Start growing food for other people and you will be fed.

I give away starts all the time because money isn’t where I reap, it isn’t the reward that I’m sowing or harvesting. The miraculous promise of a garden, or farming, is planting a few seeds for a few plants or raising a couple animals for meat and somehow everyone is fed by the end of the season. What I sow and reap is nourishment for myself and others and the wonderful thing is giving it away only makes it grow.

I started out this year with a list of dreams and goals, and I’m somewhat in disbelief of how many of them are reality now, knowing how much work it took to get here. And how much money and time…*shudders*

One huge item on my list was to become a vendor at my local farmers market. Not only have I been a real life vendor for a whole month (WITH A BABY), I’m actually on track to make back my capital investment-about $1600 worth of licensing, labeling, and growing supplies so far-by the end of the market season.

My “whys” have become ultra clear over the past few weeks, for how I choose to spend my time and define my worth. I still work from home for a local surveying company but I have had to drastically reduce my hours as I adapt to being a new mother. Working to secure life insurance for myself and my husband I’ve learned just how much less I’m valued by society when my income drops-currently I qualify for a third of the coverage my husband does, thanks to my labor being unpaid. Labor that directly impacts our ability to own land and a home in a state with a very high cost of living. The work that both of us do enriches my community financially through the taxes we pay, but I am considered financially expendable by that same entity, or at the very best a dependent on my working partner. For someone who has built a life on measuring their worth by their achievements, this transition has been a serious internal blow to my confidence.

Add on to that the constant costs of good mental and physical healthcare (even with our great insurance we pay for through Jess’s workplace), and the full time job of managing the logistics of both for myself and our son? I feel like I got a serious managerial promotion with the caveat that my new salary is pizza parties and a fat stack of Bed Bath and Beyond coupons. But that’s another post for another day.

My garden is the loophole in what I feel is a seriously messed up system. Feeding people is my love language, and I fantasize about having stores of homegrown ingredients at my fingertips to make my family and friends feel nourished inside and out. All that food costs a LOT of money, even when you buy directly from local farmers, and you dedicate time and space in your home to preparing and storing it yourself.

In the last six months we’ve made big changes to where and how we shop for food (thank you Azure Standard!) and have managed to reduce our monthly grocery bill to an average of $500. Considering we had been paying double that this time last year, this is a HUGE stride in money management and community sustainability for us. We’ve refined our time spent by batch cooking, food prepping, and investing in an old deep freezer we keep in the garage. Now we’re at the next step- offsetting that $500 per month cost entirely.

We’ve identified our food staples, and have sorted out what we want to grow and what we don’t. We know we appreciate local naturally grown meats, but don’t want to raiser butcher livestock for meat on our farm. We’ve found that our passion for growing, harvesting, and cooking our own produce is absolutely enormous. Crucially, growing produce and raising livestock for eggs takes little time per day and has been a huge mental health boost for the whole family.

*June 2nd 2021 - Week three (A scorcher! Part of our annual “false summer”)*

At the start of the season I took stock of all my seeds and started recklessly sowing them in the greenhouse. I purchased only what I had to in order to legally sell what I already had, and splurged on economical multi-use branding (website design, informational stickers, innovative plant caddies for market customers). By the time the market started I had hundreds of healthy seedlings and so far have averaged about $80 worth of sales per market day. I have about 18 more market days this year; an opportunity to make my investment of $1500 back as cash in my pocket. I’ll be using this $1500 over again this fall to buy local meat for the next year, as well as all the seeds I’ll need for next year’s garden and farmers market.

If I’m successful, our grocery bill this time next year might be reduced to the few items we eat that don’t fall into the category of produce or meats- about $100 worth of goods per month. What I grow in our garden will pay for seeds and meat for the following year, and the only component that won’t be sustaining itself will be that last $100 per month of canned or processed goods.

Suspending my disbelief long enough to ignore the inevitable losses and mistakes that come from any enterprise, I stand to transform a yearly $12,000 grocery bill into a $1,200 grocery bill while improving the quality of food I can provide my family and my community.

*Breaking that down into an hourly wage:

10 hours of labor per week for 6 months = roughly 270 hours

$10,800 divided into 270 hours = $40 per hour

Not bad! Offsetting almost our entire grocery bill 18 months into this project? Pretty awesome.

Having months worth of fresh and healthy ingredients at my fingertips and having the time to cook for my family and friends? Immeasurably valuable to me. A miraculous kind of value that not only regenerates, but takes root in the lives of everyone who contributes and spontaneously provides for them too.

Farmers Market Update!

What a season y’all

Birth Story - Hugo James Cartwright