Armed with little more than a second-hand copy of The Encyclopedia of Country Living, my family and I moved from a very crime ridden neighborhood in a large city in Illinois to a farmhouse in Northern Ohio with a couple of acres of land. I’d never lived in the country before, and I had no experience with raising animals. The idea was to eventually grow as much of our own food as we could. This will be our third full summer here.
On the property is a house, a ¾ car garage that leans slightly to the east, a deep well, and a couple acres of clay and silt. The soil is very different than the rich loam of Northern Illinois, and I’ve only be gardening for a few years, so I have tons to learn.
Since I had used raised beds in my urban garden, I started with some raised beds here. The neighbors have horses. I filled the beds with old straw and horse poop in the autumn that we moved here, so the beds would be ready the next spring. It was late in the season so we contented ourselves with planting some fruit trees and starting primocane raspberries, and hoped they would survive the winter.
In early spring I put an ad on Craigslist asking for used straw bales, and by April 1st I had about 30 that I arranged into beds too. These were heavy as hell, and smelly, and I’ll never do that again. (I will start with dry, fresh bales and put them where I won’t have to move them.) I put straight chicken poop on them along with some rabbit poop and horse poop and let that sit and soak in until mid-May, when I planted them with mostly tomatoes and peppers.
The raised beds with horse poop were still hard to manage. The clay under the compost was like rock, unless it rained and then it was like glue. I chiseled holes into it and planted seeds and starts. They grew, but were stunted and sickly looking all summer. Surprisingly, the tomatoes and peppers in the straw bales did OK. For the first month I kept having to fertilize them, but I had plenty of chicken poop. Then they just took off and grew wildly. I was afraid they would take tons of watering, but since they had started to rot and get soft they stayed damp inside for a long time. I could go a week between waterings.
Since food production is our goal, my son-in-law-to-be used some scavenged materials to make rabbit hutches, and we got three breeding rabbits. Our intention was to raise them for meat, and we did butcher about 20 of their offspring, but I found that I much preferred eating vegetarian meals more often if it meant I didn’t have to kill anything. I felt like it was almost a crime to sacrifice an animal’s whole life for a meal or two. Now the three are just poop machines for the garden. I’m not going to give up meat completely, but I do find that I eat a lot less of it now that I kill my own.
We also purchased a small, movable, chicken tractor and some young chickens just after we moved in. I thought they might start laying pretty soon, but it wasn’t until the next March that we got our first eggs.
For the winter, we built a small hoop style green house, and let the chooks spend the winter there. Both the chickens and I loved it. On sunny winter days the inside temperature would climb up to about 50 degrees even on the very cold days. I enjoyed the luxury on those frigid days of visiting the ladies, shedding my heavy coat, sitting on a straw bale and reading. I can’t believe how much I love those chickens. On very cold nights, I put a heat lamp in the little hoop house and enjoyed seeing the glow from my bedroom window.
I’m looking forward to spring coming again, and starting my garden back up. I’m amazed at how my life has changed since I started gardening. Even in the city, my garden made me more aware of the outdoors. I noticed the sun, the sky, and the lengthening and shortening of days. I saw the life that teemed in the grass, and smelled the sun and rain on the plants.
I feel like raising food is both an act of defiance and of connection for me. I am defying the broken industrial food systems, while I’m planting heirloom seeds, lessening my footprint on the planet, and eating the sorts of things my grandmother ate. I feel like I am continuing the invisible chain of people who cared for the soil and grew their own food. A small legacy, maybe, but one I’m pleased with.