Independence Days Challenge Week 1:

 

 

All right, it’s actually week 2 of the challenge, but I was pretty darn sick last week, and reports are supposed to be made on Fridays, but farmer-author-scholar Sharon Astyk, who initiated the challenge, hasn’t posted for this week yet either so I don’t feel so bad.

What, you may ask, is this challenge? It’s not a writing challenge, but a living challenge for those of us who are interested in living a more earthy-crunchy life in a very practical way,and it’s mostly but not exclusively concerned with food.  Since I love to garden and to eat locally and am more than a bit obsessed with food and food systems, I’m all about this! To quote Sharon, “the whole idea is to get the positive sense of your accomplishments – it is easy to think we haven’t done anything to move forward, but in fact, we all do, almost every day.  We just think of accomplishment as a big thing – a whole day spent putting up applesauce or a hundred tomato plants.  The Independence Day project makes us count our little accomplishments and see that we are moving forward.”

The challenge categories (again from Sharon’s site), are:

Plant something: A lot of us were trained to think of planting as done once a year, but if you start seeds, do season extension and succession plant, you’ll get much, much more out of your garden, so I try and plant something every day from February into September.

Harvest something: Everything counts – from the milk and eggs you get from your animals to the first dandelions from your yard to 50 bushels of tomatoes – it all counts.

Preserve something: Again, I find preserving is most productive if I try and do a little every day that there is anything, from the first dried raspberry leaves and jarred rhubarb to the last squashes at the end of the season.

Waste not: Reducing food waste, composting everything or feeding it to animals, reducing your use of disposables and creation of garbage, reusing things that would otherwise go to waste, making sure your preserved and stored foods are kept in good shape – all of these count.

Want Not: Adding to your food storage or stash of goods for emergencies, building up resources that will be useful in the long term.

Eat the Food: Making full and good use of what you have, making sure that you are getting everything you can from your food, trying new recipes and new cooking ideas, eating out of your storage!

Build community food systems: What have you done to help other people have better food access or to make your local food system more resilient?

And a new one: Skill up:  What did you learn this week that will help you in the future – could be as simple as fixing the faucet or as hard as building a shed, as simple as a new way of keeping records or as complicated as making shoes.  Whatever you are learning, you get a merit badge for it – this is important stuff.

And now for my results:

Plant something: Zip, zilch, nada. That will start in a few weeks. I did do my seed order. It feels almost warm enough to plant, and the soil can be worked, but I know it’s still too early to trust the weather, and I haven’t gotten the seed-starting areas set up inside yet. Soon. Soon.

Harvest something: Lettuce, kale, lentil sprouts. The kale and lettuce, oddly, aren’t as happy as they were last year, when they were well insulated by snow, but I’m still getting an occasional harvest.

Preserve something: Not this week; I don’t think I even added anything to the freezer

Waste not: Composting and recycling per usual. I’m afraid we wasted more food and generated more trash than usual these past two weeks, due to being sick. Somehow that lovely bunch of broccoli raab just didn’t look like comfort food and it never got cooked.

Want not: Continuing to save money and pay down debts, but otherwise nothing extraordinary. My husband wouldn’t let me stock up on the $1 canned pumpkin, pointing out we had a number of cans and about 15 frozen pints on hand already and much as we like pumpkin, that would take a while to get through.

Eat the food: Nuts and home-dried fruit for work snacks. Cabbage (local) and lentil sprouts–surprisingly yummy. Oatmeal with home-dried fruit. Eating from the freezer quite a lot. Himself will be baking rye bread today with locally raised rye flour (rather expensive, but how cool is that?)

Support community food systems: Shopping at the farmers market; buying lunch, when I had to eat out this week, at a locally owned place that sources sustainably raised meat and produce rather than a chain.

Learn a new skill: Sprouting seeds for “fresh” food in winter, though honestly I’m not sure how often I’ll bother doing it as long as we can get to the winter farmers’ market. Still, good to know it’s crazy easy.  Also studying up on container gardening, since we want to expand the containers this year.

 

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