Growing Our Own

One of the best things you can do to bring in a does of frugality and self reliance is from growing your own. Regardless now of where you live with new methods coming out all the time, it is possible to at least grow a little something!

We are fortunate enough to have a large flat yard of about an acre large that gets full sun shine. While we do live in the country I have also been successful with indoor apartment gardening in the past.

This year our starter bed is only 14 x 8 and I am hoping hubby will till me up enough to double that space before planting time although it is not always easy to motivate the love of my life into tasks that mean actual work!

I have purchased a seedless red grape vine, a blackberry bush, strawberries and a blueberry bush that I actually have in containers. This way since we live in a rental and if we decide to move, they can come with us! (photos not shown of these)

I also bought many packets of seeds for 20 cents a piece and started pumpkins, green peppers, squash and tomato's in the house. They are actually much bigger now than what the pictures show as I took those pictures about 2 weeks ago and they are thriving now!

I have many others waiting for it to reach planting time and will implement our small space we are starting out with and maximizing the small space by succession planting, vertical gardening and container gardening.

Even this small space will help us tremendously in the food department.

To round it all off when we took our daughter to an art workshop yesterday we passed a fowl expo and of  course had to stop! We came home with 3 silkie chicks that will hopefully turn into providing our eggs! I may add a few more to this group though as we do not know which are hens or roos and that may take time. We are thinking due to it's smaller size we have one hen at least. I would like at least 6 chickens in total, well 6 hens at least to provide enough eggs for us.

It is a start towards self reliance and cutting food costs, our third and hopefully final attempt at the self reliant approach!  :)

Yes I realize this post seems to lack luster and on the monotone side but hey it is Sunday and it has been a long busy weekend of family time and staying up way way way too late for these old bones to be anything but exhausted today!

Tell the truth though, those silkie chicks are just beautiful!

Add the fishing to it and this is going to be a WONDERFUL summer!