Growing number of Seattle-area residents growing their own groceries

It's been a long time since Annette Cottrell regularly saw the inside of a grocery store.

Her yard is an explosion of produce and herbs, with almond trees and honeybees and hops for making beer. The pantry teems with garden riches — roasted peppers, pickled beets — and there's homemade bread and caramel syrup in the fridge made with grains she ground and goats she milked.

She makes her own cheese, cures her own meats, and with summer here and the kids craving hot dogs, she complied — with garden-fresh ketchup, mustard and relish, buns built from Methow Valley grains, bratwursts fashioned from the meat of a pig she herself butchered at Everett's Ebey Farms.

It's a lifestyle you might equate with Vashon Island, but Cottrell and her family live 15 minutes from downtown Seattle — in the Sand Point neighborhood. Until 18 months ago, she'd never made pancakes from scratch or shopped at a farmer's market, but her frustration with food labels bearing questionable ingredients, and all the talk of pesticide-sprayed vegetables and the drawbacks of factory farms finally got to her.

She realized: The only way to know what she was feeding her kids was to make it herself. Now, she's one of a growing number of urban residents weaning themselves off traditional food systems, some driven by economics, distrust of big food companies, environmental concerns or fears about the future.

Most are taking baby steps, confined by space, time, ambition or inexperience. A trio of chickens, a dabbling in cheese. In Seattle's Central Area, Erica Bacon and her half-dozen housemates have turned their yard into a produce field that should sustain them through the summer and beyond.

Last year, the National Gardening Association said 40 percent more households would grow their own vegetables compared to two years earlier, with those gardens yielding an average $500 return.

Cottrell's yard boasts everything from artichokes to zucchini — in all, 22 kinds of fruit and 140 annuals on her family's 1/5-acre plot. There are even potatoes in the parking strip.

"I thought it was an experiment that would last 12 months," she says. "Now it just seems normal."

Many reasons

Cottrell realizes few are extreme as she is, but she shares her knowledge among friends and on her blog, www.sustainableeats.com.

"She's a mentor to many of us," says freelance radio journalist Joshua McNichols. "She taught us to grind our own grains."

He and his wife, Emily Hennigs, haven't bought a loaf of bread in months. Recently, they hosted a "canning exchange" where fellow home producers could trade baked goods or jarred jams, pickles and chutneys. Cottrell was the one slinging bone broth and tomato sauce.

For McNichols and Hennigs, both self-employed, the activity was an economic choice as well as a philosophical one. "We like to be in control of our food," he says. "... When we can produce it ourselves or know the farmers who produce it, we feel safer."

The same goes for the Bacon, who buys food in bulk with her housemates while tending a sizable backyard produce and herb garden. "For me, it's about resistance to the industrial food system," she says. "... People just don't know what's possible if you put a little time and love into it."

Sandy Pederson, of Urban Land Army, which offers urban-gardening instruction, says that for some, it's about reclaiming lost skills. "A lot of people tell me they feel really vulnerable, that they don't have the skills to grow their food or fix their car — all these practical things we used to know and now pay other people to do."

Starting from scratch

For Cottrell, it all started in January 2009, when she read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." Eventually she realized that even without a 5-acre country spread, she could probably grow a decent amount of food.

She broke old shopping habits and set down ground rules — for example, milk and cream must come from local dairies — vowing to buy what she couldn't grow from local, sustainable sources only. Six weeks later, they were eating greens from the garden.

Big plans ensued. An irrigation system, then backyard chickens. Her husband, Jared Pfost, built her a front-yard fence and raised beds, then retreated to his home office in the basement.

With practice, Cottrell was soon making palatable chicken and dumplings, and goat-cheese pizza with items either grown herself or crafted from Washington ingredients. Then came grass-fed beef tacos, potato soup, and ice cream made from local milk.

By November, except for spices, not a single Thanksgiving dinner item had come from a store.

"People don't realize how much they can do," she says. "They equate it with back-to-the-land '70s hippies."

She opens a box freezer and reaches below packages of Washington elk, pork, rabbit, cheese and broth bones to pull out a duck she'll make for tomorrow's dinner, with a sauce flavored with cherries from a neighbor's tree.

The food she buys isn't always cheap — canned tuna that is sustainably caught as close to Seattle as possible, for instance — but she saves by buying in bulk and avoiding imported or out-of-season items. (There are concessions, such as fair-trade coffee.) She figures she's spending less than $400 monthly to feed the family of four.

About $10 of it goes toward grains, enough to stock them with cookies, scones, pancakes and pizza dough, "anything you can buy in the middle section of the grocery store," she said. "It's crazy cheap to make your own food. I had no idea. Everybody should have their own grain grinder."

Her electricity bill hasn't changed, but water costs are up — about $200 more per two-month period at the peak compared to before.

The real cost is hours spent in the kitchen — a price she can afford while running an online-sales outfit from home, with a supportive husband. She realizes not everyone can do that, so she volunteers on behalf of community-garden efforts aimed at low-income neighborhoods.

"To do what Annette is doing takes an extraordinary time commitment," says McNichols, with whom Cottrell co-purchased and butchered her pig.

Passing a tough test

Over time, neighbors have gotten used to seeing Cottrell out in the garden, or son Max, 6, coming down their quiet street selling strawberries or radishes out of a wagon for a nickel apiece. But things haven't always been so rosy.

As spring set in, the enormity of summer's imminent harvest goaded her into making batches of cheese, charcuterie and lotions. Her family complained she wasn't spending enough time with them; she felt they weren't helping enough.

One May night, she put dinner on the table and son Lander, 3, turned up his nose, got up and walked away. Then Max whined. She'd had enough.

As she put it on her blog, she went on strike and decided not to cook anymore. She went to the store and bought things — within reason — her husband and boys could make for themselves.

Six days later, her family straining and her conscience suffering, she returned to the kitchen.

But a little later, on her blog, she claimed small victory: "Last night, we had the tater tots we bought while I was on strike. He took one bite and asked why it didn't taste like potato. Score 1 for real food! MWAH HA HA."

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com