Day One

3-17-2013
Today is my half birthday and a fine day to start planting. Living in Central Ohio I am still a solid month before the last frost date so most of my plants are inside. My goal for this year is to try to consume as many of my calories from what I can directly grow in my own home and the community garden plot I have rented. The food sources I can't grow myself, I want to get from local farmers markets. What I can't find there I will seek from the local region.  I am hopeful that I can get about 99% of my food stuffs with in those sources.  I face many challenges with this goal such as my current unemployment and being generally novel to the gardening world. 
As a little kid, I helped my father in the garden, but I don't remember many principles of growing food from that. For the last two years I have had a community garden plot down in the same area that I have one now. The first year I grew a beautiful crop of tall grass. Which would have been awesome if I was raising goats. Last year, I managed to grow about 100 thumb sized sweet potatoes on one side of my garden and on the other side I got yet another crop of grass. Through the high summer months, July and August, we had a major drought and I did not get down there to water enough. At the end of the season, I managed to save a lot of the sweet potato greens and put them in a sort of make shift Window Farm. However, throughout the course of the winter they all slowly died. 
This year, I am going to reattempt the sweet potatoes from scratch. Yesterday, I got some local organic sweet potatoes at a near by co-op. I washed them and placed them in little cups of water. In about a month they will start showing little shoots and about two weeks after that the shoots will be ready to break off and start rooting. I have also been starting lots of seeds in the last week. In a bathroom upstairs I have three egg cartons full of different seeds that are already sprouting. The other project I am trying to get underway this week is a worm bin. I have everything I need except worms. As my projects develop I will keep you updated and include things like costs and benefits, data about regionality of my food and anything else I can think of.
Wish me Luck