Given that we are very inefficient chicken keepers and get a lot more out of our flock than just chicken meat, and that we're just doing this exercise to see where it takes us, let's just halve that. Let's say $47.00 per roast chicken.

Then let's halve it again because our chickens, although they vary in size a lot, can be up to twice the size of the supermarket one. So now we're at $23.50.

(Our chickens are also twice as tough as supermarket ones -- we could put that down as a benefit measured in extra jaw muscles. True story -- the book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art says that as our food has become more tender and we have had to work less and less at chewing it, our airways have shrunk and our faces have changed, and not towards the rugged outdoor look.)

Regardless of its chewing value, in dollar terms our chicken is still two and a half  times the price of the supermarket variety. 

The real value of a chicken 

I just tried to put a dollar value on a roast chicken from a back yard flock, but there's no way to factor in the intangible value of the multitude of other things that a home grown roast chicken is connected to.

Just to list some of the benefits our own family has experienced from raising our own chickens (obviously a limited view point but it'll do for demonstration purposes):

• Our deep litter chicken coop provides finished compost by the wheelbarrow load. And when we let them out to forage in the afternoons, the flock provides free farmyard/garden sanitation (manure spreading and insect control).
• When our children were small, caring for broody hens and clutches of eggs gave them meaningful biology lessons. Mama hens and fluffy baby chicks kept them occupied for hours at a time -- and not the way a screen does. And the still little forms that didn't make it out of the nest taught them that life comes hand in hand with death, and that sometimes outcomes are beyond our control. 
• Our chicken flock is also a source of meaning, purpose, and dignity for us. It enables us to put food on the table that we're proud of, that we've been intimately involved with, that we've grappled with the ethics of.
• Our chicken flock helps us feed ourselves in an "additive" way--with things like increased soil health and quality of life as by-products--instead of in an "extractive," industrial way.
• Our chicken raising experiences have helped us grow in our sense of responsibility and stewardship toward the land and lives that link directly to what's on the ends of our forks. 

One way to sum it up would be to say that a homegrown roast chicken on our table represents a journey from squeamish, and clueless (aka, easily led and largely dependent on others) towards capable, confident, and able to contribute -- even if its just by feeding ourselves a little more and relying a little less on unethical and unsustainable industrial agriculture.

Related reading 

Here's a page that links to all my other chicken-related posts, about keeping chickens (and their environment) healthy and happy and also about chicken behavior and what chickens have to do with calling in a kinder, more connected world.

"Regenerative Food Systems vs Industrial Agriculture: Why We Need More Hands in the Soil"

"One Small Serve" - home grown food on a small enough scale

Includes a series of free extra tips + free email support

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Why would you want to grow your own food?

In this series of posts we're focusing on reducing our reliance on supermarkets and industrial food for lots of reasons. Some of the main ones are to reduce our costs, to improve our nutrition, and to tread more lightly on the earth.

In case you missed the previous posts in the series, they are:

3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better

Strategy #4 – to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket

Strategy #5 – What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?

Strategy #6 – Wise Use of Whole Foods

This post - Strategy #7 - is about replacing some of your supermarket needs (in small steps) by making a start on growing your own food.

If you’ve never grown anything before, or if you live in an urban environment without access to garden areas, take heart. There are easy, small ways to start -- including if you are short on time, space, or confidence.

I've listed the following suggestions roughly in order from easy towards more challenging. We'll begin with what must be the simplest, cheapest, quickest way there is to get started growing a little bit of fresh food in your own home. 

Start sprouts in a jar on your kitchen bench

Sprouting seeds, grains, and legumes is a simple process that takes no more space than a kitchen draining board. It's a way that you can use indirect sunlight and moisture to increase the volume, digestibility, and nutrition levels of seeds, grains, and legumes.

All you need is a clean jar, a piece of loose weave fabric or netting, a large rubber band or some string, water, some indirect sunlight, and some edible seeds grains/legumes. (Preferably organic and definitely not treated in any way that would stop them from sprouting.)

At its most basic, sprouting goes like this: Put a small amount of seed or grain in the bottom of your jar, cover with water, and leave for up to 12 hours (less for smaller seeds).

Cover the mouth of the jar with a fabric or net that will hold the seeds and release the water; drain. After that, rinse and drain your seeds at least every 12 hours, keeping them moist but not wet. Watch for them to start to sprout, which should happen within a day or so. Keep rinsing and draining till the sprouts are the size you want, and viola: homegrown food!

You can use your sprouts in lots of ways: toss them into a stir fry, add to salads, add to sandwiches, blend them up in smoothies... 

Food that grows in soil is always my preference, but sprouting is hard to beat if you're short on space or time or you just need a not-too-daunting way to get started growing something.

A how-to resource and a word of caution

There are a different soaking and sprouting times for different sizes and types of seed, and its good to be sure you're not letting your sprouts get slimy or moldy - for details, this post is a comprehensive  guide covering pretty much everything you could want to know.

The only thing I would add to it is a word of caution about soy, which I suggest you avoid entirely, and other legumes, which I suggest you cook after sprouting.

(See this article by environmental journalist Tara Lohan about soy effects on human and environmental health and how soy got so big, this one about soy farming as a deforestation driver, and this one about soy in processed foods, if you're keen to know more about why I suggest avoiding soy.)

All other legume sprouts, in my opinion, should be cooked before you eat them. All legumes are hefty to digest and some more so than others -- cooking them after sprouting gives you double insurance that you'll get their health benefits without an upset tummy.

Kidney beans are particularly tricky according to some sources, so give those a miss unless you've done your own research and you're confident you know what you're doing. 

Other than the legume family, if you can sprout it you can probably eat it! Have fun experimenting, compost your failures learning experiences, and enjoy your successes

Grow edible things in containers

(Or your could grow drinkable things in containers -- see the section below for ideas on that.)

The great advantage of growing food plants in containers is that, well, they're contained. So they're more manageable than even a small garden plot. Small and manageable is good, because we need strategies we can maintain.

If you're doing this for the first time and you can afford to buy seedlings and potting mix, do.

Or you can get off to a slower but much less expensive start by starting your own seeds and making your own compost and potting mix, which is beyond the scope of this post but isn't as hard as it might sound. You can also get creative with finding free containers, such as unwanted polystyrene boxes, instead of buying pots.

Whichever way you go about it, start small and then build slowly, so you don't get overwhelmed. 

Greens and herbs of many kinds are super easy to grow in pots, and so long as you feed them, keep them moist, and can put them where they receive enough sunlight, the more you harvest the better they grow.

Learning about ways to feed your potted plants can be a whole other adventure, just as composting can -- there's so much to learn and explore.

But for now, just start. If its really daunting, limit yourself to starting with ONE pot. The first time you snip some chives to add to a bowl of soup -- even if the chives came already potted from Bunnings and the soup from a can -- you'll have started growing your own food. Anything's possible from there. 

Grow low-maintenance perennial herbs and make chilled teas

Growing something you can drink counts too.

Do you buy soft drinks, carbonated water, cordials, or fruit juices? Consider replacing them with teas made from things that grow in containers (see above) or in your garden. (Actually, its only called "tea" if it includes leaves from the tea plant Camellia sinensis; otherwise its proper name in herbal lore is a "tisane." But we'll stick with "tea" to keep things simple.)

Any herb you collect fresh from your containers or your garden to make tea with will be way healthier for you than herbs grown in mono-cultures, packaged, and transported. And don't even get me started on the sugar content and other non-food ingredients in bottled beverages. And, on top of all that, there's the cost savings.

Chilled herbal tea examples

If you live in a more temperate region with proper winters, here's a list of 18 herbs for you.

Let's start with ginger tea. (I wrote a detailed post about growing ginger here.)

Grate fresh ginger rhizome into a heat proof jug or jar (scrub it clean first, but no need to peel) and pour boiling water on it. Let it steep for as long as you like. Overnight is fine (it will be stronger, so you can dilute it more and it will go further) and ten minutes is fine too.

Add honey (its easier to dissolve if you add it when the tea is still a bit warm, but I don't add while its hot because I use live, raw honey, and I don't want to destroy its goodness with heat).

Then chill, dilute to preference (I put a bit in the bottom of a cup and add water; my husband drinks it straight), and enjoy as a refreshing, healthy, thirst quenching drink. 

Another plant you can use to make a refreshing chilled tea is Mexican tarragon, which I wrote about here.

Another is lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus), a low-maintenance tropical perennial which also does ok in a large container if you need to bring it in to protect from frost. It has a slew of health benefits you might not have known about (I didn't).

Yet another is hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) -- yes, hibiscus flowers that we grew up thinking were just for decoration can be made into a healthy tea.

There are many more, but that should get you started. Now you can skip the bottled beverages section next time you're down that aisle.

Next, another kind of drink. 

Make kombucha 

Kombucha is regular sweet black tea that has been converted to a fermented beverage . It's cheap to make and is a delicious and healthy replacement for sweetened drinks.

What transforms the sweetened tea into a sugar-free probiotic (and puts this in the "homegrown" category) is something that grows on top of the tea, called a Scoby. Scoby stands for "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts." Fear not - they're all friendly varieties that build healthy gut flora in humans.

It takes a bit more to learn kombucha making than it does for herbal tea, so rather than try and condense it here I'll share a basic resource to get you started.

By drinking kombucha regularly (especially if you also eat un-pasturised sauerkraut and/or un-pasturized yogurt/kefir) you can scratch probiotic powders and pills off your shopping list too.

Grow tough, easy fruit/vegetable climbers in narrow spaces

This is really an extension on the container growing section above, except that now instead of talking "balcony or porch," we're talking about narrow places where there's not much space but what there is goes all the way up.

Plants like cherry tomatoes, regular climbing tomatoes, peppers and capsicums, egg plants, pepinos, cucumbers, peas and green beans, and probably more that aren't coming to mind, can all be grown in containers and trained up trellises to make use of vertical spaces.

Other, more rambling vines that we think of as space hogs can be used cleverly, too, for example by allowing them to grow up a trellis and then over a pergola or car port. Chokos, pumpkins, and passion fruit come to mind.

Sweet potato vines can be grown in a large pot to give space for tubers, or a smaller one if you plan to just eat the vine tips as a nutritious green vegetable. 

Chokos are less nutritious, but so easy once you get them going. I wrote about 7 Ways to Use the Humble Choko Vine, here.

Even pumpkins can grow on trellises. I always fear that the vine won't hold that heavy fruit up in the air, but it does. And pumpkins can also be harvested before they're large, and be cooked and eaten like you would a zucchini. In my experience small unripe pumpkins are interchange-able with zucchini in the kitchen, and a LOT easier to grow.

Grow mushrooms

Full disclosure: mushrooms in my experience haven't been the easiest things to grow. I can't (yet) count them among my successes. But so far I've only made a few attempts, and I'm not giving up because mushrooms are SUPER nutritious and many types are also safely medicinal.

I believe that food should be the first place we turn when we need medicine. And I'm convinced that food from our own immediate environment is a significant key to building our health and resilience, so we can reduce our reliance on pharmacies as well as supermarkets. Mushrooms are such super-foods that no matter how many times I fail at growing them in abundance, I intend to persist till I crack it. (It's mainly a case of moving it up the list of priorities...)

Anyway, if you're keen, consider starting with a kit the first few times to dip your toes in. There are lots of mushroom growing kits out there; search online for "mushroom growing kits" in your area. 

And while you're waiting for your kit to sprout, you might like to check out these online courses, the first one free and the other so reasonably priced that its almost a no-brainer.

Free Mini-Course: Get started with your Mushroom Growing Journey

Grow a Mushroom Garden at Home: an Online Course

Or search for another mushroom growing resources that tickle your fancy - they're springing up everywhere (pardon the pun).

Grow edible insects in a tub on a bench

The insects in the picture are silkworms, which are easy to raise on mulberry leaves at home. Many other types of insects can also be raised at home -- as food for you, your chickens, or your fish.

Around 2 billion people, world wide, eat insects.

Yes, we picky folks would need to get past the ick-factor.

And no, insects aren't pettable.

But if you have serious space constraints and you can get past those two hurdles, you could produce your own ethical, high-quality, super-local, balanced and complete protein at a fraction of the cost of any other comparable protein source, on a bench in a corner.

No, I haven't tried this personally yet. (At least, not for human food. We've had a few goes at growing black soldier fly larvae for chicken food and fish food, but we're still very much in the learning stages.)

But if I had no space to raise other kinds of livestock and I couldn't afford to buy ethically raised meat, I wouldn't hesitate to put "learn how to farm insects for food" at the top of my list of priorities.

I don't believe that fake meat from a lab is the answer to any of our meat-related challenges. Nature placed insects near the base of all food chains with the same exquisite wisdom she applied to the rest of her Creation. I would much rather eat insects as designed by Nature than meat designed in a lab.

So. If that tickles your fancy, here are some resources to explore:

Insects are delicious and nutritious

Farming Edible Insects - hello zero footprint protein

12 Garden Insects You Can Eat

And if you're not keen right now, that's ok. File it away at the back of your mind for if you ever do need or want to explore it.

TAKE ACTION

Ok. That was lots of ideas. But ideas are utterly useless without action.

So don't close this tab until you've chosen one thing to take action on. The very first thing that pops into your mind as you mentally scan back through this list -- that's the one.

If you’re new to growing your own food:

• Choose an option and take a first step to get started. You could note in your notebook (from the first post in this series) what you need to do next to keep moving, but do that after you've taken action. 
• If you have to look something up, limit your research so you don't fall down the rabbit hole and never make it out! Just look up the basics so you can get started.
• Consider what basic supplies you’ll need and add them to your shopping list if you can't find them in your house.
  

If you’re not new to growing your own food:

• Chose one thing you’re growing but not making very good use of. Ask yourself, what would I need to do differently to bring this food from where-ever it grows, into my kitchen more regularly?
• Or, What one thing is there that I'm not growing yet but would like to?
• Or, What one thing I'm already growing would I like to grow more of, so I could use it more often?
• The best way to get better at growing your own food is to make it as easy and simple as possible to eat something--anything--directly from your garden on a daily basis.  “One Garden Meal Per Day” expands on that idea.
• The eBook  "One Small Serve" describes a selection of low-maintenance, nutritious perennial plants and ways to build a "one serve at a time" food growing habit that's small and simple enough to maintain -- including for someone who knows that gardening will never be the center-piece of their life.
  

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This post is about how our social routines and our physical environments shape our grocery shopping habits and nudge us in our buying decisions. Once you see these influences at work in your life, you'll be able to respond to them in more deliberate ways rather than just being prompted by them without realizing it.

This is Strategy #5 in a series of strategies for reducing our reliance on the globalized industrial food system. If you haven't read the previous two posts in this series please do that first, then come back to this one. The previous posts are:

1. "3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better"
2. "Strategy #4: to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket"

Who is in charge of your grocery shopping habits?

We think we're running our lives with rational thinking, logic, and will power. But studies show that in actual fact our environment has much more influence on our behavior than we realize. (I wrote about how our environment can distract us from our goals or guide us toward them, here.)

We'll start this post with some examples of how our physical and social environments shape our habits. Then we'll look at how the environment inside the supermarket is designed to prompt us to buy more, and I'll share a specific example of how a family routine was prompting me to go shopping more often than I needed to.

Finally, I'll give you some suggestions for how you can make use of all of this and become more aware and deliberate about your shopping choices.

How our environments shape us

For a very obvious example of how our social environment can support or hinder us in making changes to our behavior, think about a habit like smoking. If you were a smoker who wanted to stop, it would be essential to put yourself in environments where no-one else smokes. Hanging around with smokers would make it extremely difficult to break the habit and sustain the change for the long term. 

Our physical environment shapes us too, literally as well as figuratively. For example if you took all the raised seating out of your living area and replaced it with a mat and cushions on the floor, you'd gradually adjust to sitting on the floor with associated changes in posture, flexibility, and mobility over time.

James Clear, author on habits and behavior change, calls this “choice architecture,” and says it’s “the number one driver of better habits.” (He should know; he wrote a New York Times best seller on the topic of how to change our behavior.)

Marketers know all about how our environments influence our behaviors, and they make full use of it. In the next section, I'll show you how the environment inside a supermarket is specifically designed to prompt you to buy more than you had planned to when you walked in there.

How "a few things" becomes a trolley-load

Everything about the way supermarkets are laid out and the ways the shelves are packed is designed to prompt you to buy: 

• the size of the shopping trolley (research shows that you buy more if your trolley looks empty)
• delicious bakery smells wafting over you as enter, to whet your appetite for all the foods you're about to be choosing
  
• fresh fruit and veg near the entrance to give an impression of healthful freshness that lingers for the rest of your visit and to give you the feeling that you've already selected healthy stuff, so further along it's ok to indulge in a few extra "treats"
  
• placement of specific items at eye height for you and your kids 
• the placement of items on hooks that protrude out a little from the shelves and are a different, but related, category to the other items in that aisle 
• stacks of snack foods at the ends of the aisles - high traffic areas that you can't avoid passing by
• and of course, at the check out, the magazines for you to help yourself to as you wait in line to pay, and the sugar snacks for you to pick up since you're now hungry and light headed from all the stimuli you've just been subjected to

If I were a supermarket manager, perhaps I'd make similar decisions. I hope I wouldn't, but then I'd probably go broke or get sacked. I'm glad I'm not a supermarket manager. 

***

The next section is an example of how our weekly family routine was putting me in close proximity to the supermarket which was prompting me to go shopping twice as often as I needed to, and what I did about it. 

How a good book is helping me take care of my grocery shopping habits

This example showed up in my Supermarket Notebook a while ago. (I introduced the idea of keeping a Supermarket Notebook in Strategy #1.)

First, some context: we live in a rural area and we’re home educators. Our daughter does dance lessons every Tuesday afternoon during school term, which is a reason for a weekly town trip. During school holidays, there’s no dance class so there's no regular weekly requirement to go to town.

Now, to the point of the story: a while ago, I realized that during school holidays we only go shopping about once every two to three weeks. But, during school term we seem to need to go shopping once a week. On dance class day. Now isn't that interesting?

Being in town on dance class day, in close proximity to the supermarket, was prompting me to “just go in and get a few things.” And then before you know it, "a few things" turns into a trolley-load. Which, as we discussed in the previous section, isn't by coincidence.

Now, I go shopping every second week, at the most, all year round. But how did I break the habit of weekly shopping during school term?

Every second week when I drive my daughter to dance class, I take a good book. I park outside dance, let my daughter out, then lean the seat back and take out my book. (Ahhhhh... I LOVE a good book. And as I said in this post, reading is a great way to immerse yourself in something that makes you feel good.)

So there I stay, reading my book rather than marinating in marketing messages, until it's time to drive home. I save on fuel and grocery costs and I get to relax for an hour and a half that I would otherwise have spent running around shopping. 

Necessity is the mother of invention

This strategy helps me re-affirm to myself and my family that we don't need the grocery store every week. Our efforts at growing some of our own food, making our own bathroom and cleaning products, and generally being as frugal as we can, are all paying off.

But what if it doesn't work? What if you get near the end of the "non-shopping week" and realize you forgot to stock up enough on this or that, and now it isn't going to last until the next shopping trip?

Necessity is the mother of invention. By putting yourself in this predicament you have actually set up your environment--specifically that empty spot on the bathroom or pantry shelf or in the fridge--to prompt you to be more resourceful than you otherwise would have to be.

The consumer economy wants you to be reliant on shopping frequently. But you don't have to be. You can train yourself, gradually, to be less and less reliant on the quick and easy fixes that are dangled in front of us like peanuts for monkeys.

Take action

Understanding why supermarkets are set up the way they are enables us to avoid falling for the trickery quite so easily. And seeing how our behaviors are linked together in our routines enables us to tweak our routines to support the kinds of behavior change we want in our lives. 

Here are some suggestions for ways to use your Supermarket Notebook (from the first post in this series) to figure out how you're currently being influenced and decide what you want to change about that. 

1. Think about what prompts you to go grocery shopping as often as you do. Are there things in your physical environment, your family routines or your social routines that make it easy or logical for you to go on certain days? Do you really need to go that often? Could you consolidate your trips so that you go less often, shop more efficiently, and build your "resourcefulness muscles" between grocery shopping trips?
   
2.  Think about how your buying decisions are being influenced once you get into the supermarket. Go through the list above, of ways that the supermarket environment is set up to influence your choices. Which ones have you been falling for? Remember, they're subtle. They're designed to work without you being aware of them. What can you do to make yourself impervious to them? (There are tips in Strategy #3 and Strategy #4 that might help.)
3. Scribble the answers to all these questions on the Notes Pages in your Supermarket Notebook. You haven't tried to change anything yet. Just begin by getting it all out on those pages so you can see what's really going on. Gradually (give it time) you'll see ways you might be able to make changes. Write those ideas down as they come to you. 
4. Try one idea at a time (remember Strategy #2, take it in small steps) and write down the outcomes so you'll have a record of what you've tried, what helped you spend less or shop smarter, what didn't, and what you learned in the process. 

An important tip is that useful, actionable answers may not come right away to the questions you ask in your notebook. Be patient. Ask again next week, and the week after, until gradually the answers and insights start to flow. Give yourself time to find ways to make positive changes to your routines and habits that will really stick. 

References and resources

Here are two short videos, (each a little over 2 minutes) and a short read (less than 2 minutes) about how supermarkets are designed, from a consumer advocacy website called FoolProofMe.org, who suggest that we "make healthy skepticism a habit" in this commercialized world.

Are You Being Super-Marketed at the Grocery Store? - video

The Untold Truth About Grocery Stores! - video

The Low-down on Super-Marketing - short post

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Arrowroot (Canna edulis)

This is Queensland arrowroot, photographed in mid August about a week into our Southern Hemisphere spring. You can see tired, yellowing foliage that's been hanging on all winter, old dead stumps where Alain has been cutting fodder for the chickens, old tubers for the pigs, and in the middle foreground, a new shoot just about to begin to unfurl its first green leaf. 

This clump needs to be lifted out, divided up and put to use as I described here.

The next pic, below, is a new row of arrowroot that Alain planted a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote this post.  

Chickweed (Stellaria media)

Chickweed is a salad staple in our garden whenever and where-ever it can find a cool, moist, protected spot. I don't know how to grow it on purpose; it's a generous volunteer whose presence reminds me that abundance is all around us, if we're looking. 

This time of year, when the weather is cool and has been consistently damp, chickweed is everywhere. In the images below, it's growing around the bases of our blue barrels and coming up in between the things in the barrels. As I see it beginning to volunteer, I often clear a space for it. It's a prolific seeder; once you have it, you have it forever

Chickweed needs regular harvesting to keep it from becoming stalky. Cut it with scissors, take it inside, and chop it into a salad or put it in a bag in the fridge where it will keep well for many days.

You can read more about chickweed here. 

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale)

I love dandelions. Most of us know them for their persistence in lawns and roadsides, their sunny yellow flowers  (from which you can make wine), and their fascinating seed heads.

Your grandparents know that dandelions are deeply nutritious, both the roots and the leaves. Eat the leaves and flowers in the spring, and the roots in the autumn.

Dandelion leaves have an amazing array of nutritional benefits. Even their bitter taste is beneficial, which is an idea that takes some chewing on in our sugar-addicted culture.  

You can make, very simply at home, a medicinal tincture from dandelion roots (sorry 'bout the ads in this video).

Did you know that the word "officinale" in the Latin name for dandelion refers to its "official" use as a simple, safe, and effective medicine for a wide array of ailments?

Here is a great read on wild greens; scroll down to find dandelion near the bottom. Finally, I mention dandelions in the section on wild plants in this post.

Pepinos (Solanum muricatum)

Pepinos are related to tomatoes and potatoes, so they're similar, only tougher and don't seem to get as many pests or diseases. They can sprawl on the ground or be supported by a low trellis or cage. Super easy to propagate from cuttings and tolerant of neglect, although they will fruit much better with plenty moisture and mulch/compost top ups. Read more, and see pics of ripe fruit, here.

Taro and other water plants

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is an important staple food that grows in moist to wet conditions throughout the humid tropics. You eat the large corm at the base of the biggest plant, the mother plant, leaving the surrounding small plants in the ground to grow big in their turn. You can also replant the top of the mother plant. Taro is starchy and filling and can be eaten in many ways... search online for recipes and you'll find they're endless. 

In the pic above, you see taro planted in a wet area where our rainwater tank has a persistent leak. This was only planted toward the end of last summer, so it hasn't had much hot sunny weather yet to help it get going. 

And this (above) is taro planted in a container submerged in water. Its not looking very happy in this spot because its been cold. I'm hoping/expecting it to perk up as the weather warms up. 

You can learn more about taro here. 

Also in the pic above, floating on the surface of the water you can see azolla, which we grow as fodder for our chickens. Learn more about azolla here.

Finally, to both sides of the taro tub you can also see kangkong, or water spinach (also looking very sad and wintery after the unusually cold winter we've just had, but it will soon perk up). That's kangkong runners you see trailing out across the water, with leaves smaller than the taro but much larger than the azolla.

Kangkong is related to sweet potato and looks similar. You can learn more about kangkong here, and this article has a short video about growing  it in water.  

Another post I've written about water-loving food plants is "7 Steps to a Frog Pond That Also Grows Food."

Taro safety note: There are many, many plants with similar "elephant ear" shaped leaves to taro. Some are edible and some are poisonous. There is a great deal of confusion on the internet about their names, and I would love to learn more, especially about how to identify them effectively as they all look similar to the untrained eye.

Please, when you grow plants that look anything like these for eating, do what we did and get your propagation material from someone who has been eating it themselves, and whom you trust to be providing you with the correct plant.

Also, all parts of the taro plant must be cooked to make them safe to eat. 

(There is one exception, with the common name of celery stem taro or tahitian spinach, which we have in our garden. We put the stem of this one in salads, uncooked, and have had no trouble with it. But if you try this, again: get your planting material from someone who is already eating it raw; don't find out the hard way that it was the wrong variety!)

Modular veggies

I'm finishing this post with a couple of pics from our "modular veggie garden," which has lots of things in it but especially any European veggies we grow, because its set up to allow for netting to protect from insects.  You can learn more about our modular veggie project, here.

The reason I call them "modular veggies" is because I love the idea of taking care of one or a few barrels at a time, in small chunks of effort, rather than having to maintain a large annual garden area. We tried that in this earlier, larger veggie growing project, and found that we couldn't sustain the care it needed. 

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment below

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