Practice

We try to incorporate local foods into our life regularly. It is easy to do. This experiment will stretch us to see can we get everything we need from within 100 miles. It is always fun to practice!

Tools

We like to make things from scratch. Scott is an excellent baker and it has been over 2 years since we have purchased bread from the store. This summer we finally built a wood-fired mud oven in our backyard. It is brilliant! It keeps our house cooler and makes our food yummier! We also have both manual and electric grain grinders. We are purchasing wheat from Tom Brantmeier and grinding it at home. We then sift off most of the bran, eat that for breakfast as hot cereal and bake with the rest. This piece of equipment is key to our experiment. We tried grinding popcorn the other day and Scott ended up taking apart the motor--we will be hand-grinding that from now on!

We have a food dehydrator that we will use to preserve things we pick, raspberries and tomatoes for sure.

Finally we have an electric juicer. There are many people in our neighborhood who have fruit trees and they don't use the fruit. After asking permission many have granted us total access to their crops and Evie and I started juicing apples today to get a taste of what we will drink for breakfast in August--yum!