Our Backyard Homestead

The Backyard Homestead Expansion Project

It was an exciting summer for our family.  Not only did we have a bumper crop of zucchini which after 5 years of failure was super exciting, but we also moved to an amazing new house!!  We were not planning to move, we had been gearing up to remodel, but we have always kept our eye open for a little more land without a little more commute.  The beginning of June, just such a place went on the market. 

I am so grateful every single day that I wake up in our new house!  With all of our special eating requirements, much of our time is spent in the kitchen.  Our old house had a very small kitchen and did not allow for meal preparation to be much in the way of quality family time.  Now, the kitchen is the heart of our home and all five of us can be in there together without anyone tripping over another.  It was truly exciting to remodel the old house for someone else and now that it is on the market, we are praying for a family that will be transformed by the 1.2242 acres the same way that we were.  

Here is a little picture of what life on our new piece of Texas looks like:

Gorgeous Sunsets

Interesting Neighbors

More Gorgeous Sunsets

More Interesting Neighbors

LOTS of Grasshoppers

Grasshoppers make for fat, healthy chickens

Exciting events in our own front yard

Wild birds that want to be pets

And finally, more interesting neighbors...that have babies!

 

The Ulitimate Thief

I am so thankful that my  husband held a strong disdain for watching television when we were first married.  Initially, I did not share his sentiment and found it annoying that he would never sit and "veg" with me in the evenings.  Our compromise was to not have cable and this very much limited the time wasted on mindless TV.  Over the years, we have found that the television was on less and less.  Even the kids would go for weeks without interest in watching.

A few years ago, we downsized substantially and simply did not have room for a TV.  We let it live in the garage for a while, but realized that we did not miss it a bit.  One day we were cleaning out the garage and set it on the curb with a sign that read "Free - Works" and in less than an hour, our television found a new home.

Have you thought of how much time you spend in front of the TV?  If the TV were still in our lives, there is no chance that I would have the time for a garden.  I wouldn't have a list of several books read in the past year.  My kids would not be playing two instruments.  They would not have the vivid imaginations that they have today. 

Do you think you will look back at your life and wish that you had watched more TV?  I dare you to watch this and be honest with yourself at how much time the television is stealing from your life. 

Gluten free is the future for me

I have spent most of the last decade of my life thinking I was too young to feel so bad.  Shortly after The Tornado was born, I invested time in attempting to get medical answers when the pain was so bad that I could barely climb the stairs in our two story house.  Encouragement to go to physical therapy and a diagnosis of a small amount of arthritis in my spine were all I came away with.  You have a baby and two very young children, your body will heal the orthopedist reasoned.  Arthritis in my spine at age 30?  How does that happen?  Eventually, the pain in my hips subsided a little and I learned to live with the rest.  My children passed the age of being carried on my hip, yet the pain did not go away.  I have attempted not to dwell on the nagging question always lurking in the back of my mind of if I feel this bad in my thirties, what will I feel like in my 50s or 80s?

The decision to embark upon our major elimination diet was solely for the sake of my two children who have struggled with food sensitivities since they were born.  Eating ultra healthy would be a benefit for the rest of the family as well.  If I dropped those few pounds that were causing the clothes to fit a little tight, it would be a nice reward for the effort involved on my part.  Within a week, I started to see much greater benefit than dropping a few pounds.  Chronic issues such as major sinus congestion were disappearing.  The itchy ears were itchy no longer.  But, the greatest improvement was yet to come.

Around the three week mark, I got out of bed one morning and realized that my body didn't hurt the way I was used to.  The pain in my hips that had once kept me from climbing the stairs had vanished.  The spot of arthritis had disappeared.  Maybe I was just having a good day because this was too strange to consider to be a result of our diet.  However, over the course of the next few weeks, my body felt better than I have felt in a decade.  I had so much more energy and came to realize just how much chronic pain I had been in, but had learned to ignore.  I had no idea how much of my energy was going towards just surviving the day.  No wonder I felt tired all of the time!

This past week we began to experiment with adding gluten back in beyond a few spelt trials.  This past week, the muscles in my back felt like they were on fire, yet it didn't register that it could be related to the food.  By Thursday, with only a few minor exposures to wheat, my sinus congestion was getting much worse.  I chalked it up to allergies.  Afraid that I was getting a little too paranoid about what I was eating, I threw caution to the wind and ate a honey wheat hamburger bun at my niece's birthday party.  It was the only thing that I ate that was different.  I brought our own condiments and chips to the party.

Within 30 minutes of eating the hamburger bun, every bit of pain was back in full force.  My entire back radiated with burning muscle pain.  My hip pain was terrible and severe to the point that I was struggling to walk.  It was awful and I never want to feel like that again.  I am still in shock that one little hamburger bun could make me feel that bad.  A few hours later, the pain had subsided somewhat and by Monday it was almost completely gone.

James 1:2 says to consider it joy when experiencing various trials.  As I have journeyed through the past decade of being the obnoxious mom that won't let my kids eat the foods all their friends are, it has been difficult to keep the joy.  Especially when the allergist and pediatricians left me feeling as though I am over top and because my kids don't have hives or come up positive on their tests, I must be exaggerating their symptoms.  Today I have great joy in a future with specific and big diet changes.   When we began our elimination diet I prayed that the problem foods would be obvious, but I didn't realize that the prayer would be answered for me.  I thought this was all for my kids!

Devestation

 

Gardening has brought me so much appreciation for things I wouldn't have imagined.  From bible verses to poetry to history that has come alive with new meaning.  Monday morning about 1 AM, our entire town was pummeled with golf ball size hail.  I don't know of a single neighborhood in our town of almost 10,000 that was spared.  My garden took quite significant damage but I am so thankful that I live in an era where there is a grocery store full of produce down the road.  I can't imagine how devastated I would have been to walk out and survey the damage if I had no other options for feeding my family.

I wrote to tell my grandmother about the storm and her response is so full of wisdom and a mindset sorely lacking in our country today I had to share:

I had missed the reports on hail in Tx.  I am so sorry. It is a devastating experience.  Have lived thru' several. One extremely bad when I was younger. We lost windows, siding, roofs and crops plus other things--School couldn't even start as it broke all the windows out of school also. At the time I did not fully realize my Dad's profound attitude. They had lost all their crops--our income for the year--Dad went out and checked the losses came in hugged Mom and said there's a lot of ice out there have you got some cream Ma--let's make ice cream. We kids went out gathered the hail stones and ice cream we had. A valuable lesson I have never forgotten   In those days we bought sugar and flour in 50 to 100#'s at a time. the rain water came in after the windows were all broken and ran on those supplies destroying them also.

Sadly, we lost one of our chickens.  Scared out of her mind (the very small chicken mind), she squeezed a hole in the chicken wire and escaped from the coop, only to be nearly immediately killed by the hail.  One of our cars was severely beaten but thankfully did not have broken windows.  Our roof will almost certainly need to be replaced, but it could have been so much worse.  I think of the town in Iowa that was nearly wiped off the map by a tornado and know I have much to be thankful for!

As for the garden, it took a severe beating.  My lettuce was nearly ready to harvest and it was pummeled to pieces.  The kids and I salvaged what we could and I picked out bits of gravel, twigs, mulch and who knows what else.  It was covered in dirt but after multiple washings it was edible and quite delicious.  We also lost most of the kale but were able to rescue some that was turned into several smoothies and a delicious side dish with dinner.  There were two broken off flowers from mutilated sunflowers came inside to add a little sunshine to the counter.  We did our best to make lemonade.

The floating row cover worked well for the small hail we had a few weeks ago.  I do think the tomatoes would have been a total loss if it had not been there, but as you can see, it is not effective against golf ball sized hail.

I had just planted these sunflowers a few days before.  Not too late to plant from seed.

The blackberries took a severe beating.  Nearly every branch is broken like this one.  If we get any berries, it will likely be about a third of what there would have been.

This was a new fruit tree I had picked up.  Hopefully it will recover.

We had already lost all of the peaches due to some late freezes after the fruit had set.  Now it appears we lost a better part of the tree.

All dents from the hail in a bag of mulch.

A close up of the damage to the floating row cover.  I think this one looks a little like it could be the face carved on a jack o lantern.

A baby pear from the neighbors pear tree.  I am sure that pear harvest will be minimal as well.

The dark dirt looking substance is huge piles of the shingle material that was beaten/washed off of our roof.  There are huge dents in the shingles and we have not climbed up there to inspect the chimney but I am certain it took quite a beating as well.

Leaves and twigs/branches are everywhere littering both the front and back yard.  The poor trees are looking rather bare.

 

A Super Full Moon on Saturday

Make plans to watch the moon rise on Saturday evening!  According to NASA science:

Mark your calendar. On March 19th, a full Moon of rare size and beauty will rise in the east at sunset. It's a super "perigee moon"--the biggest in almost 20 years.

"The last full Moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993," says Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC. "I'd say it's worth a look."

Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon's orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee): diagram. Nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the Moon's orbit.

You can read more about the super full moon on the NASA website.

What if???

A child in the 70/80s, I can remember all of about three kids I went to school with through the years that had major allergies or health issues.  This come up in conversation recently with more than one friend and it seems I am not alone in this memory.  So if we were healthy kids with no allergies or health issues, why are we giving birth to a generation of children with peanut allergies, milk allergies, egg allergies, wheat allergies and a host of health issues?  Why does nearly anyone I know, especially if parenting a boy, have experience with reactive airway disease with their young children?

What if the very food we are eating could be to blame?  What if by simply changing your diet, you might be able to pack away the nebulizer for good?  What if modern food science has shortchanged us and genetically modified foods have genetically modified our children?  Yes, that is a bit of an extreme conclusion, but I was pleased to read an article in a mainstream publication about the possibility of rising rates of gluten sensitivity.

Although much remains unknown, it is clear that gluten—a staple of human diets for 10,000 years—triggers an immune response like an enemy invader in some modern humans.

A new study in the journal BMC Medicine may shed some light on why. It shows gluten can set off a distinct reaction in the intestines and the immune system, even in people who don't have celiac disease.

"For the first time, we have scientific evidence that indeed, gluten sensitivity not only exists, but is very different from celiac disease," says lead author Alessio Fasano, medical director of the University of Maryland's Center for Celiac Research.

I highly recommend reading "Clues to Gluten Sensitivity" over at the Wall Street Journal website.  Recently, Matt has recommended to more than one patient that removing wheat and/or dairy from their diet, might just be the answer to lingering health problems that have not been solved by modern medicine.  The feedback he has had from patients seems to align exactly with the article.  The experience of our family with our elimination diet this past three weeks has turned us into a healthier family nearly overnight.

I have so much more that I want to research and write about on this topic, but for now I ask you to read this article and consider if you or your children might benefit from a gluten free trial.  What do you have to loose?  This coming from someone who has been suffering with chronic congestion and sinus infections for most of the last decade.  Even with seasonal allergies causing much havoc right now, I have not been able to breathe like this in years!  Literally the congestion would be so bad some mornings that I felt I was suffocating.  I don't know yet if it is dairy, gluten, corn or soy contributing to my issues, but without a doubt I am 99.9% improved since we began our elimination diet. 

I fought going nuclear with our diet because it seemed too hard in an era of modern food conveniences.  Now I regret not doing it years earlier!  It likely would have spared my children much agony had we done it long ago. 

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I give full credit to Michael Pollan for today's title and for changing the way our family shops and eats.  After reading In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto we began to take bigger baby steps in changing our diet.  Previously, I had attempted to eliminate high fructose corn syrup from our diet, but I didn't really know why other than it seemed like a good idea.  Reading Pollan's books armed me with the why's and gave me all the more inspiration to continue liberating our family from our highly processed diet that I thought was a pretty healthy one!

Last spring, we picked up a copy of Food Rules also by Michael Pollan.  I wondered if it was worth buying since we had read In Defense of Food, but the Amazon reviews convinced me I wasn't wasting $5 on it.  And the reviews were correct.  This tiny gem of a book is now what I recommend anyone interested in making change to their diet read as their first primer on the topic.  It is an extremely quick read, yet filled with helpful insight.  We felt that this book was so valuable that Matt actually ordered enough copies so that every exam room in their large clinic would have a copy for patients to glance through should they choose.

Until our recent starvation (elimination) diet as I have jokingly been calling it, I must confess that I was not doing all that great with the "Mostly Plants" part of the equation.  Yes, my kids ate plenty of fruits and veggies, but especially for meals, it was more of an obligation than a true hunger to eat mostly plants.  Since eliminating dairy/corn/soy/wheat/gluten/chicken and initially beef we have been learning to thrive on mostly plants.   It has been almost three weeks of eating a nearly vegan diet and I must say that I am not sure I want to go back to the old ways. 

We do have a freezer full of grass finished beef, so we did add that back, in small quantities, first.  Everyone seems to tolerate it with no problems.  The second challenge to try after two weeks of elimination diet also seemed obvious.  Seven chickens providing nearly seven eggs a day times 14 days left us with a large stockpile of eggs.  I had prayed that God would make it obvious as to what the problem foods are that need to stay out of our diets for the time being.  I am thankful for a very clear answer to prayer, but sad to report that eggs will remain out.  With two egg exposures, The Tornado began clawing at his arms and cheeks, the very places that have been covered in eczema for years.  By the third day of having a small amount of eggs back in the diet, the bumpy skin that had nearly cleared was returning to the sandpaper look he has sported for so long.

For now we are on hold of introducing any other foods back into the diet.  I want him to recover from the egg exposure before we complicate the introduction of any other foods.  Yet, the longer we go, the more I find I am truly enjoying our new eating habits.  Cravings are going away and I am finding that I am not nearly as hungry between meals.  Last night for dinner we had roasted broccoli and asparagus, grilled sweet potatoes, caramelized onions and one pound of steak for the five of us.  There was left over steak but not so much on the veggies.

I am currently reading The China Study that was recommended to Matt by one of his patients.  I appears that the final outcome of the book may be along the lines considerable evidence showing that "mostly plants" is the way to go.  At the snails pace I am reading, I hope to have more of a review on the book in a few months!  

On the topic of Self Sufficiency

For those that came to my blog looking to be self sustaining, this new book might be of interest.  Here is the video trailer to the book:

I love the smashing of the TV screen! Our family did not realize how in bondage we were to the television until we first cut out cable and later gave away our television set. We can still watch some things online through sources such as Netflix, but the mind-numbing influence of a television that too readily stole our free time is gone. We find that even the children rarely choose to want to watch a video and prefer to play outside.  For Matt and I, the choice to donate two hours to watch a movie happens about once every few months.

You can read more about Surviving Off Off-Grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind in this review.  The reviews on Amazon look promising as well.  I added it to my wishlist, but right now my reading list is too long to considering reading it in the near future.

Baby steps

In the three media interviews that we have done, the main thing I have attempted to stress to the reporters is that we took baby steps to get where we are today.  Our journey actually began with eliminating red dye from our son's diet.  He was premature and has suffered some significant health issues as a result, including surgery at two months and two hospitalizations for respiratory illnesses.  When he was a baby, I began to suspect that the red dye in his medication was causing extreme hyperactivity, yet he was also on breathing medications and oral steroids (both known for insanity in mom caused by hyperactivity in the child) so it was hard to pinpoint.  One night his reaction after a dose of really red Tylenol was so strong that there was no denying the link to red dye.  And thus, our baby steps began.  From that point, it has taken us six years to get to where we are today.

Another issue I would like to clear up from our interviews is the misconception that we are self-sufficient.  At this season in my life, that is not even my goal.  If there is anyone growing a garden in Texas that is able to be completely self sufficient, I would love to meet you because this is a HARD climate to work with and I could really use a mentor.  I try not to be jealous of my sister up north who can toss in a few plants and be drowning in produce a few months later!  My goal is to learn all I can about how to garden in Texas so that as my kids get older and my mommy duties begin to change, I can devote more time to the garden should I choose.  Right now my main priority is educating and raising future leaders of our great nation.  I hope by having a garden, they will learn a solid work ethic and learn to enjoy what real food tastes like. 

The most recent article stated that we only buy 25% of our food from the grocery store.  This is accurate, but does not mean that 75% comes from our back yard.  We buy our whole wheat grains from a co-op, most of our meats and milk come from straight from the farm and our eggs come from the backyard.  Right now the main reason to visit the grocery is for produce.   Later this month, the local farmer's market will be open.  Between that and the garden, we should be seeing the inside of the grocery much less frequently. 

A wonderful way to expose your children to nature and help foster a love for gardening is to visit a pick your own farm over the summer months.  My parents had a large garden when I was young, but after we moved from South Dakota our main exposure to gardening/farming came from visits to pick your own farms.  The kids are already making plans for us to visit East Texas for blueberries this summer!  Our peaches last summer came from generous friend with a bumper crop on their many peach trees. 

I hope to get some links set up to the books that have inspired us to continue our journey of baby steps.  In the meantime, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was one of the first books I read on the subject of eating local and becoming more self sufficient.  While I am not in agreement with all of her views, it was an eye opening book and really made me think about our industrialized food system.  A much less gentle primer would be Food, Inc., which I believe everyone should see.

In the next few days, I hope to get some pictures of my watering system, as well as discuss how I built my raised beds.  Most of the garden was built without my husbands help and I am not exactly handy when it comes to building things!  If you are thinking of a garden this year, start small and add as you go.  If you live in Texas, don't make any plans without first making a plan for irrigation.  I started with just three raised beds and have added to my space each year.  I also want to dedicate some time to discussing my love for mulch as it is what allows me to spend minimal time in the garden once everything is growing for the season.  The mention in the recent article of spending an hour per week caring for it was specific to maintenance and did not include time for picking.  Last summer, much of the month of June we spent 30-60 minutes every other day picking blackberries.  Now that I don't consider work!!

One giant step

Little did we know that our journey away from the Standard American Diet (SAD) began with the birth of our sweet nine year old daughter.  Within hours of her birth, she began not just spitting up, but vomiting.  The first three months of her life were misery for her and for me, helpless to understand what pained her and exhausted from a newborn that never stopped crying and slept very little.  Because she was gaining weight, the pediatrician dismissed my concerns.  Matt was working 100+ hours a week in his intern year of residency.  When he was home, he was exhausted.  Besides, none of his training in medical school addressed the link of nutrition and health beyond the basics and as related to treating diabetic patients. 

Thanks to the internet, when she was six months old I finally made a connection between her extreme fussiness and a milk protein allergy.  Being that she had never had formula, this meant the milk protein was coming from my diet.  I initially switched from cow's milk to soy milk but she became even fussier.  I don't know if the statistic has changed, but up to 40% of children that cannot tolerate cow's milk will also be intolerant/allergic to soy.  Now that much is coming out about the negatives of soy, I am very thankful that she didn't tolerate it.  As she got older, it seemed she could handle yogurts, cheeses and butter.  It was not until we switched to raw, unpasteurized milk that she and also her also dairy intolerant younger brother could make the transition from rice milk to cow's milk.

However, at many seasons over the past nine years, she and more recently her brother, have struggled with reflux and GI issues, seemingly related to food.  Allergy tests revealed some minor allergies, but after a time avoiding those foods (eggs for her, peanuts for him) they were given the all clear to go back in to their diet.  Endoscopy, allergy tests, prescription medications, etc. etc., it seemed our kids were headed for a lifetime of tummy troubles. 

As we began to take baby steps to eliminate some of the modern convenience foods and other processed foods from our diet, we began to see improvements.  The switch to raw milk seemed to provide improvements in their health and, for the first time ever, our daughter could have milk without vomiting.  The more baby steps we took, the easier it was to take that next step.  At some point in the past three years, our diet came to look rather radical from the SAD.  Yet, nagging issues remained.  Our son continued to battle reactive airway disease and was covered in eczema.  Our daughter still suffered periods of reflux.  Deep down I felt that an elimination diet would be helpful, but was so overwhelmed with how to make it happen.

Ten days ago, at our daughters request, we took the plunge and decided to see what would happen if we eliminated wheat/gluten/corn/soy/dairy/eggs/chicken/beef/pork free for at least two weeks.  Once we make the two week mark, we will likely begin to add some things back in one at a time to see how they are tolerated.  I must say, though it has been a lot of work cooking three meals a day from scratch, I am loving the way I am feeling.  My sinuses are clearing up.  My ears that have been chronically itchy most of my life are no longer itchy!  My energy level is improving and I have shed a few unneeded pounds! 

I have seen some evidence that the dietary changes are helping the kids as well.  The Tornado's bumpy skin is clearing up which is huge!!  On Saturday evening, I cheated and added a little butter and sour cream to mashed potatoes.  Our daughter vomited upon waking on Sunday morning.  We stayed home from church assuming she was coming down with something, but as the day went on it was clear that her troubles that morning we caused by reflux and not a virus.  It seems possible that the dairy we thought she was tolerating could be what has been causing her issues all along.  We pray that in time we will have a clear answer for both of the kids.  In the meantime, we are learning to become practically vegan with a little bit of fish and turkey on the side. 

To help in our new mostly vegan efforts, I picked up some beautiful lettuce transplants yesterday.  Hopefully in the next few weeks, we will be harvesting our salads from the back yard!