Scrumptious strawberry spread and participating in the 2012 Urban Farmbook Challenge

Ok, so you are perhaps a little interested in also creating a Farm City, or you wouldn't be here. A few weeks ago I stumbled across this really rockin' blog called Sustainable Eats and the Dancing Goat Garden communal project that outlines some brilliant baby steps towards sustainability. Currently as part of their endorsement of the Urban Farm Handbook, they are having a 2012 challenge of little tasks you can do each month to feel like you are saving the world. I signed up, intending to just carry over through 2013. The August tasks, that are being expanded into September are all themed around putting up food. It is something I may be becoming infatuated with. So here is one recipe I made that I wanted to share with you.

Creating a "Farm City": A responsive book review

Recently, kind of by accident, I had the pleasure of discovering and meeting Novella Carpenter.  I was so impressed with her book Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

and can't wait to visit and revisit her new book The Essential Urban Farmer. I was impressed at her poetry and honesty about the realities of raising and butchering animals. And the whole thing combined with my reading of Green Metropolis had me wishing for a Utopia in which city dwellers can only have yards if they will relegate and utilize them for something with ecological usefulness: habitat, water purification, food sources for local organisms, or food production by themselves or their green thumb neighbors. [Update: For a good laugh, go here to see what God might think of your yard] Everyone else must live in hip urban apartments...One can wish.

Remember the chickens, in the study?

E,

This week I’m thinking about eggs and urban farm animals. Remember when I hatched chickens--in our study? Of course you do. Well, it seemed like a good idea... The local extension agency (bless them!) provides educators with incubators and eggs from one of those mega chicken conglomerates, they which shall not be named (see any resemblance to Lord Voldemort?). 

There was me with fifteen eggs and an incubator exuberantly ready to do what I had always wanted but never gotten to do. We plugged it in and dutifully added water for 21 days. Every day I anxiously checked the window. Were they turning alright? Would they have enough moisture? Would any live or would I have to break it to my children and all their friends that I was in fact a mass chicken killer? (Stop chuckling).  

The first day of cracks I sat immovably for hours. (I was equally transfixed only  at the New Orleans aquarium watching a father seahorse, belly heaving, wondering if I was about to witness birth). Birth is a crazy, slow and exhausting process. Slowly a beak; an eye; a pulse through a hole; a wing. Then, wonder of wonders, twelve little damp feathered peeping (and pooping) hatchlings.