As we pull in, the sun glints off the only other car in the gravel parking lot. It is early but the day is already warm and the sky is a brilliant blue. It takes a couple of minutes to disengage: unbuckle carseats; gather ourselves; make sure keys are in hand, not ignition, before shoving the door shut with my hip.

We make our way through the opening in the hedge and up a path to a little market stand. The cedar shake roof is long and low and one wall is open to the fresh air revealing a wide counter and a cooler with vats of ice cream: raspberry cheesecake, bubblegum, maple walnut, moose tracks. There is no one behind the counter but after a minute, a woman calls out from the side of the building. We find her sitting at a picnic table playing cards with a young girl. She tells us that the best picking is to the right, anywhere we like.

We clatter off, the four of us and our odd assortment of buckets. Noa, our thirteen month old daughter is not walking yet but we brought along her push toy: a bright yellow, orange and purple wagon with big wheels, a handle and a storage box under the seat. She toddles after us determinedly pushing the wagon over the gravel, falling every few steps but always quick to rise and push on. She has not yet figured out how to turn the wagon; her tactic whenever she encounters an obstacle is to look back at us with a grin and wait for help, one hand still resting on the handle. However, today she will need no such assistance. We have come to a pre-walking, wagon-pusher’s paradise: a blueberry farm. Our four year old son Rain runs ahead to choose our row. After a moment’s wait while we turn the wagon into the wide alley between waist high blueberry bushes, Noa is greeted with the longest unobstructed straight stretch she has ever seen. We set her free.

Noa is instantly distracted from wagon pushing paradise when she notices the marble sized berries on the bushes. They are a deep dusky midnight blue and covered with a light powdery film. I am not sure that Noa has ever had blueberries and she has certainly never seen a blueberry bush. Call it human instinct; she drops to her knees, crawls to the nearest bush and begins to fill her mouth with berries with both hands.

In fact, this is pretty much the reaction of all of us. We are all diverted from our intentions by the sweet, slightly sour fruit. I love the tanginess of the berries that still have a red blush to them. It takes a few minutes before we are able to get down to work, overwhelmed as we are by the plenitude on each bush, blueberries hanging in clumps like grapes.

Eventually, we settle in. The rows are wide with freshly mown grass between. It is the perfect work space for a mom of young kids. Fully fenced to keep out the deer, bushes dense enough that it isn’t easy to get into another row, vast enough to provide a sense of freedom for roaming as far as they like and provided they stay in my row, I can always see them. Rain wanders off, imagination and monologue running a mile a minute as usual. He has a yogurt container laced on to his belt loop but he picks directly into his mouth.

The only rule: Fill your bucket or fill your mouth but once the fruit is in my bucket, hands off. The small competitive spark in me flares up as I make it my goal to fill my large pail before we leave.

Aaron and I begin working on opposite sides of the same bush so we are facing each other. Noa stays close for the most part, filling her belly or pushing her wagon beside us. She occasionally crawls over to the fence to check out the horse on the other side, squealing “Puppy! Puppy!” Rain spends some time picking into the storage box in the wagon but between him and his sister, the berries don’t last long in there. As Aaron and I start to pick, the lovely plump thud of the berries falling into my pail makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. When the sound disappears, I am spurred on by the realisation that it means the bottom is covered and I focus in. My attention narrows and I am now looking at the berry farm with my mind’s macro lens. Grass, leaves, berries, stalks, spider web, dew.

I don’t have to worry about my children. I can hear them, see them out of the corner of my eye. They both check in periodically or I raise my head to double-check. They are safe. Rain’s yogurt container is empty every time I ask how much he has picked.

Aaron is busy picking. I can’t see his face; only a hand or a shoulder sometimes, after a rustle of the plant. We fall into conversation and spend a glorious hour chatting uninterrupted (without having to leave our babies with a sitter!). We discuss parenting, we strategize, we gossip, we dream, we make idle chit chat. Hands busy, words flow easily. Sharing pleasurable work, we connect in a way we haven’t in a long time.

The weather is fine. The sun is bright but the day is not yet hot. It feels good to be up and out of the house so early. We are happy to have the field mostly to ourselves. We already feel rewarded by the act of harvesting our own food. Touching it. Picking it. Knowing where it came from. Everything about this day feels so right, so wholesome. Doing the work to pick our own food, together as a family, everyone involved and present, even the very youngest. I imagine a time when this is what it might have meant to go to work: not working 8-10 hours a day separated from our families to be able to buy food but working together to grow food.

Rain begins to whine that he is ready to leave and I am reminded that I am being idealistic. We get him settled with his sister for a picnic; they share a bottle of water and some rice crackers. They keep each other occupied for another precious fifteen minutes, long enough for me to fill my bucket.

We pour our buckets into a big gallon pail and our bounty fills it almost to the top. I gather the children and Aaron carries the pail to the farm stand to be weighed. We have brought in ten pounds of blueberries in an hour, a leisurely sunny hour in the company of our family. We get ice cream cones for the ride home. Rain is deliriously happy. Noa falls asleep in her carseat.

The berries have not been sprayed: no need to wash. We eat all ten pounds that week—on cereal, in cobbler, pie, frozen, fresh, by the handful—and we head back the next weekend for more.

I know that one idyllic morning is not the reality of growing all of your own food or of sustaining your family in the current economy but I feel happier than I have in weeks for having reconnected in this way with the outdoors, my family, our food and the concept of working together. The paid work I have known in offices, retail stores, grocery stores did not connect me to the bare essentials of what we need for survival—good food, fresh air and community—in the way that this Sunday morning at a u-pick blueberry farm did.

Now that the leaves are starting to fall, we have to ration the few bags of blueberries we have left in the freezer. Rain is back at preschool. Noa is walking on her own without the wagon. We are planning for the winter, pulling sweaters and mittens out of storage and hoping that our first attempt at growing a winter garden will be fruitful. Aaron has started baking our own bread. They are little things but it feels good to keep that blueberry picking feeling year round. When we look back over the summer, Aaron and I agree that the few hours we spent at the u-pick were some of the best of the season.

How do you connect with the food you eat and what are you storing away for the winter now?

• Number of pounds of pickling cukes picked by Aaron and Rain while I jiggled and bounced Silas in the Ergo: 29
• Number of pounds of pickling cukes bought from local farm stand: 10
• Number of quart jars of homemade dill pickles made at 11pm after children were sleeping: 31

• Number of times per night that Silas wakes to nurse: 8-12
• Number of cute noises Silas makes per hour: 568*
• Number of annoying noises Silas makes per hour: 6
• Number of decibels of annoying noises Silas makes: 100*
• Number of decibels of planes flying over our new house near the Air Force base: 130*
• Number of decibels of Rain’s constant singing & clapping: 75
• Number of pints of strawberry jam canned while children watch movies: 13
• Number of pounds of blueberries picked by 3 adults, 6 children & 1 sleeping baby: 16.5
• Number of pounds of blueberries remaining after 2 weeks of pies, smoothies, snacking: 0
• Number of coats of orange, yellow, red & purple paint (respectively) it took to paint our 1976 Dodge camper while the children slept and watched movies: 5, 2, 4, 3

• Number of days on annual camping trip to Klein Lake (Sunshine Coast): 5
• Number of sunny days on annual camping trip to Klein Lake (Sunshine Coast): 1.5
• Number of teeth Silas has now: 6

* These numbers may or may not be slightly exaggerated.

There you have it folks. That’s the way the final days of our summer are shaking down, in numbers. How did your summer add up?

Joel’s family raises pasture-fed beef, pork and poultry on their once totally depleted, almost soil-less farm which they completely revitalized without sowing any seed. Refining methods introduced by his father, Joel rotates his herds through his land using portable electric fences to allow the land to replenish itself naturally, without fertilizers. The animals eat grass and roam in the open air. This is the exact opposite of the feedlots and industrial food system.

Salatin argues for the local food movement, for transparency in the food production system, for a re-integration of our rural and urban lifestyles where we respect our food producers and include them in the communities where we live and work. He urged us not to expect change overnight but to do what we can every day to change our food system. Ideas included turning the millions of acres of lawns in North America to edible food gardens, reinstating the kitchen as the heart of our homes where we make our food from scratch from real ingredients (not unpronounceable ingredients that come in packages), buying from local farms that allow us to tour the premises and of course, gardening with our children.

With sparkling eyes and a big grin, he is a compelling, even mischievous speaker, as he said last night, “I definitely recommend that you break a lot of laws.” This was in response to the question at the end of the night from a man who stated that everything he wants to do is illegal so what laws should he break first. Of course, Joel is referring to the over-regulation of ordinary citizens who want to make their own choices about the food they eat: whether it’s to buy eggs from the neighbour, have backyard chickens or drink unpasteurized milk.

I was already sold on his message, but I was further enamored when with a roll of his eyes he stated that our disconnect with food began back in the day when people decided that breastfeeding wasn’t good enough for our babies. He went on to tout the virtues of La Leche League, Lamaze and having dads in the delivery room as examples of ways the pendulum is starting to swing back towards an acceptance of the sanctity of life, even the sanctity of life of the least among us (the animals and plants we eat).

Maybe it’s because I’m a hormonal pregnant woman but when he ended his speech by saying, “May your children call you blessed for they have inherited a better earth than we had,” I had just a little tear in my eye.

Similarly, I’ve been wanting to try making our own butter. I remember fondly making butter as a kid by shaking it in a jar for, um, forever and I remember how delicious it was. We’ve been trying to make more and more food ourselves and I thought this would be a fun one to add.

So last Tuesday (the only day the kids and I are home together the whole day without outside commitments like work, preschool or dance class), we decided to tackle homemade bread and butter. This time we used the Basic White Bread recipe from The Joy of Cooking.

As predicted by our Waldorf friends, Rain loved kneading the bread. It was so fun that we forgot to take a picture. But here he is with the dough ready for the first rising:

While that was rising, we started on the butter. You have to warm the cream to room temperature and meanwhile, stick the bowl you will be using in the fridge to cool it. Then you pour the cream into the bowl and whip it with your hand mixer.

Notice the cloth on the counter. I did an awful lot of counter wiping as the cream sprayed everywhere, including all over the front of my sweater which later that evening, smelled like sour milk. I recommend an apron.

The first stage is called the frothy stage:

The next stage is meant to be the whipped cream stage, where it should get thick and start forming peaks. After this stage, it should get even thicker and start crumbling. The cream we were using came from a local farm and was unpasteurized. As a result, I do not know it’s exact fat content. It certainly didn’t seem as thick as a store bought whipping cream but resembled a cereal cream or half and half. We I whipped for a long time – Rain got bored and left – but it just wasn’t thickening into whipped cream as it should have. I whipped longer and longer until I noticed that there appeared to be curds floating in the foam. On closer examination, I discovered the curds were yellow.

The longer I whipped, the more of these curds appeared so I just went with it. Then I strained off the buttermilk.

I didn’t get nearly as much butter as I would have if I had used whipping cream. According to the internets, 1 quart of cream should have delivered up 1 Lb of butter. I used a quart of cream and got about 1.25 cups of butter.

The next stage is to wash the butter. If any of the buttermilk remains in the butter, it will go bad quite quickly. To do this, you put the butter in your blender with some cold water. You blend it and then pour off the water. You repeat this process as many times as it takes for the water to be clear when you pour it off.

Once you have cleaned the butter, the last thing to do is to squish it all together to form a solid chunk. I used a combination of a rubber spatula and my hands to do that part. It was a bit of a strange process because there was some water drops still in the butter and of course, water and oil don’t mix but the butter was soft so it was hard to squeeze the water out of it. I did manage in the end though.

By now, our bread had risen through both of its risings:

It was time to form loaves. Rain made a couple of small buns and had the idea of putting sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds on his.

Here are the loaves ready to rise one last time.

For dinner that night we had fresh warm bread, home made butter and home made carrot soup.

It was amazing. But it also took most of our day. I’m not sure if we’ll do this on a regular basis or not. But in the mean time, yum!!!

How do you try to incorporate self-sufficiency into your home with kids? Have you ever tried making butter? Do you have other things you make from scratch rather than buying prepackaged from the store? Do your kids like to help?

I’m usually the one who takes Rain to the library but one week I sent Aaron. He came back with this treasure of a book. On Meadowview Street is the story of a girl who moves to a house in the suburbs and decides with her parents to sell the lawn mower, let the grass grow long and turn their yard into a nature preserve. They plant some trees and build some ponds. One of the latter pages in the book also has lovely drawings of the type of natural plants and creatures she might find in her yard after the makeover. And her idea starts to spread down the street.

I love it that Caroline gets her parents on board. Too often, the reality in this story is that the parents would put an end to her nature preserve. This is a story about respecting the earth and about going outside the norm, not being afraid to be different. It’s a story about how one person following her heart can start a trend.

I am not a fan of lawns, especially those square lawns in subdivisions and in front of patio homes where all the houses look the same, and the only embellishment to the yard are a few low maintenance shrubs and some tiny poorly pruned city trees. I love this book for inspiring children to think about the changes that could be made to return their lawns to a natural state. I love this book for daring to say that an un-mown lawn in its natural state is more beautiful than a manicured city lot. I love it for suggesting that living in the city doesn’t have to mean you can’t commune with nature. Imagine if the book went a step further and suggested only planting local native species?

I’m even dreaming about a second book where the front yard is turned into an edible garden, where Caroline grows lettuce, tomatoes, beans, peas, herbs. Imagine if everyone really did this?

There is an organization that is trying to encourage people to do just that. You can check out the book Food Not Lawns and also find them on the internet. There may even be a chapter near you. These are local grass-roots organizers who encourage people in their communities to convert their yards into gardens and grow their own food. They organize seed exchanges and put on workshops for people who want to learn how to garden but don’t know how to start.

Until then, you can read this book with your children and inspire them to think differently about what they can do about their own environment and about the food they eat.

Book Description:
Caroline lives on Meadowview Street. But where’s the meadow? Where’s the view? There’s nothing growing in her front yard except grass. Then she spots a flower and a butterfly and a bird and Caroline realizes that with her help, maybe Meadowview Street can have a meadow after all.

On Meadowview Street
Henry Cole
Harper Collins

Homemade Mayo

2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp dry mustard

Clean down sides with spatula. Add:

2 Tbsp lemon juice

Start blender, remove cover and very slowly, pour in:

1/2 cup salad oil
2 Tbsp vinegar

Slowly, with blender still running, add:

1 cup salad oil

3 or more good sized beefsteak-style tomatoes (fleshy, not too juicy), diced
1/4 small red onion, minced
1 clove garlic
juice from 1 lime
splash of olive oil
splash of red wine vinegar
1/2 clump of cilantro
salt to taste

You can give this a brief whizz in the blender if you like your chunks a little smaller or eat as is.

1 cup plain yogurt
1/2 cucumber, shredded on a cheese grater
1-2 tsp cumin
cilantro to taste
1/2 tsp salt

Stir everything together and serve with your favourite curry.

Aaron invented this dish out of whatever we had in the cupboard a few years ago, one of those days when we really needed groceries. I’ve refined it over the years and it is so yummy.

beef or lamb cubed
1 can whole tomatoes
1 onion, diced
fresh cilantro
turmeric
cumin
1/4 tsp – 1/2 tsp curry

If I’m using a nice cut of beef, I throw everything (except the onion) together in a container and marinate for 1/2 hour before cooking. Using hands or scissors, mush up the tomatoes into bite size pieces. If I use stew beef, I simmer it in 4 cups of water for an hour prior to adding everything else and then I omit the marinating phase.

Cook onion in a tsp of oil until translucent. Add all other ingredients and simmer for 20 minutes. I like it mild, especially with kids at the table, so I don’t put much curry. I like the curry flavour without the burn and this way Rain will eat it. You can always up the curry-quotient if you like spicey.

Serve with basmati rice and raita.

6 cups chicken stock
1 chicken breast, shredded
1/2 nameless orange squash (leftover in fridge), cubed
5 small new red potatoes, skins on, cubed
1 small onion, diced
1/2 cup green beans, chopped
dash salt & pepper
1/2 tsp poultry seasoning
1 star anise

Yum. yum.