IDC: Week 4

By popular demand, the Independence Days Challenge is back! Every Friday from February - September we are challenged to work on our skill set. Anyone can join in!

The categories and my responses:

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.

Plant something:

-started seeds: luffa, yellow squash, zucchini, pattypan, lion's head, peppercorn, cinnamon basil, genovese basil, leeks, tall utah celery, tendercrisp celery, broccoli, premium late flat french cabbage, mammoth red rock cabbage, dwarf siberian kale, blue curled kale, diamond eggplant
-started peppers: sweet chocolate, lipstick, paprika, jalapeno, habanero, cayenne
-started some herbs: parsley, grindelia, and cold stratifying e. angustifolia, e. pallida, licorice

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.

Harvest something: 

Eggs

Milk

Sunchokes (these things are the perfect survival food!)

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.

Preserve something:

-nothing this week

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.

Waste Not: 

-Fed chickens, dog and cats scraps; composted unfeedable scraps
-Converted the leftover egg whites from ice cream making into meringue cookies

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

Want Not:

-placed bulk food order: glee gum (the best gluten free/crap free gum we've found), bragg's liquid aminos, cocoa powder, millet (for grinding into flour), oats (to grind into oatmeal), quinoa, garbanzo beans, black beans, demerara sugar, brown rice, peanut butter, brown rice flour

-purchased more herbal books (for both research and personal use): Herbal Medicine, Healing & Cancer by Donald Yance, Healing Lyme by Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook by Dr. Joseph Alton and Amy Alton, Herbs for Hepatitis C and the Liver by Stephen Harrod Buhner, Cancer Salves by Ingrid Naiman, Herbs to the Rescue by Kurt King,  and Do-It-Yourself Medicine by Ragnar Bensen.

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!

Eat the Food: 

-made ice cream from our goat's milk, egg yolks and raw cream purchased locally
-made meringue cookies from leftover egg whites

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?

Build Community Food Systems: 

-friend gave me ~20 strawberry plants from her garden to plant out

-shared sunchokes with friends

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.

Skill Up: 

-still studying up on common and uncommon, infectious and non-infectious diseases and what herbal medicines would best be suited for them