Friday, October 17, 2008

Self-reliance salad


Well, sadly, it wasn't really. The greens were foraged from a nearby park, but the snails were bought in a can from a store, and the potatoes were from our CSA.

But what I'm thinking is that this could be an almost wholly home-grown and foraged meal, once our small potato patch is ready, and once I get a bit more organised, protein-wise.

I'd been thinking about how Sandra said that she feels more secure now she is producing her own eggs and has a homegrown source of protein.

I totally understand that, and wish we had enough room to legally and ethically keep chickens. We don't though, and we're not planning on moving anytime soon. So what are my options for protein security? Growing mushrooms, and gathering wild snails seem like good possibilities, and I'm looking into both of these.

Sharon Astyk's latest post, a recipe challenge, galvanised me to think about all this further, and so yesterday I made this warm salad. (I love warm salads.) I'm about to go post it on her comments section.

At least one other NZer has posted some lovely food suggestions there. If you are keen too, I think there is about one more day to go.

4 comments:

Ruth said...

Hi. I knew some people who had a 1/4 acre suburban section with house etc, and they created a chook tractor - a little one for 3 chooks - for their gardens....it looked ridiculous though and I don't know if ethically ok...but ours seem to be happy and healthy - although they're in a big chook tractor. But you could let them go foraging.. I know some other people who have a little back yard and they keep chooks in a fenced off enclosure during the night and let them free range during the day and they get 2 eggs per day from their 2 and they fence off their vege garden. Depending on the size of your garden, could chooks be a possibility if you got creative about how you were going to have them?

Johanna Knox said...

Hi - yeah, you're probably right about creativity ... Maybe we could effectively create more land by building several-storey structures ... hmm!

ATM we have the grand total of 25-30 sq metres of backyard that's not already used up as vege garden, but we have a few more parts of that earmarked for veges.

If they free-ranged up to the left of us, that takes them up into a dog-walking park, and if they freerange to the right of us they might get into scraps with the neighbours chickens - lol. (The neighbours have more backyard space than us ...)

Nik said...

Hmmm, maybe you could encourage the neighbours chickens to free range your yard and lay eggs on your side of the fence! LOL

Johanna Knox said...

lol - well - when one of their chickens kept escaping last week, they did very kindly say we could keep any of its eggs if we found them. :)

A bit later I did find two eggs up in some long grass beside our section, but they were VERY old and rattly!!