I have made the decision to grow more food for the family for 3 main reasons: 1. For our health 🤒– I’ve long been a believer in the benefits of organic fruit and veg, but on a recent hospital visit my consultant (who bore an uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth McKenna from the 2017 series of The Apprentice), urged me to take this more seriously. Studies which have been done indicate that environmental toxins from things like pesticide use (among others) as being a trigger for flare ups of auto immune diseases. I found an interesting article written by a Dr Amy Meyers in the Huffington Post "5 Things You Can Do to Help Reverse Your Autoimmune Disease That Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You". She discusses the possibility of self-healing through adjusting diet and other environmental factors. I’m sceptical about a lot of it (I’m a sceptic by nature), but I’m willing to try most things once. 2. For environmental reasons ♻️– anyone who reads my posts by now already know how much I detest the unnecessary use of single use plastics, such as food wrapping. By growing as much as I can of the things we regularly eat, and perhaps adjusting slightly what we do eat, I’ll drastically cut down on the amount of plastic we consume each week. 3. For financial reasons 💱– organic food is expensive! For the two reasons above, we want to switch to organic, but financially we just can’t afford it. By saving money on the weekly shop, there might be enough left over to buy organic grass fed meat until such time as we can adjust things on the farm to allow us to grow everything we eat, which is our ultimate ideal. Having made the decision to grow our own food organically, the next thing was to decide where to grow, and how to set it up. The 'where' is currently in the stable yard. While there are various places on the farm we could grow, we felt that this was dead space. We have a large concrete yard, which needs a lot of sweeping to keep it clean, and we don’t need that much concrete space. So, the plan is to parcel off part of the yard where we currently park the cars, and build raised beds. What we are going to build them with has been the conundrum. We’re both big fans of recycling things (the majority of our house was built either from items rescued from a skip, or bought second hand), and there are various things we could have used. There’s an old freezer unit which could have housed potatoes, old plastic shopping baskets, and bald tyres aplenty. But, having read an article on the Rodales Organic Life website on choosing growing containers which highlighted the possibility of toxins leaching from aged plastics and rubber tyres, and zinc leaching from galvanised metal into the soil, we had decided on using untreated wood. It recommends using ceramic, but there’s no way we can afford that on the scale we’re talking, and we have various sections of fallen branches stored away to build and repair the cross country fences around the farm. Next on the list is finding the energy when I'm supposed to be resting, and the time (hubby's doing 2 people's work while I'm recuperating), to construct this in time for the seedlings to start.... 🤔🌧🌞🌱
