Is eating organic food worth the price? Does it have more nutrition than conventional food? A landmark study from Newcastle University helps inform consumers.
No surprise, but good news. A comprehensive study from Newcastle University in Great Britain confirms that organic food is better for you and the world. Using meta analysis, an advanced statistical technique, the international science team reviewed 343 individual food studies and found that organic crops contain significantly more healthy antioxidants and have dramatically lower pesticide levels than conventionally grown crops.
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You can protect your plants from heat, drought, wind, rain, and cold by creating microclimates throughout your garden. Here are some simple ways to shelter your plants from extreme weather.
Cold frames protect vegetables from cold, wind, rain and frost, and extend the growing season.
Using Microclimates to Shelter Plants from Weather Extremes
Climate change is bringing a new challenge of weather extremes to gardeners and farmers across North America. The predictable weather patterns we knew and counted on are becoming more unpredictable. One week the weather may be hot and sunny—perfect for tomato transplants. The next week a cold wind pushes over young plants and chills their roots. It’s confusing to the plants, and to the growers too.
Adapting your growing area to protect young plants from heat, drought, wind, rain, and cold is a key to growing successfully. You can do this by creating microclimates that offer protection to vulnerable plants.
Microclimates are small areas that have different growing conditions from the surrounding region. These areas can shelter vulnerable plants and seedlings that are not strong enough to survive weather extremes. For example, a microclimate such as a sun trap, wind buffer, or radiant heat producer can protect plants from cold. In drought conditions, a cool microclimate, such as the area under a tree canopy or an umbrella, shades the plants beneath it and retains water to minimize heat stress.
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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.
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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
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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RECIPES
Parmesan Garlic Kale Chips • Ginger Basil Kale Chips • Tahini Lemon Kale Chips
Is the Kale Trend Over?
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
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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.
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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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