I have a kale goal:

I want year-round kale.

That means that I have to plant kale seed indoors in the winter, so that when our over-wintered kale goes to seed (which it did last week) we can set out the new baby kale.

I did that. I planted my seed in early February, then killed it late February. I started more seeds in early March, but the plants are as teeny tiny as the lovely, lush Central American country of El Salvador.

We are eating our flowering kale like it’s broccoli, because it looks exactly like broccoli. I’ll steam it, then put a half pat of butter on it.

Because of my singular kale goal, I had to say goodbye to our last two turkeys. They were sweet, but the kale was their favorite treat. It was at beak level, and they nipped off every fresh leaf, every day this winter, leaving us NONE leafs of kale! We have a fenced back pasture, but turkeys can fly 10+feet, and no fence can hold them.

We have some fun varieties of chard and other greens that we’ll be growing along with our kale. The more greens, the better.

I’ll share one more goal. I want to eat fresh from our garden 365 days a year. I think I might make a little sign for our house that’s like “_____ Days Since Last Safety Incident” (but for Days We’ve Eaten From Our Garden) just to see if we can eat from our garden every day this year. I think we can do it.

Here’s my lunch.

We grew the lettuce and beets, but that’s it. (Although I did brew the apple cider vinegar that the beets were pickled in.) One of my goals is to be able to create more meals that are made up of 50% (or more) of the things we harvest and preserve.

I know we won’t be able to realistically grow our own shrimp, but we are currently growing turkeys and rabbits to harvest. In the future we’ll be able put together salads that have many more home grown ingredients, such as:

  • Cucumbers and\or pickles
  • Hull-less pumpkin seeds
  • Slow-smoked rabbit meat
  • Cooked sorghum
  • Herbs (not sure why they didn’t make it onto this salad)
  • Roasted hazelnut oil
  • Yellow beets, carrots (maybe??)
  • Cooked dry beans (like our Old Mother Stallard variety)
  • Mosto cotto syrup
  • All of our vinegars
  • Fermented chili sauce
  • Sun dried tomatoes
  • Hard boiled eggs