Urban Homesteading

Last week I was scrolling through Apartment Therapy and came across a post about the Dervaes Family. The Dervaes family grows all their own food on 1/5 of an acre of land in Southern California! Their story is fascinating and proof that you don't need a lot of land to sustain yourself and grow your own food! Here's a short video of their life as urban homesteaders.



They have more videos on youtube including an interesting 5 part lecture at UCLA about sustainable living and of course, a blog.

Food wise

Mike and I finally found a CSA to join for the season. We were lucky to get one with a pick up location in our neighborhood. Some of the other ones we found were on the Upper West Side (we're talking 125th St!) which is just way to far to trek to once a week, even from my office in midtown. It starts on June 3rd. We are super excited to try out some veggies we've never eaten before. We are hoping that we can eat just from the shares we receive each week, they estimate each weekly share to be about 14 pounds of vegetables, that seems like a lot!

Mike and I are down to eating meat about once a week now. After watching this video I would really prefer to avoid it all together. I tell Mike all the time that I want to raise animals on our farm to eat but I just don't know if I could do that. I feel like I would get too attached to them! I just watched an interesting show on Sundance about a family who is trying to sustain themselves on their farm in England and they raised two pigs and slaughtered them on the farm to ensure that they were treated humanely during the slaughtering process. The wife had a really hard time with it. Pigs are so cute too, I just don't know if I could! I guess it's about knowing that you gave them a better life then they would have had if they had been raised on a feed lot and having a responsibility to take part in how and where you food comes from.

Farm apprenticeships

So yesterday Mike and I started searching for CSA's available in the city. I know we are a little late in the game for this and most of them are full for the season but we have found a few that are still available! While searching through several farm's websites in upstate New York we noticed that one of them offered an apprenticeship. As we researched further we found out that many farms offer this program to people interested in learning the farming trade. Basically you go to the farm in March or April and work with them, they usually give you a place to stay and a small monthly stipend along with farm produce in exchange for your work. You can work through the season or some farms offer shorter work assignments. Mike and I are seriously considering doing this next season. We really want a farm and neither of us know much about farming except for the small amount of reading we do each month when we get our "farm magazines" in the mail. This is such a great opportunity for people who want to learn and all the farms we have researched are organic! I am so excited about the possibility of doing this. Mike and I are going to research this more this weekend and start contacting farms about their opportunities for next season! Farm life here we come!!

Find Your Spot

Mike and I have been talking a lot about where we will go when we do finally leave the city and buy our big piece of farm land in the country. We have scoped out a couple of areas that we like but haven't yet committed to a place. Last year I found this great site online called Find Your Spot. You take a short quiz and the site gives you four pages of results of places it thinks you would like based on your answers to the questions. It then gives you a four page overview of each city. I just re-visited the site and took the quiz again. Of all the picks, I like Clarksville, TN, Chattanooga, TN, and Roanoke, VA.

My next vacation...

Blackberry Farm is a 4200 acre real working farm and hotel located in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. I'm already planning a trip here, it looks amazing!

Farm Life

I think I may have mentioned before that one of my dreams is to move to a farm in the country and be able to grow all my own food. Thankfully, Mike shares this crazy dream with me. In fact our plan is to one day leave the city and do just that. I know it sounds strange to go from BIG city to small town rural living but it is something we both want very much. We even subscribe to farm magazines, just so we are prepared when we finally make the move! So I was elated when I stumbled across the blog, Farmgirl Fare. I am hooked, I have been reading it non-stop, her recipes look incredible! She also has a collection of newsletters from her first years on the farm in a separate blog, Writings from Windbridge. She has a story about deer eating from her garden that is hilarious.



On a separate note, the destash shop has been updated and I hope to add more over the next few weeks.