Can your lawn do this?

Harvested from our front lawn: potatoes, beets, and purple, white and orange carrots.

Yes.

First you have to take out some of the grass. Grass is wonderful for playing and walking on. Soccer, frisbee golf, and field hockey would not be the same without it. Typical grass lawns, however, are like reality show starlets: high maintenance but not really useful. How often do you play sports in your front yard?

This spring, we tilled up a patch of our front yard. (We let the lawn sit a few years in case there was lawn chemical residue from prior owners. ) The kids helped plant a variety of vegetables right before the drought of the century. I confess that we could have planted earlier and are learning about the local climate. The First of May was the guideline where I grew up, and was entirely too late for some seedlings to get established here in Southern Iowa. Despite the intense heat and dry season, we still have a decent crops of beets and three types of carrots. A few potatoes survived and we managed to get some zucchini before insects destroyed the plants.

This soup was made with vegetables from our garden, plus a cup of flour and an egg from a local hen-keeper down the street:

beets
carrots: white, purple, and orange
potatoes

2 tbsp parsley

I cleaned and chopped up all the veggies, including the tops from the beets. I tossed them into crock pot, covered them with water (plus two cups above) and cooked them on "low" for about six hours. In the last hour, I added:

salt to taste (about 1 tsp for our pot)
egg noodles

Nutritious, filling, and delicious. Not bad for a nearly-free meal, eh? The boys tore into it and easily got their days' worth of vegetables in one sitting. We have plenty left in our front yard garden and will soon plant some kale other cool-weather crops.


I shared this story with Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways, a weekly link-up for money saving and eco-conscious ideas from bloggers all over the 'net.


www.stealthymom.com