Growth is a double edged sword. Unchecked, growth can be cancerous and destructive. It is this type of ceaseless expansion that has put our society into the precarious environmental and financial positions in which we currently find ourselves. On the other hand, growth can be regenerative and life-giving. Following a forest fire or a bitter winter, the first green shoots to emerge from the earth bear witness to the earth's ability to restore life in the wake of disaster.

My goal for this blog is pretty simple and open-ended: I want to document and share with family and friends my efforts to incorporate an ever increasing degree of self sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, and environmentally-conscious design into my life as a would be urban homesteader.


Thursday, June 7, 2012

Pending Abundance



Summer isn't technically here yet, but the garden is getting ready to explode. Two days ago, I was weeding around the tomato plants, and I saw this:

I was excited, because I've been looking forward to eating fresh tomatoes since I planted these seeds back in late January. Today, I got home from sumer school with one thought in mind - BLT's for lunch! I picked the 3 that were most ripe, and there were 4 more that will be good in a couple of days. A quick look around the tomato plants show that this is just the tip of the iceberg.




My blackberry plants that I put in 2 years ago are loaded with berries that are just now starting to ripen.





This is Das Cluckhaus 2. It is currently housing the 10 chicks that came from 2 different kindergarten classes this Spring. The 4 older ones are 7 weeks old, and the younger 6 are just over a month. I plan on butchering all of them (assuming the roosters don't get too noisy before that point). I've read that they should be good to go at 3-4 months of age, so that puts D-day sometime in early September. Good thing I don't have anything else going on that time of year...oh, wait.....