Guest Blog on Jamie Oliver's Site

If anyone is interested, Our family was featured as guest blogist on Jamie Oliver's Food Revolurion site yesterday. Check it out

http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution/news-content/returning-to-our-roots

Whoa - you raise your own catfish and tilapia and butcher and process pigs?

way to go!
Are you guys thinking of hosting a Food Revolution Day in your area?

We do. We have a 300 gallon aquaponics system we raise the fish in. We live in the city so we buy a live pig from a farmer in KY, slauter it there, cut it into primals and bring them back home and spend several days cutting it into chop, ribs, roast, and hams. That will last us all year and saves us about $1000 to $1500 doing it our selves.

Davanna, I don't know. my wife is the one that follows Jamie and I just heard about Food Revolution Day yesterday.

gwennifer wrote:Whoa - you raise your own catfish and tilapia and butcher and process pigs?

Excellent!

Yeah well done ! a celebrity among us

Loved it!

What a great article! Thanks for sharing it with us.

I was happy to see your family featured. I love Jamie Oliver and his recipes and watch his show all the time.

Good article, it is nice seeing shown what all is possible on half an acre.
I found myself wondering why no Kinder goats?

So awesome! This is exactly where I want to be five years from now. Inspirational!

This is awesome! Whenever my hubby goes fishing we cook everything that night and it is delicious! Turan what are these goats youspeak of? I would love to have chickens and soon might!

Thanks everybody. It is exciting for us.

We would buy goats in a minute, but our nieghbors are open minded about the chickens and we are afraid goats would put them over the edge.

@cheyannarach, Fresh fish is great. Wild fresh fish are the best, but when I go fishing it is like a box of chocolates, I never know what I'm gonna get. I call talapia the tofu of the sea. The texture is great, but we have to add flavor to them.

@dougneiner, We can't stress enough that we did all of this in steps over about 5 years and with both of us working we are at our maximum. Last year we tried bees and failed. That was our "bridge too far", but especially using square foot gardening you can push alot of food out of the dirt.

@Debs, I raised rabbits when I was a kid and the smell was pretty bad in the summer. I wonder if it would make a differance putting a layer of leaves or cut grass on the pile every few days or week.

To cut down on feed cost and keep everything as organic as possible we have started raising red worms to feed the fish and Black Soldier Fly lava to feed the chickens. We feed the guts and heads to the BSF larva. Before that we buried them in the compost pile. You have to be very careful doing that, but it can be done.

It is a good idea to start off with goldfish. That is what I had in my small 55gal. system for a year. When I moved them to the big system the catfish wound up eating the smaller goldfish. So they weren't a waste. The Tilapia are fresh water, it just easier saying "sea". They do need warm water, but here ours survive the winter in my "semi heated" system and it takes them 2 years to get 1lbs of filet off of them. Further south they get larger quicker. We chose tilapia because they will eat almost anything (including the algea that I can't keep from growing in the system and lettuce that have bolted), very easy to keep alive, grow fast and are extremely easy to breed. Not meaning to I stuck two out in my 1200gal. water collection tank to eat the masquito larva and found out later, when hundreds of small fish started showing up, that they were a male and female. But other fish do great as well.

As for the bees we were mostly trying to get honey. Terrie bakes alot and honey is getting very expensive. We have tones of wild pollinators here so when we had the bees we didn't notice a bump in production. Mason, carpenter and mud bees are everywhere here.

Thanks so much for your support. We have been so busy this season we have been slow to post, but we are planting the last few things for now and hope to catch everyone up on the progress.