Living Simply… Parenting by Instinct

The regulations regarding what I am allowed to put in my mouth make me so angry. Big Brother thinks its his place to decide what types of food and what ways of raising, harvesting and processing those foods are safe. I am not allowed to source out local farmers and purchase from them fresh meat butchered on their own farm, eggs candled at their kitchen table and milk that has not been pasteurized. I am permitted to consume these things if I raise them myself, but I must consume them on my property (the property on which they were gathered or processed) and only my immediate family is legally allowed to consume them. That is unless they are part of a governmental quota, pasteurized, or processed in a certified abattoir. Unfortunately, for me, the farmers of Northern Ontario and I suspect the majority of farmers in remote rural areas, the smaller local abattoirs cannot afford to keep up to the regulations required to be certified. And so the cost of selling legal, local, clean meat and eggs is going through the roof.

What can you do? Protest. Write to your member of parliament, join my facebook group:Freedom of Food I will be posting MPP’s addresses and other information on what you can do to change this.

I am experimenting with growing indoor vegetables and some fruits. So far I’m doing great. I have tomatoes plants, pepper plants, peas, beans, eggplant, onions, strawberries, blueberries, and tons of cucumber plants. This year is experiment year, so I snapped up all the seeds I could get my hands on and collected up containers. This is the year of "why not?". Thats what I say whenever Nic asks why I’m trying to grow ____ : "Why not?"

I’m so excited. I’ve never grown things before and everything is doing very well. I’m particularly pleased with my pepper plants and my blueberry (its only a little wee sprout but still; everyone said I’d never get it to grow). 

I even went online and bought a book from ebay for an exorbitant amount of money b/c books about indoor veggie growing seem to be very few and far between but its a pretty good book considering its age (almost 20 yrs). But really how much can change plant wise in that time; if anything there should be more hybrids that can weather container growing than when it was published. Although, the authour claims you can grow melons in containers inside… I’ll have to try that one out when I get some room on my plant table; its full to the brim right now.