Our family dinner on Friday night was deer cube steak, mashed potatoes with deer gravy, and kale.
The venison was gifted to us by our hunter neighbor. The potatoes were grown in my raised beds, from the scraps of store-bought potatoes. The kale was from the supermarket. It was a delicious repast, and came it at under 50 cents per serving. If only every meal could be this cheap and good!
If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you know how much I love to talk about growing potatoes. But it hasn’t always been an easy venture. The first couple years I grew potatoes, I planted them in grow bags with compost. This worked very well in terms of gardening ease, but the yield was rather small. Last year, I planted them in the ground, and while the yield was a bit better than with the grow bags, it still wasn’t that great. Our soil is very rocky. Every year when I prepare the in-ground garden space, I end up throwing at least a five-gallon bucket of rocks into the creek. You’d think at some point there wouldn’t be any stones left to find, but you’d be wrong. I think they reproduce.
Anyway, the potatoes just don’t like the rocky soil very much, and last year I felt that I’d put more work into the potato patch than it was worth. But I still believed in the power of potatoes—their nutritional value, their caloric density, their store-ability, and most of all, their ability to soak up butter and gravy. I knew I had to keep trying.
Well, this year was the first time I tried growing them in raised beds, and the results were phenomenal! I harvested so many potatoes, I barely had room to store them all. But there was a problem.
Potatoes need to cure in a cool, dark space, spread out so they don’t touch, for a week or so before being put into the pantry or cellar. This curing process hardens the potato skins and keeps them from rotting in storage. Problem was, we didn’t have a cool, dark place to cure them. Our small home has no air conditioning, and we don’t have a cellar, basement, or garage. Other years, with smaller yields, we’ve been able to devise a solution. But this summer the temperatures were so hot that there was nothing we could do to give the potatoes the curing environment they needed.
This is why it’s good to have friends and community. My longtime friend, Kimi, allowed me to cure my potatoes in her basement in exchange for a cut of the profits (in the form of potatoes, of course.) As of now, the potatoes are cured and in storage. The temperatures have cooled down a bit since then, so I’m not worried about them overheating.
The pursuit of greater self-sufficiency is no easy proposition, y’all. Challenges abound. Some challenges you conquer, some you learn lessons from, and some you settle with.
I’ve practically given up on buying meat at the store.
The free-range meats I used to buy are absolutely out of my price range now, and most conventionally raised meat is approaching the cut-off point. Certain cuts are still affordable. Pork chops and beef organs, in my area, are fairly cheap. Prepared rotisserie chickens have only risen in price a dollar or so, but they are smaller and of lower quality than they used to be.
With grocery prices ratcheting up higher and higher each week, I find myself scheming for creative ways to cut costs. I have purchased large cuts of meat from the discount grocery store—it’s surplus restaurant stuff, and it went directly in my freezer. Unfortunately, with a small family, I have to figure out some way to portion it out for smaller meals without it spoiling. I’m thinking of building a small smokehouse for this purpose.
On the bright side, my broody hens have increased our flock substantially this summer, and we still have one hen sitting on a nest of eggs. There will be free-range chicken in the freezer come fall. If I can keep the predators away until then.
Ever since we’ve had chickens, we’ve had to deal with predation threats. Usually it has been the raccoons, sneaking into the coop at night when someone forgot to close it up, and taking their fill. Last spring I installed a battery-operated mechanical coop door that closes automatically at sunset and opens at sunrise. Since then the raccoons haven’t gotten any chickens, but they still do try and devise ways of gaining access to the chicken feed.
One time, we heard a kerfluffle in the coop around 3 AM, and went outside to investigate. By the time we got there, the predator had run off, and we could hear it trampling through the dead leaves on the wooded hillside behind the chicken area. We shone the high-powered flashlight up into the woods and saw a bobcat, poised on a boulder, looking back at her missed meal. We fired a couple of shots in the air to scare her away, and she hasn’t been back since, to my knowledge.
Well, night before last we had a new predator visit the coop. It tore an entire side of chicken wire off the run and destroyed the feeding system, scattering grain all over the place. It also left behind a calling card: a muddy paw print on the wooden side of the coop. We have a bear after our chickens. It hasn’t succeeded yet, but something has to be done. In the meantime, until I have the time to fix it, the chicken-wire run is wide open for the raccoons to eat their fill of feed each night.
So I’m thinking it’s time to restock the freezer with raccoon and bear meat.
No one ever said producing your own food would be easy. But is it worth it?
I’m still by no means a master gardener or homestead food producer. My projects in the pursuit of greater self-sufficiency look like junkyard editions of the photos you see in homesteading magazines. Sometimes my animals get eaten by predators. Sometimes I end up feeding the raccoons instead of the chickens. Sometimes my yields come out tiny. And sometimes the squash bugs decimate my zucchini. But with each passing year of gardening, livestock, and food preservation experience, I’ve gained a little more knowledge, a little more confidence that comes as a result of all the trials, struggles, and challenges I’ve faced in pursuit of the goal. So yes, it’s all worth it.
It’s worth it because I know where my food came from, how my animals were treated, and exactly what additives went into the growing of my vegetables. It’s worth it because of the money I can save, if I do it efficiently. That saved money may not look like much now, but as grocery prices rise, the ROI has and will continue to increase. Most of all, it’s worth it because raising crops and meat are fundamental skills for human survival. You may not truly need this knowledge now, but there may come a time when you can’t live without it. I, for one, don’t want to be just starting to figure this stuff out on the worst day, week, or year of my life.
Thank you for reading!
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-Starr
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This is important, so many people get disheartened by the perfect scenario they are often shown, in "showing your work" you are letting people know, this is a learning process, and with each failure comes a lesson.