Food
You are probably familiar with pinto, navy, and kidney beans, but there are also scores of amazing unique bean varieties that you may have never heard of. Unless you specifically sought them out, you wouldn’t be familiar with the not-so-common beans as you won’t find them on your grocery store shelf. These special beans are heirlooms that have been preserved and passed down from generation to generation.
It might seem highly improbable that just a pile of cardboard, newspaper and grass clippings will magically turn into beautiful rich soil, but that is indeed what actually happens. I saw it with my very own eyes. In our quest to find more space to plant vegetables in our ever expanding garden, we did a trial sandwich composting project on the sunny, but weedy side of our house last October. Now in spring, our simple compost sandwich has really turned out beautifully.
The Scarlet Runner bean has won a very special place in my heart. It is lovely as a trailing ornamental garden plant, and also provides delicious edible pods and beans. Another wonderful quality of runner beans is that they are also a perennial vine, meaning beans will grow all year round in mild climates, and do not have to be resown. In our area (hardiness zone 9) the beans die back with the first frosts of winter, then reemerge in the spring.
As exciting as it is anticipating a multitude of tiny young legume sprouts pushing up through the moist earth, my absolute favorite aspect of this bean planting adventure is my experiment with a recycled trellis. I am not entirely sure if it will work for my intended garden function, but I love gazing at the strange found sculpture so much, with its relentlessly upbeat outlook and vacuously chipper smile, that I almost don’t even care if the beans ever succeed in growing up it.
I am really psyched about this list of berries for a few reasons. For one, it is really exciting to learn about a cool berry you have never heard of. Even better if they are also fantastic for you and packed with nutrition. But, perhaps the most exciting thing is that these berries are all perennial (meaning that they fruit year after year), and can thrive across most of the United States.
This season if you are growing your own lettuce, squash, carrots and other vegetables in your backyard garden, be sure to also plant a few varieties of beans. Growing your own protein and have nutritionally well-balanced meals entirely from your edible garden is easy with legumes.
Legumes not only feed and sustain us, they also feed the earth by their near-magical ability to fix nitrogen into the soil, (in partnership with bacteria). The diverse legume family includes beans, peas, lima and fava beans, and also clovers, which are invaluable cover crops and often used as green manure.
So you are interested in growing plants in your soil. You have picked up a packet of seeds and read on the back: This plant prefers a “loamy soil.” You wonder, what does this mean, and how can I tell if my soil is right? This guide will give you a brief introduction to types of soil, and how to tell what soil you area has.
Billionaire Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has recently announced that this year he has started a personal challenge to only eat meat that he has killed himself. From lobsters and chickens to pigs and goats, he has vowed not to eat any meat from an animal that he has not personally rendered.
Zuckerberg has embraced the economics of more sustainable localized food production; he decided that if he is going to eat animals, that butchering his own meat locally made the most sense to him. He explained a bit about his new insight into food and agriculture:
In a major victory for sustainable farmers everywhere, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a summary order upholding the previous decision in a long-running lawsuit over the impacts of genetically engineered (GE) “Roundup Ready” sugar beets. The ruling allows all previous court rulings in favor of farmers and environmental activists to now remain in place, and it also mandates that the USDA now must extensively research all of the potential hazards of Monsanto’s modified plant.
The shared histories of people and plants have been woven together over thousands of years, and as a result edible plants are a critical feature of every culture. We can do our part to honor and protect this beautiful partnership.
The spring has come and you are excited to get growing! Eager to start, you buy some seeds or plants from your local nursery, and start reading up on how to care for them. Somewhere in your research, you learn that your plants are going to be happiest at a pH between 6 and 7. so what does that mean? Today we are going to talk about the seeming mysterious term: “pH”.
Fava beans are a fantastic cool weather cover crop used to improve soils by many gardeners and farmers. But in my garden we grow them every year to eat them as a seasonal spring delicacy. We can hardly wait as we watch the pods getting bigger and bigger as the weather warms in the spring. The tender favas are wonderfully buttery — try them boiled for a few minutes, drain them and add a bit of olive oil, a sprinkle of salt and perhaps some lemon juice. My favorite way to eat them is to make a simple but delicious warm bean salad, just by adding fresh chopped tarragon from the garden, diced red onion and cooked baby potatoes.
Heavy clay earth can pose a difficult challenge to any farmer or backyard gardener. Test your soil to find out how suitable it is for planting; if you determine that your soil is overly rich in clay, you can still grow healthy plants. But before you can properly amend a heavy clay soil, it is important to know exactly what a clay rich soil means.
Chef Damian Cardone stunned many after admitting on his Facebook page that he knowingly fed gluten to patrons who requested gluten-free food.