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.

This is my planned gardens for this year: I’m going to have a 20′ x 40′ main garden, divided into roughly 4′ square plots with two feet between the rows. Then I’m going to have a 18′ long 1′ wide window boxes in my covered porch divided up into 2’square plots. Then I’m going to have several containers either in the house or in the porch containing several of my more sensitive herbs.

I’m growing:

*tomatoes

*cucumbers

* peppers (sweet and hot)

*pumpkins 2 types

*eggplant

*okra

*dill

*onions (bulb and bunching)

*radishes

*beans

*leeks

*peas

*endive

*lettuce

*kale

*spinach

*turnips

*potatoes

*cabbage

*echinacea

*goats rue

*marshmallow

*nettle

*lemon balm

*catnip

*chamomile

*fennel

*fenugreek

*heartsease

*lavender

*motherwort

*oregano

*California poppy

*Shepard’s purse

*vervain

*pot marigold

*comfrey

*valerian

 I also plan to plant some wildflowers and other random flowers to attract butterflies and other pollinators. I also am hoping my husband can find me some blueberry, raspberry and wild rose plants to transplant to the property. They are native plants, they just don’t happen to be located right here now. I want to transplant the berries and just let them go wild. The roses I want to keep semi contained.

So what do you think?? I plan on drying, canning, and freezing all our surplus to keep us in food in the winter. Some of the herbs are for health issues too. I was going to freeze a bunch but then I thought about it and we only have the one deep freeze and we’re planning to get several chickens, a pig and a beef to put in the freeze in the fall. And that doesn’t even include hunting. So I think I’ll stick to canning and drying the majority of the veggies. The potatoes will keep for a while in our cold cellar if placed on the cement without any special preservation methods so… 

I think we’re in pretty good shape. Hopefully spring comes early and we don’t get a monsoon season like last year. 

So Nic and I are hoping to raise the initial payment for my midwifery education. We need a good chunk right off the bat. Then 5 years or so and I should be into my apprenticeship. We are talking about buying a bit of land and building once I can be starting to make some money and raising some Dexter cattle, chickens and maybe some pigs. 

I’m hoping our plans work out. We’ll have to see. Maybe we’ll move back to Cochrane in a few years or so, who knows??

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.