How to become a legitimate homesteader

Step 1. Buy land

... oh and a good farm dog.

Overrun with zucchini

My first market is one week from today and the garden is growing away.

I've probably already harvested about 50lb. of zucchini this year, but there is still more to come. My freezer is already bursting at the seams with shredded zucchini. This is how I am preserving most of it, I will be able to cook it into pasta or soup this fall. My favourite way of using the zucchini by far is cooking it into chocolate zucchini bread. My boyfriend almost ate the whole thing in one sitting, he loved it so much:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/breakfast/ChocolateZucchiniBread.html 

Having too many zucchini made me dig for recipes that use a lot of zucchini. So I tried this amazing zucchini soup, it takes 4 medium sized zucchini. It has such a nice mild flavour and the perfect texture for soup, plus you can always freeze soup:

http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-zucchini-1-32520

Starting this week at the market I will have heirloom tomatoes, beans, and zucchini. I plan on pickling a lot of my beans. The mix of reds and greens will look gorgeous on the market tables.

To market, to market... 

Turnips! One of the easiest and most underrated vegetable to grow. When they are fresh from the garden nothing is tastier than grated turnips in a salad, or cooked turnip puree.
These are a few of the turnips in my market garden at Downsview Park. Maybe I will pull some to sell at the next East Lynn market.
My first few tomatoes are starting to ripen as well. I might eat these first ones myself, but I will be saving some to bring to market as well. Fresh tomatoes off the vine beat out weeks old, harvested green, tomatoes from mexico any day.

Companion planting and the Three Sisters

Companion planting is a traditional planning method used in small gardening practices. Horticultural science studies often come up either proving, or disproving some principals of companion planting. Heres what I think about this: Traditional knowledge is built up over centuries from the experiences of living in a specific environment. One could argue that this applies to a specific lifestyle as well like subsistence agriculture or gardening. Traditional knowledge and folklore are becoming recognized as important knowledge disciplines alongside science. Companion planting passed down to you from anyone, in any form deserves it's recognition. You should choose weather or not to follow the principals of companion planting passed onto you regardless of what horticultural science says for the sake of tradition and the many years of knowledge held behind those traditions. So I say go ahead and follow traditions you were taught be it from North America, Britain, Italy, or any other cultural tradition you've been exposed to. 

I've received teachings about growing the Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, together in many forms. But heres a helpful document that outlines this type of companion planting and also conveniently lists companions to most common garden vegetables in a table.


Helpful companion planting guide available from this page:
https://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/summaries/summary.php?pub=72

Excellent Online Garden Planning Tool

Here is an excellent resource on planning a market, or even smaller home vegetable garden. It's very simple to use. You can input your climate zone based on where you live and the program will select plants that you are able to grow. This is the easiest garden planner by far that I have used and the program will calculate information for you like number of plants, planting, and harvesting dates, and also includes information about companion planting. Highly recommend this if you are starting a garden, or continuing one this year. There is a 30 free trial, but if you work quickly you can record all the information that you create and have it for the rest of the year.

This is the resource:
http://www.growveg.com/Default.aspx

And this is a sample of the work you can do on the website, this is my own garden plan to be implemented this summer in Downsview Park:

I have dedicated the top section in the image to growing the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash. A traditional companion planting method used by Native Americans and the Huron Indians here in Canada. The corn provides a trellis for the bean plants, bean plants fox nitrogen which benefits all three plants, and the squash's large leaves shade the ground reducing evaporation which keeps moisture in the ground. The rest of the garden is conventional crops that I personally enjoy eating.

And a little self promotion:
I want to point everyone reading this again to the program that is allowing me to be able to farm in the city this way. We need to reach the goal of 20,000 pledges in order to receive any money. This money will go towards seed, tools, irrigation, compost, and the list goes on, for the collective member farmers. All of the member farmers are young entrepreneurs in the city that believe in the local food movement, like myself. If anyone is from Toronto you should seriously invest in this to help lower some of our carbon footprint here in the city by reducing the miles our food travels.

This link will take you to the campaign for donations:
Makers and Eaters Unity: 100 farmers, 1 city

Weeding

Weeding isn't fun if you are overwhelmed by it, but this is hilarious and will definitely make weeding much more interesting this summer. 

Hold up! Lets slow down a little.

"The problem had been with cars the disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harms way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest in to the sea all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another - particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke, and short of fish."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Trilogy 

Hold up! Lets slow down a little.

In our attempt, as put so adequately by Douglas Adams, to get from one place to another as quickly as possible have we lost sight of the slower processes that surround us? Maybe getting in touch with the slower traditional processes, like say growing our own food instead of running to the supermarket, is one step in the direction to harmony with earth. 

This will be my first year as an urban farmer on my small 1000 square foot piece of land in Downsview Park hereafter called Food in the Belly. This is also the inaugural post of my blog Food in the Belly, where I will connect with the slower processes in life and share this with readers. This blog will contain my trials and errors as an urban farmer this summer, and my connection to other slow processes like knitting, sewing and cooking. 

How did I get a 1000 square foot plot of land in Downsview? Well Fresh City Farms has been kind enough to lend out it's land to 22 urban entrepreneurs looking to start their own market gardens. This fits with their goal of eventually training 100 farmers in the city producing 1,000,000 pounds of organic produce in Toronto within the next two years. However these 22 entrepreneurs, hereafter called member farmers, need a little financial support to start this year off right. Pledges are being taken, in exchange for Fresh City swag, to help us buy supplies like seed, compost, farming tools, etc. Donators can visit Kickstart (below) to make pledges:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639830094/makers-and-eaters-unite-100-farmers-1-city?ref=live

This is the link to the Fresh City Farms website:

http://www.freshcityfarms.com/about/our-vision/