Good day friends, everyone in the #homesteading community. It's been a hectic week for me, but success is our goal. Today, I will be sharing my simple life of growing and eating what I sowed. It's often said, “A farmer must not sell his farm produce, let the stomach also taste the soil”. For me, I feel it's been the stomach that's been tasting everything, hehe.
The lifestyle of growing food and taking from them to keep the family is a cool one, it's a way of living that's worth sharing with everyone.
First, I would love to talk about the cassava plant. This is the most common food crop grown in my country because when mature and harvested, it can be processed into different products like garri, cassava flour, starch for soup, and lots more.
The peels can be used as animal feed and the stems can be sold where they are scarce(like in cities). For over ten years now, my family has never failed to plant cassava every planting season. We have farmlands in different places and we utilize them properly.
When these cassava plants mature we harvest them and make house food rather than buying from the market.
I can remember months ago, I shared how I was able to transplant many of my pepper seedlings from the nursery to our little garden.
By constant watering and weeding, the pepper seedlings have grown to standing pepper plants and have started to bring forth fruits.
Almost every food requires some amount of pepper to spice up. Pepper is classified under spices because without pepper one can still make a delicious meal, but with pepper, it would be a spiced delicious meal with some essential vitamins from the pepper. The only period we buy pepper from the market is when ours in the garden haven't ripe yet. But when they are ripe, it's from farm to table no more from markets.
The last food crop my family never jokes with is the pumpkin. We cherish planting pumpkins every planting season because my Mom knows the importance of vegetables in meals.
These pumpkin plants have served us many functions when we talk about kitchen and family feeding. We have a special farm dedicated to pumpkins only. Though the pumpkin vines are not staked, we still try our best to keep them in a suitable condition to flourish.
Stew, vegetable sauce, soups and many other meals we prepare at home need vegetables and we get as much as we need from the farm. One day, while I was working on the farm, I began to estimate how much my family would have spent on buying most of the food crops we grow from the market.
That's why my enemies now are no longer humans, but farm pests and rodents because they don't wish our farm crops good. For the vegetables, pests eat up the leaves and for the tuber crops, the rodents dig up and feed on the tubers.
Because of these my enemies, I have fastened my seat belts and try never to neglect regular farm visits.
Do you have a farm or little garden? If yes, why not get something into the soil, cucumber or pepper and watch them grow? I can't forget the joy I always have watching my plants grow from points of germination till the day they pass my throat, lolz.
Thanks for reading, enjoy your day friends.
All the images are mine
