100 FOOT DIET/VICTORY GARDEN HIGHLIGHTS

Welcome to all new participants who signed up – the challenge is certainly growing by the week! Jordanne informs me that the 100footdiet.org site is slowly creeping towards a launch date, so grab your seeds, shovels, hoes and let’s get this challenge growing!

This week we have a collection of wonderful homegrown/local meals along with musing over victory gardens plans and preparations.

Reading Dirt while winter gardening and foraging efforts have been limited was able to concoct a tasty homegrown/local meal with spring-wild greens and homegrown herbs and local potatoes – delicious!

Belinda’s had a bit of an oil crises and made a handy list of ingredients in her diet and mulls about spices. She also posts a delicious bean and tomato recipe (which we northern hemisphere gardeners will have to wait a couple months to try)

Red State Green proudly writes that she eats local every day and posts pictures of her “purdy Famous Salad”

War Road Garden is transforming her 1/2 “weed patch” into an edible eden and baked up some gorgeous winter squash for her family. She also adds about how blessed she and her family are to be able to grow their own food while folks in other parts of the world are sadly forced to eat dirt – point well made.

P~ jumps starts his 100ft diet by raising baby chickens. Oh dear, those adorably cute baby chick photos makes us wanna raise another batch again this year… and the next and the next. However, since we don’t slaughter our hens for meat consumption we’ll just have to make do by enjoying other folks cute baby chick photos instead. Happy chick raising.

Becca’s Life makes room for spring plantings and digs up the last of the winter vegetables turns them into mouth watering roasted vegetables along with sautéed green – yum.

Wildside Home once again show us those lovely homegrown eggs from her happy chickens – combine those eggs with homegrown vegs one has a very satisfying meal

Vintage Flapper eagerly awaits the growing season and is considering relocating her urban homestead. She’s contemplating a move to Alaska (perhaps I’ll hitch a ride)! Her seventh meal (congrats – she’s on a roll!) of the challenge consists of homegrown tomatoes (kudos!) and other local ingredients

Recent Web-Nods Relating to the PTF 100 ft Diet – Victory Garden Challenge

Deborah at Riot 4 Austerity writes

Just finished reading Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It’s convinced me even more that eating local, or even better growing my own, is the best option for feeding myself.

Also been looking at Path to Freedom’s challenge to eat what is home grown. It’s another call to plant a Victory Garden.

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Eat Food / Change Alley

Pollan’s core message is that we should return to eating “real food”, and offers some recommendations on how to find it and get the most out of it. It’s a long list, here’s a few to give you a flavour:

Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food. Going back several generations enables us to avoid the confusion of lengthy ingredient lists, most of which have dubious nutritional value and are included more for the food industry’s benefit than for ours.

Avoid food products that make health claims on the package. Anything with a package is more likely to be a processed than a whole food. And the whole issue of packaging and its environmental impact is another kettle of worms altogether.

Cook – and, if you can, plant a garden. Creating your own food chain, “from fork to fork” as Monty Don used to say, enables us to reclaim control from industry and science.

Pollan goes so far as to say that “cooking from scratch and growing our own food qualify as subversive acts”. This puts him firmly in the same camp as relocalisation groups such as Path To Freedom. It doesn’t matter how much or how little food you can grow yourself. If you can just grow some salad on a window-sill, that’s one less nitrogen-filled plastic bag of imported salad bought. After all, as Lao-Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

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Thanks for the nods!

It’s good to see Jordanne finally posting [hiya, little sis]. The others will join soon enough. There are definitely lots of stories and tips to share and it will be wonderful to hear them from different perspectives. Hopefully, she’ll get some responses to her plea/request for help. Oh, she forgot to mention, you can also help by supporting this site either through donations or online purchase.

I’m off again to the English Tea Shop today – which I didn’t plan but they need help, we are like their family so we are obligated to lend a helping hand. I plan on posting the urban homestead’s weekly meal wrap up before I leave…. right now animals and chores beckon!