Got up today and weighed ourselves. We were reminded of the film Supersize Me (http://www.supersizeme.com/) where the protagonist eats junk food for a month. This is sort of the opposite program but folks might think we'd loose weight with all this health food. I am pretty sure it is nearly impossible to eat locally AND eat junk food.

My Weight

Looks to me like 154 lbs. I am 5 ft, 8.5 inches tall. That gives me a Body Mass Index of 23.4, which is towards the upper end of the normal range. I am a mesomorph so that's okay. My wife is 5 ft 5 inches tall and weighed 114 lbs, giving her a BMI of 19, on the low end of normal. I gotta help her keep that weight on!

Breakfast was really simple today.

Oct 4 Breakfast

We had watermelon from Covelo, Bruce's Bread from a Redwood Valley bakery (obviously still cheating on the local flours) with butter from Petaluma, homemade plum butter and Templeton's Honey from Willits. Downed it all with homemade apple-pear juice.

I have been feeling guilty about the non-local flour so Ron came over with his electric mill and we made 4 quarts of flour. One pound of this grain, Mare's Widgen winter wheat grown by Ellen at Ridgewood Ranch several miles south of Willits, made 3.25 cups of flour. But it wasn't fine enough for good bread so would produce greater volume if ground properly. Those 3+ cups of flour would be good for one medium sized loaf of bread. So one pound of grain yields about a loaf of bread. I think our family goes through 2-3 loaves per week, so we'd need about 2-3 pounds of grain per week, or about 150 pounds per year. Historically around here, farmers produced about 1000 pounds of wheat per acre per year. This means about 6-7 families could have their yearly bread allowance from each acre of wheat.

I think we need grain farming again. Hope these calculations help give folks an idea of the scale needed for such a farm or set of farms to support the population in general.

Grinding Wheat from Ridgewood Ranch

With this flour, some butter and milk from Petaluma, and baking powder, I made some quick drop biscuits for lunch.

Oct 4 Lunch

They weren't great but worked out okay with the leftovers from dinner Oct. 2.

In the afternoon I harvested potatoes from the garden for dinner.

Oct 4 Potato Harvest

The yield was good. About 25 lbs from about 30 sq ft. It took about 20 minutes to dig these out with a spade fork. I chose a few that looked good for baking to go with the dinner stew.

Oct 4 Dinner

This was a really fine meal. I took the leftover meat and bones from last night and started a stew in the morning, adding barley, Frey wine, water, more onions and garlic, and rosemary for the base. Later in the day I added tomatoes and tomatillos, then about 1 hour before serving some winter squash. All these came from our own backyard. I picked the green beans in the afternoon too. The potatoes have Petaluma butter and sour cream on them. The beer we picked up at Hale's place yesterday is in my cellar, so I walked down there for a pint to go with the meal. This was my finest work so far and we have leftovers for lunch!