Eating locally

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We've just arrived back at Moora - with an objective to, without being silly, grow as much of our own food as possible.  Where we can't grow our own, we want to get as much as possible from short supply chains - connected back to farmers who, much as we can determine, are doing the right thing.  The remainder - we'll buy from the corporate food system.

While I think many things about the way most of us eat are wrong, not sustainable and even dangerous, it doesn't seem sensible to opt out completely.  So what I'm going to do is ask those cooking food at Moora to, once a day, do a simple estimate of the proportion (by input value) of our food from each of 3 sources:

• grown by us;
• sourced from a short supply chain - with little or no corporate involvement; and
• everything else.

I'll need to create various rules to make the task explicable to those who will do the estimates.  I'll publish them when they're a bit more developed.

The output I'm expecting will be a graph tracking the proportions over time.  I'll publish that from time to time.

At present we don't have a lot of capacity to eat from Moora - because we haven't been living here.  Son Neil has done a great job looking after the place, but the only thing ready to pick at present are the herbs in the herb garden we created when we were back at Christmas time.  Within a week or two we are going to slaughter one of our cattle - and we will have a supply of beef.  The other thing we need to do is get going with the vegetable garden.

The herb garden mentioned previously is in just the right spot - just outside the kitchen door.  It already has a good supply of parsley (2 types), basil, rosemary, thyme, sage, mint, oregano - and probably one or two others.

Today we planted some seedlings in the kitchen garden - which is an area about 15 metres from the kitchen tucked in between the house, the garage and the plant shed.

The first photo is of me doing something I couldn't do before my recent functional fitness workouts!  I'm planting seedlings into beds - which we're going to fill with a jumble of vegetables and flowers.  The beds are filled with compost and topped with sugar cane mulch.  My guess is that we'll be eating lettuce and other greens in between 4 and 6 weeks.

You can see all 9 beds in the second photo. The 3 on the left are going to contain lemon trees in due course.  The garden will be enclosed (eventually) by a line of espaliered apples or pears growing on the structure you can see to the right.

[If you want to see a bigger version of the photo, just double click on it.]

I've yet to decide what is going to go on the pergola structure between the garage and the plant shed.  It will be either food or fragrance.  In any case, yesterday we made an important start to producing more of our own food.  Later on there will be a bigger garden producing food for more than just us.

The other thing we've done is get the cattle a bit organised.  Saturday we got them all in and weighed them.  I separated off the 5 cows we have that have had no trouble calving - and at least 3 times now.  They have now gone, with their 2009 calves, to our friends' place at Romsey.  When the calves are about 8 months old, we'll wean them and bring them back here.  The cows will then have 4 months quiet before, hopefully, having 5 live calves in mid spring.
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