Amy loves to cook and share food, and the farm has been a great source of wonderful, nourishing ingredients.
We eat farm fresh eggs almost every day and consume honey from our bee hives. When the momma goat was in milk, we drank raw goat milk and made cheese and cajeta. We’ve cured and eaten olives from our trees and fermented kraut from our vegetables. At a harvest party with a big group of foodie friends, we pressed cider from our apples. Jam making is part of most summers.
Eating even a small piece of food every day from land you care for strengthens your body immensely, according to Russian folklore. We do notice that something is being transmitted to us through our farm’s food. On this land, we give of ourselves as stewards with physical work and careful thought and love. Eating food from this place completes the circle of giving and grounds it in our bodies.
We’ve experienced a big upgrade in our health by following the nutritional philosophies described Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation and Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions cookbooks. These methods recognize connections between human physical, emotional, and mental health, and the symbiotic little beings that live in our intestinal tracts. We took it to another level with the help of Daverick Leggett and his Recipes for Self-Healing, and Andrew Sterman’s Welcoming Food book and Cooking Like an Herbalist teachings.
Our first “farm animals” were these self-renewing “thundering microherds.” They grew in the kraut pot, kombucha bowl, and Fil Mjolk jar.
Then we became curious about microflora and microfauna in soil health. And then, we started farming the land.