Confessions of a Lazy Gardener: Or Reasons to Grow Your Own Food

Growing food is a skill I think every human being should have.

Many people know nothing about growing food and don’t want to know because they perceive that it’s hard.

They’re wrong.

Growing food is easy. Case in point:

At the end of May when I should have been planting my garden, I was travelling. Upon my return we had a solid month of rain. I finally planted potatoes July 10, six weeks later than tradition dictates (last week of May in Calgary).

I hand watered my potatoes a couple times, basically tossing a few gallons of rainwater at them when it was really hot and dry. I handpicked a few weeds twice, spending a total of maybe 20 minutes on the entire patch all summer. I didn’t even get around to hilling* them. In essence I could not have done less to propagate potatoes. Plain lazy!

Our first killing frost arrived October 13. (A killing frost sets the potato skins so they’ll keep longer). A few days later I dug my potatoes. From one kilo of seed potatoes I harvested all the potatoes in this picture, about 12 kilos.

Lazy Gardener's 2013 Potato Crop
Lazy Gardener’s 2013 Potato Crop

There were dozens of marble-sized potatoes under each plant indicating that if the season were longer, they would have produced more. (They made perfect, melt-in-your-mouth roasted potatoes).

My potatoes are crisp and flavourful, despite a summer of neglect. They grew without the “benefit” of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and other noxious substances.

A friend of mine grew potatoes in PEI for a major food processing company. Following the company spray schedule was a condition of supplying them with potatoes. The farmer sprayed her potato crop for something every other day! Potatoes routinely appear on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty DozenTM list of the foods most likely contaminated with chemicals.

Why are those potatoes so heavily sprayed when potatoes grow almost wild, without care at all, as my humble potato patch proved?

Michael Pollan, in his book, Botany of Desire tells us it’s because of our demand for the perfect long French fry. At least that’s what Big Food attributes to us.

Monocultures contribute to the problem. Huge tracts of one-species are like a TV commercial for a free buffet, attracting every bug and blight to which that plant is vulnerable. The modern solution is spraying.

Eventually the land is addicted to its drugs.  Just like pharmaceuticals, once you take one agricultural chemical, then you need another to combat the effects of the first chemical.

Chemicals wipe out all life around the intended crop including beneficial organisms like soil bacteria, earthworms, insects (good and bad), bees, birds, bats and other natural predators, not to mention, contaminating groundwater, lakes and streams.

There is no proof any of these chemicals is safe for human consumption, never mind the cumulative toxic effect they have on the body. Then add the chemical assaults from our homes, our cars, our clothes, our cosmetics; the list goes on. No wonder rates of cancer continue to skyrocket.

Food that is grown in living soil, rife with minerals and beneficial bacteria, food that isn’t sprayed with toxins (sometimes called organic food) benefits our health in many ways:

  1. It contains more nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and antioxidants. Recent research shows plants produce antioxidants and other beneficial chemicals to repel insects and other marauders unless they’re doped up on agri-chemicals. This partially explains the nutritional differences between plants grown with chemical versus organic growing practices.
  2. Fewer toxins mean lower toxic load for the body to process, resulting in less “dis-ease”.
  3. We even benefit from exercise and sunshine we get from growing food, however minimal it is.  Gardening is the only exercise besides weightlifting recommended for the prevention of osteoporosis in women.
  4. Growing our own food helps heal the earth. Less fuel is used in production and transport, reducing pollution and other costs. Grass gobbles up a huge portion of synthetic fertilizers and fresh water in North America. Growing food instead is a better use of our resources.
  5. Growing our own food reconnects us to food and each other. Food made with human hands is often made with love. Factory food doesn’t contain love; usually you can’t pronounce what IS in it. Digging around in our own gardens spawns interest in others’ garden. Soon you have a community sharing resources.

I urge you to grow even a small portion of your own food.  It doesn’t require much space or a great deal of effort or knowledge, as I have confessed. Usually, all you need to know appears on the seed packet.

Potatoes aren’t the only easy to grow food plant. Lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, squash, and onions require little care and attention. Start a strawberry or raspberry patch with donated plants and eat fruit from them almost forever.  Rhubarb and asparagus are perennial too. Perfect for lazy gardeners like me.

Baked Fries recipe

                   

 

*Hilling potatoes is a “best practice” when it comes to growing potatoes. Soil is scraped into little mounds or hills at the base of the plants when the potato tops are six to twelve inches tall. http://www.wholerealfood.com/baked-fries/ prevents the tubers from peeking out of the ground and turning green, which renders them toxic. It also helps maintain moisture and coolness.

Rah! Rah! RAW! Updated July 2013

rawfoodRaw Food, that is.

Incorporating more raw food into your diet is one of the best moves you can make towards optimum health. It’s not necessary to toss out your stove to enjoy the benefits of eating raw foods, simply add more of them to each meal.

Why raw?

Raw food is “living food”. As opposed to dead foods, (anything that is processed and/or cooked), living foods still have their enzymes intact. Enzymes are catalysts for every function of the body from blinking to breathing.

Cooking also destroys food’s naturally occurring vitamins and strips away most antioxidants. (One exception is that cooked tomatoes have more lycopene, a nutrient known to prevent prostate cancer, than raw tomatoes). Our bodies were designed to eat primarily raw foods and many of our modern diseases can be controlled or eliminated with a raw food diet.

I first became aware of the benefits of eating living foods about 30 years ago. When planning the “real estate” of my plate, I strive to ensure at least 2/3 is plant based and of that, at least half is raw. Lately I’ve worked at increasing the ratio of raw to cooked foods based on the miracles eating raw has brought to others.

A few years ago a friend of mine lost his sister to cancer. A cleaner in the hospital where his sister breathed her last breathe had gotten acquainted with the family over the course of her illness and suggested that her cancer could have been prevented with a raw food diet. My friend was intrigued and bought the book the woman had recommended. He began eating raw and within about two weeks he noticed his asthma was gone. He no longer needed medication that he had taken nearly his entire life, over 50 years.

There are many cases of diabetes retreating from a raw food diet. Drew Carey of the Price is Right has reportedly cured his diabetes and lost significant pounds by eating raw.  Mike Adams, founder of the web site Natural News (which has over 100 raw food articles) cured his pre-diabetic condition by eating a diet that is 60 to 90% raw. Unfortunately, most doctors believe diabetes is incurable and must be treated with expensive medications.

One of my daughters has struggled with her weight since she was a teenager, despite working out religiously and eating “healthy”. When she began eating a primarily raw food diet she miraculously went from a size 12 to a six and for the first time in years, her stomach doesn’t hurt whenever she eats. She reports having more energy and even though it takes some extra effort to seek raw food, she vows she will never go back.

The main benefits of eating raw include:

#1 More energy. The body spends less energy digesting food and the aforementioned enzymes are not destroyed, adding to one’s vitality.

#2 Elimination is drastically improved on a raw diet. A properly functioning digestive system is vital to maintaining optimal health.

#3 More time: it takes less time to prepare raw food (once you know some of the tricks) and people on raw food diets often report that they require less sleep.

#4 Weight loss: 82.5% of people who switched to raw food diets reported losing weight.

#5 Mental Health: 87.5% of raw “foodies” report improved mental health in areas such as optimism, memory, focus, patience, and even creativity, without the dreadful side effects of anti-depressants

#6 Lowered cardiovascular disease, including lowered cholesterol and triglycerides.  C-reactive protein, an inflammatory molecule linked to heart disease, diabetes and other chronic disease is also lowered with raw food.

#7 Improved menstrual cycles; stress reduction, reduced breast and prostate cancers.

Studies show that cooked foods increase our white blood cell activity, essentially meaning our bodies see cooked food as invaders. This explains why many “dis-eases” can be treated by switching to a raw food diet.

It’s not difficult to increase your raw food consumption. An easy way is to eat fruit for breakfast.  My favourite breakfast is a sliced banana or two with some berries and/or a sliced peach with a splash of coconut milk. If you eat enough fruit, it will get you through the morning. Fruit is also a good snack anytime of day.

Another great way to increase your raw food intake is to eat salads. They don’t have to be the standard lettuce and tomato salad. You can literally turn any veggies into a satisfying meal. I invented a salad a couple years ago that is a summer favourite of mine and it has no lettuce in it at all.  See Nasturtium Salad.

Raw foods can also be added to cooked foods. A baked potato can be topped with any number of chopped raw veggies, including cabbage, broccoli, onions, and/or tomatoes.

I have attended a number of raw food workshops given by Afke Zonderland and sponsored by a local health food store, Amaranth Whole Foods Market. Afke is a marvelous woman who showed us how to make Walnut-Zucchini Crackers and some fabulous dairy-free dips.

She made a sweet potato and celery soup with cooked sweet potatoes and served it warm. I liked that she wasn’t a raw food “purist”: she argued that after a day on the ski hill she didn’t want to eat something cold and that the idea is to eat as many raw foods as possible but not be militant about it.

Afke is all about spreading the message of healthy eating. She has dozens of recipes on her website at www.foodsalive.ca. Not all her recipes are completely raw but they all incorporate some raw elements, which is really the point. She also recommended David Wolfe’s book Superfoods. His web site is www.DavidWolfe.com. I have included more resources below.

I encourage you to take small steps towards incorporating more living food into your diet. By eating less dead food, you are sure to enjoy some of the benefits without having to diet (aka, “suffer”!

Rah! Rah! Raw!

Sources:

www.NaturalNews.com has dozens of Articles on raw food including: http://www.NaturalNews.com/z030137_lifestyle_health.html

http://altmedicine.about.com/od/pop…

http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content…

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/diabetes/…

http://www.iowasource.com/food/lenk…

http://www.google.com search Raw Food for tons more resources.