Modern Life Is Broken...So We Started Growing Our Own Food

Modern life made us think differently about food. The more we learned about food, the more we wanted to eat healthier. And we found the healthiest way to eat is to grow your own food. What started as a small garden and a few fruit trees in our front yard slowly grew into something much bigger. Year by year we added a little more. Today we grow much of our own food, raise animals for meat and eggs, and our kids are learning these skills There's a lot of peace of mind that comes from knowing exactly where your food comes from. Today I'm going to show you what that looks like in our everyday life during the summer. If you're new, hi, I'm Sheri. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom. I share homeschooling content all year round, but this time of year our book work takes the back seat and we are learning a lot of life skills. I love encouraging other homeschooling parents here on my channel and on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. In my course Beyond School, the Home Education Breakthrough, I share with moms the complete approach I've refined in over 16 years of raising and educating our 10 children. This is to help you build a home education lifestyle that truly works for your family. You can learn all about it by clicking on the link in the description box below. My husband and I have 10 children ages 21 down to 3, so feeding our big family takes a lot of time. And we love to eat healthy, so growing our own food has become something that is more and more important to us. One of the biggest parts of our day in the summer, part of our daily routine revolves around the animals. On our small homestead we raise four pigs, two are for us, two we exchange for beef with a friend, and then we also have two sets of 80 broiler hens that we raise all summer. This allows us to stock our freezer while only having two processing days each year. It's a lot of work to process the chickens and we do it ourselves. My husband butchers them, we have a plucker, we usually have some friends come over and help us. It's an all-day event. The kids help package everything and the kids help with raising the animals. Every day one child is assigned to animal duty and that child is responsible for the animals all day with the assumption that my husband and I are coming alongside and helping as needed. Another child has kitchen duty and another is the kitchen helper and this just really helps us to manage all the work that we need done around here. The animals have to be fed every morning and evening so this really teaches responsibility. When my husband gets home from work he moves our broiler hens onto fresh grass. We have three chicken tractors for our hens and this works out really nicely. I like them to be on fresh grass especially when they're about four weeks old they start getting really messy and they need to be moved every day. The broiler hens probably are the most work around here but they're only here for eight weeks so it's temporary work which helps motivate the kids a little bit. We also have laying hens that are here year-round, about 15 of them. They're a lot easier, they eat a lot of the scraps. Nothing is wasted around here. Everything we eat if there's something left over it always goes to the chickens which I really love the efficiency of a homestead life. In the summer as we're canning and preserving we have a lot more left over and that goes to the pigs so nothing is wasted. Our pigs are here for about six months that's the most cost efficient way that we found to raise them. After that it costs more to feed them than what they're worth in meat. You can also see our large garden. Our garden started originally at our old house. We had a shaded backyard. We only lived on a small property so we just started a garden in the front yard and we've learned skills. We've gotten better and better at it over the years and now we have a little bit more space and our garden just keeps growing and this is where most of our food prep happens. One thing that's made a big difference for us is using a black tarp to help keep the weeds down. To give you a little tour of our vegetable garden these are our beets. We have four rows and then we just planted a fifth row of seeds. We love canned beets. On either side of this black landscape cloth you can see we have cucumbers growing so my husband will bring out the trellis and we'll tie them up so they can grow along the trellis. We have about 30 tomato plants. We'll make diced tomatoes with these. We'll can those for winter. This is the time of year when the garden's a lot of work tying up plants, pulling weeds, hilling potatoes but the reward comes a few months later. Here we have about 15 pepper plants and we cut and freeze these. These are our rows of green beans. We planted these two first. Two more we plant them in succession. We're going to have to weed that and plant another row there. We like to freeze these. We've also canned them. Either way it feeds our family for most of the winter. We've had great hopes for our corn patch in the past but it seems like each year something gets in it and destroys it. Hopefully this will be the year we actually get to see some corn and we love creamed corn that we freeze. This is the kids patch. They always ask if they can have a section of the garden. This year they're growing peas and they're turning out really nicely. They're doing the strings keeping up with them as the peas grow which is what they need to support themselves as they spread out their tendrils. We also have two zucchini plants which really produce a lot. By far one of the best parts of raising your own food is having meat in the freezer year-round. We raise enough chicken, beef, and pork for our whole family and it's like having a grocery store right in your house. If we're out of everything I always know I have meat and I come out here if I have meat I have a meal. This has been probably one of my favorite parts. It's a lot of work initially but it's work we do for a short period of time in the summer and then we have it all winter long. This is the end of the season so we're getting kind of low but you can see we have some whole chickens there, sausages, bacon, some more loose sausage, some bones for broth. In this freezer we keep the carcasses from some of the chickens we butcher. This is great to open up throw in a pot and make some broth quickly so we don't waste any part of the chicken. It all gets used. Now while we grow most of the food we preserve we also keep our eyes open for good deals at local farmers markets Today I'm freezing organic blueberries that we found at a great price. We bought several boxes of these. Each box had I don't know 12-15 cartons in them so we froze quarts and quarts of berries. I put them on a tray and flash freeze them for about an hour. Get them out. This is so that they don't freeze in one big bulk they freeze individually. Get them out put them in quart size ziplock freezer bags. These are great for smoothies to get out and put in some blueberry muffins to snack on throughout the year. This is one of the easiest preservation projects for kids to help with. Summer is here and it's full of projects like this. I have a post on the blog just sharing some of the seven easiest foods to preserve with kids this summer. I'll link it below for you if you are looking for some good ideas. Once again all the discarded blueberries go out to the chickens. They love this. They are living high during the summer getting all of our leftover scraps. This is another good job for kids. They can always be taking out the leftovers to the chickens and pigs. Our kids really do help with all of this. It keeps them busy in the summer which is wonderful. They are rarely looking for things to do. There is just always some little project that we're working on and that's one thing that's great when you're preserving food. The kids are contributing to something very meaningful that keeps everyone busy. The kids help us with other food as well. For example green beans is perfect for kids. We have them help pick. We all go out there set a timer because it's hot and nobody really wants to. We set a timer and we all pick for a couple minutes together. We bring it in. We cut off the ends. Rinse them. Those we blanch for about a minute. Take them out to cool and put them in quart bags as well. We've canned them occasionally but for the most part we like to freeze beans. Even though we're not doing our formal book work we're still learning. I still take some time every day. If it's a casual day where we're here we're not going anywhere. I still read aloud to the kids in the afternoon. Maybe once or twice a week I'll have my five-year-old read her bob books to me because she's still at that stage where she's just at the height of learning to read and I don't want her to get behind right as she's just getting it. So we spend a little time doing that. For many years our gardening approach was simple. Just grow what we need to eat and we like to start. I started originally with just one food that I could grow well that I knew our family would eat and that was strawberries. And we had strawberry jam all year long. I think then we added tomatoes and then probably peppers and just slowly we've added foods that I know I can preserve and keep and my family will eat all year long. But over the last couple years I've started making room for some beauty in our gardening. Along the side of our house we've created a small herb and flower garden and this has really been fun for me. I have spearmint that we make for tea. I grow some rosemary, oregano, basil, cilantro, lavender. This year we planted bee balm. We're also growing some raspberries and blackberries that I got from a friend. For flowers I've been planting rows of zinnias and marigolds and sunflowers. The spearmint has produced so much I almost have to keep cutting it back. So we've been making a lot of spearmint tea. This is so easy and refreshing in the summer just when we need it. I've decided that zinnias and marigolds look best in these pots so each year we collect the seeds, dry them out, and I replant them the next year and they work great in these pots. We have a couple large pots around the house and I just like to find something that looks really good in them and do the same thing over and over. These have been wonderful to cut and arrange and just put around the house. Growing food when you have a large family is important but creating beauty around our home has been fun. Now I don't want to pretend that this lifestyle is easy especially when the harvest starts coming in and the kids have to spend a lot of time cutting up cucumbers, cutting beans. It takes a lot of work to preserve and we don't always have the best attitudes about it but when the food is all done, when it's all down in our pantry and we get to step back and see the reward of our labor, it is wonderful. I love that our kids know where their food comes from, that they've learned the skill of growing and preserving it for themselves. So it's a lot of work. Sometimes the garden looks messy, sometimes we are just completely exhausted after days of processing chickens or preserving food and during the harvest season especially, it just seems like there's always more food on the counter that needs to be put up but every year we see the benefits. We love the food in our pantry, the meals in our freezer, the confidence that comes from knowing where our food comes from. Most importantly, the skills our children are learning. If I step away in the middle of canning vegetables, freezing green beans, any part of it, our kids are able to step right in and pick up where I left off. They've been right beside us year after year, watching, helping. Growing your own food isn't just about healthier meals, it's about passing down knowledge and creating capable kids. It's about building a life that's a little less dependent on systems that we can't control. We started with a tiny garden and a few fruit trees and while we still have a lot to learn, we're grateful for what we've learned and where this has taken us because learning to grow your own food is one of the most valuable skills we can pass down to our children. Is this something you value as well? Comment below with your questions. I'd love to share what I've learned with you. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.