Affordable Healthcare Series- Vitamin “O”
Vitamin O
Vitamin O, as in vitamin “OH my gosh you just grew a full spread of nutrient dense superfoods in your own garden!” 😊 If you have invested the time to read through this entire series since it began last year, you may notice several repeat offenders. Grow dark, leafy greens, dark heirloom tomatoes, richly colored carrots and beets, lentils, or beans if you’re able and brilliant peppers. This blog was never intended to be a journey into the realm of Agroecology, Permaculture or Epigenetics; nor was it supposed to dive into the curriculum of chemistry and the Periodic Table of Elements. There are volumes of books available on those heady subjects. Remember, we are not doctors. We are successful backyard farmers and a proponents of growing your way back to better health. Our recommendation is that you do not negate medicine, but simply try to find the joy in growing your own food and perhaps boosting your health at home! If you are seeing a medical professional for anything that ails you, let them in on your thoughts and start a conversation about nutrition, food, and diet. Most people today are more informed about their iPhones and other devices than they are about the food they eat.
Inform yourself about the corporate food and centralized food distribution systems in your homeland. Find the prohibitive hurdles that true organic farmers face and support your local small farms. You should know that there are thousands of vegetable varieties being grown and shipped to your grocery that were chosen for shelf life and not for their nutritional value. Remember that healthy food nourishes, transforms, and can inspire. It is time to make a real change and we ought to be allowed to make our own choices about what we consume; for ourselves and our families. The human nose and sense of taste have evolved to know when fruits and vegetables are ripe and taste good. We challenge you to hold up a mush-mouth, warehouse “ripened” tomato against your first harvested heirloom. You will not even need to bite into it to know which one is better! Trust us, we have grown the mediocre, and we have also grown some of the best varieties available. It is the quality of your intake at stake, and you can do better!
Here is a quick at-a-glance checklist:
1. Know your area’s growing season.
2. Find your sunniest garden location.
3. Pull or dig up weeds by their roots in the chosen destination. No more spraying of anything where you grow food! Or, build large raised planter boxes if open land is scarce.
4. Get the soil right and keep building it. Add piles of organic planting mix, other organic materials, compost and especially give Slowdirt a try; to help optimize nutrient density and nearly eliminate the need for any pesticide applications. This is the first money to be spent on a new, or in the regeneration of a garden plot. Remember, crappy soil equals crappy growth performance and crappy nutritional value in the final product. Grow your soil first!
5. Sow seeds or plant your starters. Just add water and let nature take care of the rest, because she has been handling that for millennia! Rinse and repeat.
Enjoy the hunt for seed varieties! Do your research and if you can grow them, grow them! There are more than 10,000 heirloom and ancestral seed types available globally through seed suppliers and seed banks. We love Baker Creek Seeds, www.rareseeds.com and The Seed Savers Exchange, www.seedsavers.org.
If you wish to go big, then learn to properly process and dry your seeds from your personal favorites for future gardening years or to share. There is at least a half-dozen great books on this subject I can think of right now. Check out Seed Swap by Josie Jeffery. You can join a seed swap in your local community and if there is not one, start one as we did! It is easy to get the word out there and a ton of fun. You will get the opportunity to meet other enthusiasts such as yourself and probably save some money along the way. Give this thing a try. Stand up for global food sovereignty movements. You can grow great food and eat great food just outside your door. Know what you grow and take back your food!
“The Federal Government has sponsored research that has produced a Tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can’t eat it.” -Andy Rooney
