The 100-Foot Diet

I have this dream. This wee little gorgeous dream for me and mine.

It started to germinate within the recesses of my brain 5 or 6 years ago when my husband and I were still grad students in Boston, and the only piece of exterior property we owned was the parking space at our apartment building. I was pregnant at the time with our first baby and groceries were expensive, produce was generally less than inspiring and the news was filled with story after story of food contamination.

So my husband and I started to wonder: What would it take to feed our family ourselves? And when I say ourselves, I mean JUST ourselves. Could we grow enough fruit and vegetables to provide for us year-round? What would it take to raise our own livestock? What about grains like wheat, corn, and barley?

It was daunting -- for two kids from the suburbs who'd grown up thinking that you'd as soon produce all your own food as you would your own refrigerator. But we were determined to try.

Finally, in 2008 we purchased our first house: a 30 year old split level farmhouse on 1 acre in the corner of a still-functioning 150 acre farm right in the heart of the Kawarthas. And in the two years since we've moved in, we've slowly but surely started down the road to what my husband calls The 100 Foot Diet.

I'm not going to lie to you, its WORK. And we screw up A LOT. Right now we've got 4 garden plots for growing potatoes, radishes, beets, carrots, broccoli, spinach, mesclun, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, cantaloupe, watermelon, and cucumbers, plus a 1/8th acre with half wheat and half sweet corn. Sweet corn that grew fabulously before it was all eaten by raccoons while we were gone for a week on vacation. Wheat that turned out to be a winter variety, meaning planting it in spring did jack all. And we've NEVER successfully transplanted a pepper.

We also bought our first chickens this year, 7 ready-to-lay hens which we allowed to free-range until four of them were eaten by a fox -- turns out chickens raised in a cage don't really understand they can fly and foxes can't.

But you know what? The mistakes don't matter.

Our three remaining hens reliably lay an egg each every day, plenty for this family. We didn't get any peppers, no, but we got truckloads of potatoes, carrots, and cucumbers and my 5 year old got to eat a HUGE flamingo-pink watermelon she herself grew from seed. I ate the most delicious spinach salads picked fresh from our garden for two weeks straight and we still had bagfuls to freeze for winter.

It never ceases to amaze me that the peace lily on my desk sits on death's door but we've managed to grow enough produce to cut a big chunk out of our grocery bill. The mistakes just make us work to figure out how to do it better next time, while the successes remind us with every bite we're one step closer to our sweet dream.

And next year? We're getting a pig. :)