, so they didn't do quite as well as we had hoped. After a second planting of sweet corn, the crop came a little late, but continued into early October. The pumpkins did well enough and some of the squash did too. The cucumbers were unstoppable, in fact we just had some cucumber slices for lunch today on October 25th!
As with any family, no matter the generation, there are some things that we just haven't learned how to make for ourselves. Here at Juniper Hill Farm, when we are out of toilet paper and peanut butter it's time to take a little cash and stop by the local grocery store. Nearly everything else can wait.
Why don't we all set a goal for the coming year to do for ourselves, become more self-sufficient and enjoys the fruits of our labors all year long.
Good Luck.
"Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden." ~ O.S.Card
