6 years ago, our family set a goal to grow all of our own meat and produce for a year, and to learn the preservation techniques that would allow us to eat our home grown food all year long.

The goal felt impossible because we had a lot of mouths to feed (we are a blended family with 11 kids total), we homeschooled many of them, Jake had (& has) a full time job, and we had no background in farming or homesteading whatsoever.

When we got started, we were overwhelmed with where to begin and just how much we didn’t know. There are so many different kinds of compost (cow, horse, sheep, mushroom, plant, etc), soil (garden, potting, vegetable, fertilized, unfertilized, etc), and things we’d never heard of in the soil section (perlite, vermiculite, peat moss, etc). What do you start with? What is safe to use and what should you avoid?

We did a deep dive on gardening, and specifically organic gardening because we thought that was the direction we wanted to go. What we found shocked us…

Almost all the compost sold by nurseries in Spokane can be traced back to one company: Barr-Tech. And Barr-Tech’s compost is made from Spokane’s yard waste, food waste, and biosolids (aka human waste). All the prescription drugs, toxins, plastics, radiation, etc is packaged into a “certified organic” soil and sold to you as a premium garden soil. And as it turns out, we discovered *most* of the local organic farms are growing in it. 

We felt like we must have fallen into the twilight zone… how is this acceptable?!

The last thing we want when trying to be free from the food system is to grow our food in compost that is the lump sum of the food system. So we searched high and low for a nursery carrying a large supply of compost NOT from Barr-Tech and couldn’t find any. That led us to a momentary existential crisis. We knew what we didn’t want to do, but we had no idea how to pull off what we did want to do.

It took us a few years and A LOT of trial and error, but we achieved our goal: we raised, grew and preserved all of our own meat and produce that our family eats in a year. And we did it without machinery, chemicals, pesticides, artificial fertilizers OR compost containing human waste touching our land & livestock.

We now have a simplified system that we follow every year so we know exactly what and how much to plant and how much we need to preserve to last us all year. And we have automation in place so that  WE CAN GO ON VACATION! We leave our garden for weeks at a time and it keeps on growing without us.

While we love that we save thousands of dollars a year by growing our own food, the real value isn’t monetary. It’s having the peace of mind that comes with knowing where our food comes from, what it does (and doesn’t) contain, and that we have the skills to keep growing and preserving it regardless of what happens in the future.

As friends and followers watched our journey, we started getting a lot of requests to teach classes on how to do what we were doing.

We decided to put together an in-person gardening and preservation class series that was everything we were looking for and couldn’t find when we were first getting started. It sold out in a week. We opened another one, and it sold out again. The more classes we’ve taught, the more requests we’ve received to make them available online.

After years of teaching, improving our courses, filming, writing, and editing, we are so excited to finally have an online course available to everyone!

And the best part is, unlike in-person classes, you can follow along step by step in your kitchen & garden with the ability to pause, rewind, and rewatch as much as you need to until you have mastered the skill.

To see more about us & our journey check us out on social media: