[title subtitle=”words and images: Jessica Sowards”][/title]
Back in February, when there was still a threat of frost, my eldest son Jackson and I turned the dirt in the raised garden bed next to the greenhouse, weeding out any grass that had sprung up over winter. We stirred in a couple of bags of organic potting soil, a wheelbarrow of compost and half of a five-gallon bucket of rabbit poop. Then we planted neat rows of sweet peas and radishes. We built a trellis out of T-posts and masonry twine and stood back with sweat on our backs and black soil clinging to our knees, hands and hair, admiring our hard work.
Jackson, in his full ten years of wisdom, said, “Growing food yourself makes you want to eat it more, huh?”
I nodded, “Yeah, I feel like that.”
“I really like growing food,” Jackson said.
I replied, “Me too, baby.”
It did frost, but it just made the radishes sweeter. I let Jackson have the honor of pulling them out of the ground. He harvested a basket of dirt-covered rubies and we tore the greens off the tops, while still standing there by their bed. On the way back to the house, we detoured through the chicken yard, scattering radish tops and watching the silly birds swipe them and run before another bird could take away their prize.
He and I ventured into the coop and gathered three dozen eggs, carefully placing them in the basket with the radishes and the kale we’d cut in the greenhouse. Once inside, I scrubbed the radishes and handed them to Jackson, who sat at the counter and cut them into quarters and tossed them into a baking pan. We drizzled them with melted butter, salted and peppered them and stuck them in the oven to roast. We spun the kale and laid it out on a cookie sheet with oil, salt and pepper and put it in the oven as well.
Roasted radishes, kale chips and fried eggs is an early-spring farm meal if there ever was one. It was a strange lunch, but one Jackson proudly served to his brothers. He, the child who a few years ago wouldn’t eat a vegetable to save his life, ate every bite.
My journey with real food started almost ten years ago. Asher, the second of my five sons, was a baby. I cooked dinner every night, and the process usually entailed opening boxes and cans and adding water. But Asher cried a lot, a whole lot. Especially after eating. His skin was often broken out, and I had that gut feeling that something wasn’t right.
The day Asher was diagnosed with a dairy intolerance, the doctor told me I’d have to remove all dairy from my diet if I wanted to continue breastfeeding. I figured it would be no big deal. I was in for a rude awakening.
I can’t tell you how many times I would take a bite of something and spit it out because it would register in my mind, Oh, this is dairy. Milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream, anything made with butter, anything containing whey, the list just kept on going. Did you know most spaghetti sauces contain dairy? Yeah, I didn’t either.
Learning to scrupulously read labels alerted me to the rest of the stuff in the food we ate. I began to study and the more I learned, the more I moved our diets to whole, unprocessed foods. I adopted a rule that the fewer ingredients some-thing had, the better it was. I began to learn about pesticides and GMOs, and about the environmental impact of transporting out-of-season produce across nations.
Somewhere in the midst of that season, my childhood dream of having a small farm resurfaced with a vengeance. I fell madly in love with farmers’ markets and with finding local food sources. It took seven years, and the grace of God before that dream became a reality. Even before we closed on our house and acreage, my plans for the food we could produce were growing wildly.
It’s taken two years of trial and error, of hard work and building, but, we’re finally getting to a place where we can make meals of food entirely produced on our farm, even if those meals are occasionally a little strange.
It’s expanding exponentially from this point. This year, we bought an additional twenty-nine acres and partnered with our neighbors. Together we put in an orchard and tilled more than 8,000 square feet of garden space, planting it with heirloom seeds that will be organically grown. We are raising holiday turkeys for the second year, and we’re venturing into chickens and pigs for meat. Our laying flock gives us dozens of eggs daily, and our dairy goat herd produces several gallons of fresh milk a day. We make goat’s milk yogurt and kefir and cheese (which, by the way, Asher eats just fine).
Seasons are now marked by what’s growing. This month, for instance, starts blackberry season. The kids and I will spend hours foraging, while wearing rubber boots. We will eat cobblers for dessert every Sunday for two months, and by the end of June, we’ll be so scratched and scraped from the brambles that we won’t want to look at another blackberry bush for a year. But, in a few months, when I make breakfast and ask the boys what kind of jam they’d like on their biscuit, every single one of them will respond, “The blackberry kind we made.”
I realize this life isn’t for everyone. This life is more of a calling than it is a hobby or a career. And understanding this makes me want to share it with everyone I can. One of my favorite things about this farm is sending our visitors home with a Mason jar filled with our hard work and a dozen eggs they got to collect themselves.
The sharing goes far beyond that. We’ve branched out into selling what we make, and truly it feels like sharing our life. A few weeks ago, we sold duck eggs to one of the locally sourced restaurants in Little Rock. I used to sit in that place with a plate of Arkansas-grown food and dream of having a life like this. And on Saturday mornings, I no longer wake up at 8 a.m. in a sleepy neighborhood and take empty baskets to the farmers’ market. No, now I wake at 5 a.m. on a bustling farm and load my truck with the goods we will sell.
I never thought, in all my dreaming, that this farm would change so integrally how we do life. Striving for food sustainability has made me rethink the way we cook, the way we consume, and the way we appreciate what we have. My goal is to someday produce ninety percent of what we consume, with extra to share and sell. We aren’t even halfway there yet, but it’s obtainable if we put in the work.
In the meantime, we will be here plugging away, getting our hands dirty and our arms scratched up. It’s often hard, and we are always tired, but ask any one of us what we’d like for dinner. The answer will always be the same, “I’ll take the stuff we made.”
Follow Jessica on her blog @thehodgepodgedarling.blogspot.com
