crops

We’re trying to grow as much of our own food as we can, exploring what grows well in our region and what makes sense time-wise, economically, and with regard to what we like to eat.

We started out with a focus on staple crops: dry beans, field corn (for cornmeal, masa, etc.), oats, wheat, buckwheat, millet, tomatoes, and the like.  Some of this we’ve been growing for our own direct consumption, and some for chicken feed – one of the goals is to move away from purchased inputs, so, for example, if we are going to have chickens we’d prefer to grow their feed rather than just buying it.  Our logic here is that if we’re going to buy chicken feed, we might as well just buy the eggs (we talk more about our chickens here).

We have also been playing around with producing our own sweeteners and spices; whether we will continue with these endeavors is currently under discussion.

Here are some of the things we grew in 2014.  Because we are currently in a severe drought, we played around with dry-farming most of our crops this year.  Everything that wasn’t dry farmed was on drip irrigation, either through the season or just to get it started.

There is more about wheat and bread here.