Coriander (or cilantro, as the leaves are sometimes known), may do a lot more than just season your salsa. Scientists in Portugal, testing oil from coriander seeds, found the herb effective against such dangerous bacteria as E.coli and staphylococcus.
By growing open-pollinated plants and saving seeds, you’ll always have enough for next year’s garden.
Seed shortages and rising food prices due to the pandemic have generated huge demand for backyard gardens. Unfortunately for gardeners, this need collides with a rapidly consolidating seed industry. Dominated by a few global companies, seed corporations are determined to substitute patented seeds, which must be repurchased each year, for open-pollinated seeds, which gardeners can regrow indefinitely.
As gardeners, you can counter this trend by planting heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, and saving your seeds. This does more than simply save you the cost of buying new seeds each year—it builds diversity and resilience in the environment and our food supply.
Starting a seed-saving garden is easy and depends on two things: 1) willingness to let your plants go to seed, rather than tidy up as soon as they bear fruit, and 2) choosing heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. Open-pollinated plants grow true to type, which means that (unlike hybrids) their seeds produce the same kind of plant as the parent. By selecting seeds from plants with the best flavour, size or other desired characteristics, you can create a garden most suited to your tastes and microclimate.
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Want to eat more seasonal winter vegetables? Here’s our guide to cooking and eating local in-season veggies in fall and winter.
Seasonal vegetables are the unsung heroes of winter eating. It may surprise you just how many winter veggies are available fresh. If you add in root vegetables, which keep well in storage for several months, you have a wide range of eating and cooking choices for the cold weather season.
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Parmesan Garlic Kale Chips • Ginger Basil Kale Chips • Tahini Lemon Kale Chips
A few years ago when kale was all the rage, kale chips became an instant classic—a healthy snack food to make in minutes. The kale trend has subsided, but as winter comes on each year, we’re reminded why this hardy vegetable became so popular in the first place.
Kale is the quintessential winter vegetable, able to withstand cold temperatures better than just about any other crop. Stroll through any local garden or farm on a freezing day and you’ll see this hardy green thriving in the chill or pushing up under cold frames. Not only is kale able to survive winter weather, it actually becomes sweeter after a frost.
What’s more, these leafy greens are loaded with good nutrition. Rich in vitamin A and vitamin K, kale is also a source of vitamin C, folate, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium.
So, even though the trend is over, I guess this is why people continue to ask for the recipe for these vegetable chips. Below is the basic Parmesan Garlic Kale Chips recipe, and two new flavour variations: Ginger Basil, and Tahini Lemon. Enjoy!
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What is a chayote squash, you ask? Bright green, spiny, pear-shaped chayote squash may just be a new reliable staple crop for BC coastal gardens.
Chayote squash
What makes chayote squash so unusual is that it has a mild taste like a summer squash and the texture of a cucumber, but is able to withstand cool fall temperatures. In maritime south coast British Columbia, chayote squash is hardy on the vine until early November.
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You may have noticed chayote squash appearing at local markets. This unusual bright green, pear-shaped squash has long been cultivated in Mexico and Latin America, and is now making its way to northern grocery stores.
Chayote squash
New research points to vitamin D as a low-cost way to reduce the severity of coronavirus.
As medicine urgently searches for therapies to treat COVID-19, no vaccine or effective anti-viral treatment is yet available. Two new studies, however, highlight the relationship between low vitamin D levels and COVID-19 death rates, and point to an effective treatment to reduce the severity of the pandemic.
Natural food sources of vitamin D include salmon (above), and mushrooms that have been exposed to ultraviolet light. Vitamin D may be a low-cost way to reduce the severity of COVID-19.
RECIPE
This is a traditional tried-and-true sweet pickle—wonderful on burgers, sandwiches, mixed into chicken or tuna salad, or eaten straight out of the jar.
We searched in the stores and never found sweet pickles as good as these. Which is why it’s worth it to spend a few hours on a summer day, canning up enough Bread and Butter Pickles for winter.
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A leek in flower
The shortage of garden seeds this spring gave a foretaste of what it is like when supplies run out. If anything, the shortages demonstrated just how important it is to grow and save your own seeds.
Many gardeners miss the second part of vegetable growing: allowing plants shoot into flower and produce seeds. We’ve been told to have tidy gardens and to pull out our plants as the harvest slows. Nothing could be farther from the truth! As the harvest season slows down, the seeding season is just beginning. The garden is abundant with seeds. We have only to gather and store them to have the most an ample supply we could ever want.
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As farms, food vendors, and other businesses begin to reopen, three new scientific studies show why face masks are an important way to bring the COVID-19 coronavirus under control.
COVID-19 has spread so widely because infected people often don’t show symptoms during the first 4–5 days, but still shed virus by breathing, talking or coughing to anyone nearby.
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We’ve put together nine of our favourite basic staple food recipes—from condiments and sauce, to bean pots, soup, bread, crackers, and pastry.
If being in lockdown is doing anything, it’s teaching us to cook at home. We now have time to try new recipes and experiment with foods we never thought of making. Case in point—pantry staple foods. Have you ever thought about making your own salad dressing, mayonnaise, crackers, or baked beans?
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