Expanding the Kitchen Garden to Include Grains and Animal Feed

November 1st. That’s the starting date to enjoy the (canned) fruits of our labor. The date plugged into all of my calculations of exactly how much I had to can from our Kitchen garden to feed us all this Winter. Six months. November to April. That’s (approximately) twenty-four weeks. So, if we’re having spaghetti once a week, we’d needed twenty-four quarts of sauce. The same goes for chili (actually, those twenty-four quarts can be turned into chili, Spanish rice, or goulash–you know, in case no one actually wants to eat chili each and every week), and etc. and so on and so-forth. And while God was very good to us this year (and every year, really), giving us more than we need, it became apparent that we had to expand our Kitchen garden for next year.

We began this farming/homesteading thing as more of a hobby than anything. Well, let me tell you it got real this Summer. The prices at the grocery store made it real. And once we switched to producing most of our own food, it began to get harder and harder to buy it. Because it became more than just about money. Besides being so much better tasting, there is something about growing something yourself, with your own two hands. And, I know the animals have rich, full of fresh air kind of lives. That’s important to me, too.

So, with that in mind, I’m expanding a bit, to include all sorts of extra stuff, like growing our own grains and animal feed (Hey, they like to eat well, too!) I followed the plan outlined in Back to Eden Gardening by Paul Gautschi (I highly recommend the book and the School of Traditional Skills, where Paul was featured and I first learned about this process) in which the grass is cut as short as possible, a paper barrier is applied, and woodchips and mulch are spread over all to slowly decompose over the Winter, resulting in lush soil next Spring.

In this space that more than doubles what we had, I plan to plant meal corn in the Spring, as well as some potatoes and tomatoes, and then in the Fall, plant our Winter wheat. In the place where the corn had been grown, I plan to plant black oil sunflowers for the chickens and turkeys.

When I first considered the endeavor, I must admit, I felt a bit overwhelmed. I didn’t have the pile of woodchips accumulated that Paul had, and honestly couldn’t imagine that changing. The Farm is WAY back off the road. No one, and I mean no one is going to go down that dark lane to drop off their load of free wood chips. It just wasn’t going to happen.

So, I thought I’d use leaves. We have plenty of those. But, as I was to (gently) find out, it takes years for those to decompose. I didn’t have years. I needed that garden in for the Spring. And then, just like that, God took care of that, too. Someone mentioned in passing that the town in which I live has piles of woodchips for cheap. I shrugged and quickly forgot it. And then it came again, louder. THE TOWN HAS WOODCHIPS, MELANIE, AND THEY ARE LESS THAN TWO MILES FROM THE FARM, someone said, just a day after the first person mentioned the chips. So I went to check it out. And, not only did they have piles and piles of woodchips, they had one pile in particular that had been sitting there for over five years (like it had been waiting for me!). And it was woodchips no longer. No. It was black-rich soil, just waiting to grow something beautiful. And so it shall, right in our growing garden. Thank you God, yet again, for pushing past my denseness to rain blessings down.