From the website:

FRESH is a documentary featuring Michael Pollan, Will Allen and Joel Salatin which celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system.

I’ve read/watched several food related books/films, and I think that Fresh is a great addition.  It’s got quite a bit of the same content as Food, Inc., but it goes a lot farther to offer solutions to the problems.  It’s a great way to get motivated about real food!

Click the link above to watch the documentary Fresh for free until February 1st!

Well, I’d say I’ve done a bit of an expansion…

I now have three times the garden space, with 6 4×4 Square Foot Garden style beds.  This is all working toward my goal of growing (or sharing, my grandfather also gardens) 50% of my family’s vegetables throughout the year.  Needless to say, this many beds require a little more planning that I’ve done in previous years.  So I decided to print out a grid of my beds to do a little “pencil planning”:

I’m using the Wikipedia page List of Companion Plants as a guide for placement.  This has made my planning like one of those little sliding puzzles – move this piece here, oops, that can’t go there, etc.  I hope with this kind of foresight though, everything will have the best chance possible.

Man, I can’t wait for that first slice of garden fresh tomato…

First, my lettuce garden, still kickin’ in 2012:

And my garlic, yet to lose its foliage to the frost:

Stay tuned!

…and my perpetually bolting cilantro has finally taken a foothold.

A few carrots and lonely green beans survived excessive heat and chicken pecking and are still working…

… and my garlic has sprouted 100%.  Hopefully I planted it at the right time – I’m a garlic n00b.

Tasks remaining before the winter:

• Anxiously wait for the rest of the tomatoes to ripen, while picking off any suckers.  I swear this tomato plant is a monster that won’t give it up!  Eventually I’ll trim it, pull it up and hang it in the basement to allow the remaining tomatoes a chance to ripen.
• Mulch mature plants that will overwinter.
• Smother grass and weeds under future garden beds.  Spring is going to see a great expansion of the garden.
• Harvest lettuce and eat delicious salads sweetened by the cold!
• Set up a glass shelf in the kitchen window for winter herbs (more on this soon).
• Gather seed catalogs and knitting and get ready to dream the winter away.

Stick it to the man – start a garden!

The chickens in their early days...

So today’s blog news is kind of sad – I gave away the chickens.  To make a long story short (and sum up a previous post)  my three ladies turned out to be one lady and two dudes!  Not only does that really put a damper on egg production, it also doesn’t make for a harmonious chicken household (poor Tammy!).  My only options were to get more chickens, or give these away.  With cold weather quickly approaching, I found the idea of getting new chickens to be quite daunting.  The new plan is to wait until the spring and get some certified pullets, probably 3 or 4, which will be a perfect number of eggs for my family.  I never really wanted a rooster in the first place (and no you don’t need a rooster for eggs!).

This will also give me a chance to make some improvements to their living quarters:

It’s good at keeping chickens in, but very bad at keeping curious beagles out.  And where Jerry enters, chickens exit!  I’m thinking we’re going to need to partly bury the fence, and put in some “real” gates.

Don’t worry, this is not the end of my chicken adventure.  This experience has taught me that yes I do want chickens, but I think I just needed to jump in there and do it once before I got it right.  That’s just the kind of gal I am.

1. ALWAYS have reusable containers in my car for restaurant leftovers, so this doesn’t happen again.
2. Bring reusable containers to Whole Foods for meat purchases.  I checked with the butcher and he said this was no problem!
3. Forage for acorns to feed the chickens over the winter.  Most of the acorns around here are of the low tannin variety, so they’re safe to feed chickens raw.  I’m hoping that this will seriously reduce my feed costs in the coming months, especially since I have fenced in my chickens.
4. Shoot for more no food waste weeks.
5. Start making bread again.  The last few weeks have gotten kind of hectic out here, so the extra cooking has gone by the wayside.

I’d say that #4 is by far the hardest, but it’s a noble cause!

This weeks waste: 3 restaurant chicken wings.

But I would be disingenuous if I left it at that.  We also wasted a styrofoam container.  It wasn’t me, I swear!  I do my best to bring reusable containers in the car with me in case I need to take leftovers (which is almost every time I eat out). The hubs went out to eat without me and brought it home.  There were too many leftovers in the container to eat all at once, so these three little stragglers got left behind.

I think I’m pretty far from convincing my husband to bring reusable containers when I’m not around, so I have to resign myself (at least for now) to having a few of these come in the house.  The bright side is that many Atlanta area restaurants are taking a clue from their patrons and packaging takeout in paper and cardboard containers instead.

All right, well I’m signing out and hoping for a no waste week next time.  Have a great Friday!

Revision!  After reading this post, my husband lovingly pointed out that I WAS indeed with him, and this was during my birthday dinner!  I didn’t have any containers in the car at the time, so it was a choice between using styrofoam and wasting food – oh the agony!

We went to the True Nature Country Fair in Flat Rock (right outside Hendersonville) on Saturday.  I signed up for an artisan bread making class.  I’ve been making bread for a while now, but I wanted to get deeper into the whys of it all, to see if I can make bread without a “recipe” per se.

The class was wonderful; he taught us how to let the flour and water sit to autolyse, where the flour will absorb the water all on it’s own, and keep you from making a dry dough.  I also learned that the less kneading the better, and to make my dough as wet as I can still work with it. They were going to bake our bread in this awesome cob oven:

…but unfortunately the class took entirely too long, and the oven still had 2 hours to heat up!  I’ve been really interesting in regaining some of the skills lost to our generation, and I think making great bread at home is definitely one of those.

I also got to meet, for the first time face to face, a blogger that I read.  Ashley English of Small Measure was running a booth on water bath canning.  She was gracious and engaging; we had a short conversation on chickens and the neighborhoods of Atlanta (love Decatur anyone?).  I picked up a copy of her book Keeping Chickens, and I love it!

What lost skills are you trying to regain?

Full disclosure: If you follow the book link to Amazon.com, I get a (very) small commission from anything you buy while visiting the site from that link.