Ever wondered what is the best way to cook different kinds of potatoes? Russets, fingerlings, white potatoes, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, and blue potatoes. Here’s a guide to potato varieties and how to use them best.
Greta Thunberg, outside the Swedish parliament. Her sign reads, “school strike for climate”.
School gardens now have a new role: help prepare young people for climate change. As the global climate warms, the world faces an urgent need for increased food security, sustainability, and environmental stewardship. By instilling kids with skills that support ecological balance, school gardens can be an effective program for meeting the challenge.
It’s clear that climate change is an issue of grave concern to children. In September 2019, millions of young people gathered worldwide to demand action to prevent further global warming. Inspired by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager who began her one-person “school strike for the climate” outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, the protest has grown into an international School Strike for the climate movement of millions. Children want to do something about climate change. When young people work together to grow food and learn sustainable practices, they become part of the climate change solution.
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By warming the soil and protecting plants from the rain and cold, gardeners can gain weeks or months of additional growing time at both ends of the season.
Season extension does not need to be costly—especially when you use scrap and natural materials already at hand. Mulches, raised beds, wind protectors, and surroundings designed to capture the sun’s heat are just a few of the low-cost and no-cost ways available to resourceful gardeners. (Article continues below slideshow.)
If you enjoy eating tomatoes ripe from your garden, consider saving the seed of some of this season’s harvest for next year. Saving tomato seeds is easy. The basic rule is to choose heirloom and open-pollinated tomatoes for seed saving rather than hybrids, because cross-mated hybrid tomatoes will not produce true copies.
In nature, fruits such as tomatoes ferment before detaching their seeds from the pulp. If you want to save tomato seeds, you need to “wet process” the seeds in much the same way nature does. (Article continues below slideshow.)
Beneficial insects can be a gardener’s best resource for protecting crops against destructive pests. Beneficials include pollinators, predators and parasites. By attracting a large enough population of helpful bugs to counteract plant damaging insects, you can keep your garden healthy using nature’s method of pest control.
Earlier this year, a group of people showed how quickly ordinary citizens could rewrite laws to protect nature and transition to sustainable farming. It took just four months.
RECIPE
If you want to add more plant-based protein foods to your diet, green pea dip is a simple, nutritious choice. This fresh, light dip is an alternative to chickpea hummus, and is high in protein, minerals and vitamins.
Green pea dip makes a good appetizer or a lunch spread, and is a stand-out at dinner parties with its amazing bright colour.
You can make green pea dip with frozen peas, or with fresh shelled peas from the garden. If using fresh, it takes about three pounds of peas in the pod to produce three cups of shelled peas.
Peas, once out of their pods, begin to lose their natural sweetness and become more starchy. So, unless you use them just after shelling, they will lose some of their sweet flavour. Luckily, because frozen peas are quickly chilled just after shelling, they retain their natural sugars and work perfectly in this recipe.
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On Salt Spring Island, in Canada’s Pacific maritime climate, oranges and avocados flourish in an innovative, energy-conserving greenhouse. The subtropical fruit greenhouse, called simply “The Garden,” uses renewable energy, thermal mass, nutrient cycling, and rainwater harvesting to grow citrus fruits with minimal inputs. (Article continues below video.)
Is eating organic worth it? A new study in the journal Environmental Research says yes. The research, conducted on four families across the United States, offers a snapshot of how pesticides in our food accumulate in our bodies.
What did the advent of cooking bring to human development? Scientific evidence suggests cooking our food may have made us more intelligent.
Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania
Ancient grains are making a comeback, as farmers, millers, artisan bakers and diners seek them out for their exceptional flavour, nutrition, and low-gluten content.
The heritage wheat, barley, rye, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa and flax at Dan Jason’s farm come in many colours. In August, at Salt Spring Seeds, the fields shimmer with blue, gold, and purple seeds and grains. Not the kind you’d see on the large industrial farms of the prairies, but old world varieties that grow today much as they did thousands of years ago. (Article continues below video.)
