Are home garden foods healthier

Garden Foods are not guaranteed to be healthier.

Organic is a term just meaning no pesticides used.

But what makes a vegetable actually healthier? A plant is in a symbiotic relationship with microbes in the soil. This relationship is a loop where the photosynthesis process of the plant producing sugars transfers it to the roots where the microbes attach to the roots and exchange minerals for the sugars.
I remember a professor saying it best, think of these microbes as breaking down rock, zinc, iron, those minerals we need in our diet.

If the minerals are not in the soil, and the microbes are not there to transfer those minerals, your garden food may not be any healthier than the grocery store.

So how do we get minerals we need in our soils and into our foods? Composting is critical. And not just composting in black plastic barrels. Composting with vermicompost (worms) is the most effective. What we feed those worms then becomes the source of the minerals. A wide variety ranging from vegetables to leaf matter to kelp will give you that variety.

Mice in kitchen

Mice in your kitchen is not a popular subject, but to provide healthy food this is an area we have to address. If you ask your doctor they will tell you there really is no such thing as a 24 hour flu. Nine times out of ten it is contaminated food and one of the contaminators that is the hardest to be aware of is pests. Mice, cockroaches, ants, flies; all move about a kitchen area after coming in contact with contaminated drain areas, spoiled food in garbage cans and their own feces and urine. It is a horrible realization but it is a fact.

So how do we insure we are providing our family with healthy food that has not been contaminated? The first step is to realize that no matter how clean we keep our home, these unwanted guest will eventually be an issue. Mice and cockroaches hide in warehouses with food where they can chew their way into a box that is then picked up and moved to a grocery store, then that creature is transferred by accident into our home.

Being aware that this is something that constantly is happening, no matter how diligent warehouses and grocery stores try to be, will put us on guard to be preventative and not reactive. Taking action ahead of time with traps, organic scents or other pest control, is the only way you can be certain of this. This doesn't mean you have to pay big dollars for a pest control service. You can do much of this yourself, (see infodiypestcontrol link here).

Watching pest control operators use blue lights to see where mice have urinated in our kitchens reveals the horror of how they will crawl across cutting boards, counter tops and other food preparation areas. If we use powerful disinfectants, we may be transferring chemicals into our food that are as bad as the mice urine. A good option is to always put down wax paper or some other clean material to prepare your food on.

Never leave food out over night due to the fact all of these pests are nocturnal and will be traveling about during that time.

Remember mice can get into drawers where we keep our silverware, so covering your silverware with a hand towel can save you from contamination you didn't notice until mice droppings were discovered under the spoons.

Not a fun subject as we said before but very important to address.

Finding fresh food in the winter.

Where does all that fresh produce come from in the middle of an artic blast?

Do not be deceived by a pretty organic label or "fresh" label in the grocery store. You know that food has to be coming from the southern hemisphere where regulations are nothing compared to the U.S.; so how do we get healthy food in the winter.

The truth is, we honestly have no real way of knowing at this time how or where our food has been raised and under what standards overseas. We can wash the food to try and get rid of chemicals but that will not help the systemic action of the chemicals.

The only true way to know what we are eating is to know the grower or grow it ourselves then flash freeze that food to eat in the winter time. This is just to eliminate the chemical element but does not consider what nutrients may have been lost in the freezing process.

We do know that the faster you freeze your fresh food the better it retains nutrients.

I know others that are doing the drying process but there isn't enough research yet to show how much we retain in nutrients under that process.

Is Organic really healthy?

I think we are all starting to ask the question if Organic is really healthier than any other food process; AND; is it really helping my families health.

Pesticide, the word, means to Kill Pest. So anything that kills must be bad for us, right? Well let's word that another way, is it good for us?

I can eat card board but it's not good for me. And that is the way LD50 is basically measured, by how bad it could be for us in what doses. So the answer is that pesticides are not measured on how good they are for us. But the level of how bad they are for us and what our bodies can withstand, so a good answer is the less to no pesticide use is wise. But is that enough?

Unfortunately; the USDA is measuring Organic in much the same way. The pesticide use is removed but how good for us is the food that remains?

A GMO really can be a fruit tree in your back yard modified over the years to bring a certain looking fruit, but the real question you should be asking of all the food you eat is, how GOOD for me is it?

If the fruit tree roots are being watered by a irrigation canal that has all the run off of local farms using pesticides, or, if the fruit tree is growing in sand with little to no nutrient value, or, if heavy doses of manure are being used to create big fruit but it has no nutrition in that compost process; have we really gained anything other than it's not as bad for us?

We need a label that declares what the food has been grown in nutrient wise. The label should state if it has volcanic ash, Nordic sea kelp, natural worm casting compost, manure from nutrient rich soils the animals grazed on. THEN we would be able to say, yes, this food is actually GOOD FOR ME.

Public demand is what will prompt this and we need to start asking the organic fruit and vegetable stands these questions.

Dog and Human health gauge

Health in our pets is an interesting gauge of how our health is doing.

I was raised in the 70's on a large ranch with several dogs that never had a health issue and lived to ripe old ages. One was even bitten by a rattle snake on the neck and simply laid down for three days, swelled up to a football, then the swelling went down and was fine. That was good health to be able to overcome such a problem.

Same went for the family working on the ranch, no cancer or other problems.

But now we see pets with diabetes, cancer, allergies and every other human type condition plaguing our society today. Could we learn something from this?

The old farm dog lived in a natural environment, ran at least ten miles a day, ate raw food it could find from old meat to ...well I hate to say it, raw cow pies (manure).

The domestic dog today lives on carpet fibers made from petroleum synthetic fibers. Eats man made processed food and is lucky to exercise an hour a day.

Not a surprise that dog health is starting to be like our modern human health.

Natural is a buzz word but do we really even want to go back to natural. I watched a friends 21 year old daughter picking fruit off a tree and throwing away the fruit because it had a hole in it, so it had to be all bad...the truth is there was a larvae probably in there but cut it out and eat the good part.

The girl had a fit when I said that. But she wants to go organic and natural. Natural is dirty, not McDonalds boxed and shiny. Working in the yard makes us sweaty and dirty. This is what we naturally came from just a generation ago, but our lives are so homogenized, we are going to have to adjust if we are truly going to go back to healthy.

Getting out of the house with it's latex paint, carpet fibers and microwaved food could be just the thing you and your pet need to get back into an environment you were supposed to be in.

Minerals back into our diets

How do we get minerals and nutrients back into our diets?

Farmers have had to produce so much food so fast that our land is depleted from many of the needed minerals in our diets. If you don't believe that, eat a fresh tomato off your own vine and then try the store bought version. Taste and satisfaction in feeling well after you eat a meal is your body telling you something is good for you. If  you have the munchies afterwards or the food you ate didn't even register with your taste buds, be suspicious of what you are consuming.



Where do we get these minerals because organic just means the farmer is not using pesticides or chemicals. It does  not mean the food is healthier.

It comes back to you, you have to make the effort toward health. This starts with raising food that has these nutrients and minerals restored.

A worm farm is the most advanced biological means of reintroducing lacking minerals and nutrients into your soil. Their castings or dirt after they have digested the food creates amazingly rich ground for plants to absorb minerals. The next step I highly believe in is brewing a compost tea from those worm castings and including Volcanic Ash (Azomite ), Sun Dried Kelp from Nova Scotia that has not been heated more than 80 degrees (again available on line), and fish emulsion to this brew you are feeding your plants. With this you just reintroduced an amazing boost for the plant and that boost will be taken up by your body when you consume the plants fruits.

The other item is to throw away that processed salt and purchase Celtic Sea Salt to put in your diet.

Powerful steps to getting you and your family healthy.

How to get kids to eat healthy

As a child I was never fond of broccoli. Now I know why. It was the quality of the broccoli. Yesterday I was in a organic garden with a man who uses worm extract spray on his vegetables and has the complete organic loop in his garden. In other words he has fresh water, well composted fresh soil with worm castings and only fertilizes with worm oil. He picked off a head of broccoli and told me to eat it.

My childhood taste buds were screaming "NO", but I trusted him. The taste was amazing. It was actually sweet. He tossed a piece to his dog and the dog ate it ravenously. The over grown, nutrient poor vegetables that taste like cardboard from our grocery store are a big part of the failure to help us eat healthy food.

I challenge you to find a organic gardener who practices this technique and compare the food. If your child started its taste bud memories with that kind of flavor they will gladly eat healthy.

Now that was an easy thing for me to challenge but you and I know this kind of grower is rare. So this brings us back to the truth that we are going to have to make that effort to grow our own food if we are going to take real steps to healthy food.

I have to say, do not trust the word organic. I go to lots of organic food retailers and never have I had food that tasted the way that broccoli did. The problem is they are not nourishing the soil with fresh worm composting, feeding the soil with the minor elements that are so needed in our diets. They simply are using a compost with high nitrogen to produce a fast plant and not using chemicals. That is all it takes to be called organic but it does not give us food with all the nutrition our bodies hunger for.

When I stop at a organic retailer I ask how they prepare their soil, where their water comes from, do they let the land rest or do cover crops. If they can't give you this information than that should be a warning. If they are not into putting nutrition into the soil, then this is not what you are looking for. The final and best test is taste. Good nutrition taste good, if it doesn't have much taste then it is lacking these elements.