atlantalarry

Starting my fall garden

Yesterday I set up a raised bed for my fall garden, and put in two parsley plants, mostly to have something to look at before the seeds start sprouting.  I assembled a 4x8 foot cedar raised bed from a kit I'd bought some time back, and filled it with a mix of 1/3 compost, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 peat moss.

I use the Square Foot Gardening method developed by Mel Bartholomew, as outlined in his book All New Square Foot Gardening.  This method has several advantages, including space efficiency, ease of weeding and watering, high yields from remarkably small area, and attractiveness.  Most of the expense and work is up front, since once you have a bed set up and prepared, it can be used for a long time (until the material for the structure of the raised bed degrades) aside from regular addition of compost. 

The key trait of the method is that it dispenses with row gardening, and divides rectangular area into 12 inch by 12 inch grids of squares.  Depending on the size of the plant, you can get 16, 9, 4, or one  plant per each square.  Since my bed will give me 32 squares, I'm doing staggered plantings of 8 squares each over a four week period.  Staggering my planting avoids the problem of too much of one crop maturing at once.

My first week I'm planting Baby Finger and Royal Chantenay carrots, Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, Red Winter Kale, and a Bloomsdale spinach.  All the seeds are organic, and all except the spinach is an heirloom plant.  I'm considering adding beets, turnips, and chard to the mix in subsequent weeks.  Lettuce, carrots, and spinach will be planted every week, since we can eat as much of those vegetables as I can grow.

My goal this year is to garden all fall and winter, with cold-hardy plants like lettuce and kale dominating the outdoor gardening, and sprouting done indoors.  Sprouts will be a topic for a whole future post.  At the moment I have a batch of brocolli sprouts ready to eat, and soy and sunflower sprouts in progress. 

I don't expect to live forever, but on the other hand ...

I've always wanted to live a long life, not because of any particular fear of death, but because the events of my life, and the changes I've seen in the world around me, have been so darned interesting.  Even the mundane stuff holds my attention.  Take washing dishes for instance.  There are two baking pans in our kitchen which absolutely resist all attempts to be cleaned.  I read cleaning manuals, search the web for methods, and have tried a half dozen techniques, and it still takes ten minutes of scrubbing per pan to get the things even marginally acceptable. It's imperative that I stay alive at least long enough to defeat those pans.

It may be just a sign of getting old, but I find small routine challenges like that absorbing.  The big stuff is sort of interesting, too (major technological changes, scientific and medical advances, trying to figure out why anyone has any fascination whatsoever with either Angry Birds, or the Kardashians).

But, moving along to the topic of longevity , I've just finished reading How Not to Die: Surprising Lessons on Living Longer, Safer, and Healthier from America's Favorite Medical Examiner, by Jan Garavaglia.

I don't have cable TV, and watching anything on broadcast television is extremely rare for me, so I was only vaguely aware that Dr. Garavaglia had a TV show.  I picked her book up at the public library.  Since I am interested in health and longevity, I frequently browse the stacks on health, nutrition, and exercise, and the title caught my eye.

I wasn't disappointed with the book.  It was readable and engaging, the advice is sensible, and despite the tragic nature of the anecdotes she recounts, a number of them are funny in a macabre, Darwin Awards sort of way.  One death, which she describes as similar to a cartoon, involved a fellow who sat on a limb he was sawing from a tree.  Another involved two men hauling a mattress on a car roof.  Lacking a rope to secure it, one of the guys attempted to sit on the mattress to hold it down, with tragic, though predictable, results.

Based on her experience as a Medical Examiner, the advice she gives can be summed up as staying alive by not doing high risk things.  Don't drive fast, don't ride without a seat belt, don't smoke, don't drink heavily, keep your eating under control, keep your blood pressure and cholesterol within normal range, visit the doctor and dentist regularly, and so forth.  Some of the more interesting stories involve people who managed to die by neglecting things which don't normally kill a person, like a fellow who failed to seek treatment for an abscess, leading to a deadly infection.

The book is worth a read, whether you're interested in auditioning for the Darwin Awards, or like me, trying to avoid that honor.

 

The pink slime dilemma

Whether you call it "pink slime" (the most popular term) or "lean finely textured beef" (the beef industry's preferred name for the substance) that particular emulsified food product consisting of beef trimmings treated with ammonia has become one of the most notorious food additives of the past few decades.

Various forms of meat slurry are not unique.  The popular engineered food "chicken nuggets" are produced by a similar process.  And those longtime slurries of the processed meat world, hot dogs and sausages (unless you make them yourselves), have always included components that it's best not to think about if you intend to eat them.  Meat slurries and chemical additives are among the reasons I mostly eat food from plants, and overwhelmingly buy those foods in a form which makes them easily recognizable to me.  The tomatoes I buy or grow look like tomatoes.  The beans are clearly beans.  Even the flours I buy tend to look like what they are purported to be, and if I buy organic whole wheat the likelihood that it is really ground grain is high enough for me to accept.

The argument that pink slime is being treated unfairly may have a grain of truth to it.  Pink slime has the disadvantage of being pink and slimy.  It also had the misfortune to have its derisive popular name stick.  The likelihood that the industry's chosen name, "lean finely textured beef" is ever going to gain currency is nearly zero.  But on the other hand pink slime is probably no more unsafe (or in my opinion unappealing), than the tens of thousands of other highly processed food-like products foisted upon the public every year.

There are two interesting arguments I've seen advanced defending pink slime.

The first is that the controversy is killing companies, and consequently jobs.  That's true, but industries are hurt by negative publicity all the time.  The same argument could be used to defend the tobacco industry, or to remove toy safety regulations.  Consumers have indicated clearly that they don't want to eat a slimy, pink, ammonia-processed food additive in their hamburgers.  The USDA actually approved the stuff.  So if you would like to use the "job killer" argument blame the consumer. 

The second is that pink slime serves a resource friendly and animal friendly purpose by using more of the cow.  True, as far as the argument goes, but not eating beef is an even better way of conserving resources (the inefficiency of cattle as a food source is well documented).  Likewise not killing the cow at all is a kinder act than making sure that every bit of cartilage and ligament winds up in the hamburger or hot dog..

My own preference, and there isn't any means of enforcing it except by increasing the availability of nutritional information, and knowledge of the process by which food gets to our table, is for people to eat real food rather than highly processed and highly engineered extruded "product".

As a start, I think everyone should read the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser.  It goes into a great deal of detail on how factory farming and the fast food industry operates.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto is another book with excellent descriptions of our descent from eating food to eating highly engineering food-like product. I think the bar should be set higher for what we consider acceptable eating habits. "It won't kill you", while a good criteria at the extreme end, is hardly an encouraging endorsement of any food or diet.

 

 

 

Smoothie with a bit of a kick -- Habanero spinach smoothie

I experiment with food combinations with an enthusiasm that has often horrified my friends and relatives.  Sometimes the more unusual combinations are quite tasty, and only sound awful.  Sometimes they are just awful.  I also browse the Dekalb Farmer's market, and the various ethnic specialty grocery stores in metro Atlanta for new ingredients, and follow studies in the scientic press on possible beneficial (or detrimental) effects of various food components.

Lately I decided to add more hot peppers to my diet, based on studies indicating that capsicain, the chemical which makes hot pepper hot, might lower blood pressure and cholesterol.

Since I'm drinking a lot of smoothies these days, I decided to try a smoothie with habanero pepper (for breakfast, no less!)

Here's what I came up with.  It was actually quite tasty.

1 avocado

1 medium tomato

1 banana

1/2 cup frozen blueberries

2 cups soy milk

1 cup spinach

1/4 habenero with seeds

1 T flax seeds

1 T chia seeds

1 T walnuts

1 t cinnamon

I ground the dry ingredients (flax seed, chia seed, walnuts) first, then added the other ingredients and blend until smooth. By my standards, it's hot, but not blazingly hot.  If your tolerance for heat is lower, you could try using less habanero, or subsitute a milder pepper.

An afternoon walk along Nickajack Creek

As I've stated in a previous post, I've begun taking a long walk every day, to help bring and keep my blood pressure, and my LDL cholesterol (the "bad" cholesterol"),  down.  Unfortunately I can't check my LDL every day, but after two weeks, the increased exercise has already helped bring my blood pressure down to the normal range.

My current favorite place to walk is Heritage Park trail, which runs parallel to the Silver Comet trail, and connects to the Silver Comet near the ruins of a 19th century mill.  The Heritage Park trail is roughly 1.5 miles long, and I extend the distance by doing part of the walk along the Silver Comet trail, for a total distance of about 4 miles, most of which runs along Nickajack Creek, one of the tributaries to the Chattahoochee River.

I took a few photos of my Thursday walk along the trail

 

The first is the entrance to the trail, at the intersection of Fontaine Road and Nickajack Road.

This is a native azalea bush.  I've believe they are Rhododendron calendulaceum, otherwise known as flame azaleas.

The trail begins on a downhill slope:

After a few hundred feet you reach a boardwalk over a marshy area.

Then there is a bridge over Nickajack Creek

After crossing the bridge you walk along the edge of Nickajack Creek for maybe a mile or so:

The next notable feature is the ruins of an old mill.  This is also where the connector to the Silver Comet trail is.  The connector enters the Silver Comet between the bridge over the East West Connector, and the bridge over Nickajack Creek.  This stretch includes the Concord Road entrance point to the Silver Comet trail.

Below is the paved connector to the Silver Comet trail, which runs above Heritage Park:

This is the beginning of the connector, taken from the Silver Comet trail.  Note the bike racks.  If you're biking on the Silver Comet trail, Heritage Park trail would be worth a look:

I have about a hundred other photos, but the ones I've posted here give a pretty decent overview of Heritage Park.

Yet another soymilk-based vegetable/fruit smoothie

Normally my breakfast and lunch are the meals where I get creative, and concoct combinations which one of my past co-workers called my "dare foods".  At dinner (aka supper, as we always called it when I was growing up) I'm also usually preparing the meal for my wife, so I have to be a bit less daring, and somewhat more conventional.

This evening my wife is at her office late,  so my evening meal is for me alone.  I went with the criteria I use for the breakfast and lunch.  That goal is to pack as many different nutrients and beneficial substances into the meal as possible.  Often the best way to do that is to make a smoothie.

Tonight's  smoothie consisted of:

2 cups soymilk

2 cups kale leaves

1 medium tomato

1 medium apple

1/2 cup blueberries

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 teaspoons olive oil

2 tablespoons rice based protein powder

I'm drinking it as I type this, and it's really good ... at least by the wide ranging standards of my palate.  My guess is that on my scale of 1 to 10, which ranges from 1 (foods only I would eat) to 10 (dishes most people would find tasty) this is about a 7.  If you like smoothies you should give it a try.

Walking

I had no intention of transforming this blog into a health and fitness blog, but those are my particular obsessions at the moment, and health and fitness (particularly healthy food, and exercise) are what provide me with enough motivation to write regularly.

As part of my plan to bring my blood pressure and LDL ("bad" cholesterol) down into a more suitable range, I've begun going on a long walk every day. 

At one time running and cycling were my exercises of choice, and were built into my routine.  I would cycle commute (which guaranteed me at least eight miles of brisk cycling) and had the habit of running either in the morning before work, or during my lunch break (depending on the weather).  I work from home now, and running has been increasingly hard on my aging knees.

Consequently I've begun a daily program of walking.  I haven't excluded cycling and running altogether, but walking has a number of advantages over both of them.  It isn't as rough on the joints as running, and it isn't as gear and equipment intensive as cycling.  It's also something I can schedule at the spur of the moment, wherever I am, as long as I have a decent pair of shoes.

So I bought a cheap pedometer, and set it to measure number of paces.  My target is a minimum of 10,000 steps per day.  So far that's been easy to meet.  I've been walking the length and back of Heritage Park trail in Mableton (which parallels the Silver Comet Trail on one side, and Nickajack Creek on the other).  Walking its length and back is approximately 6,100 of my paces.  That leaves me only 3,900 steps to go, which I've been able to meet just by the rest of my routine activities during the day.

If I decide to increase the base number of steps, the Heritage Park trail connects to the Silver Comet trail, so I can just walk up to the Silver Comet and add an additional leg to the walk.

I've timed my walk a few times, and I'm averaging about 4.2 miles per hour, which I've seen defined as "brisk".

I've always loved to walk, so in addition to the other advantages it's fun.  The modest amount of gear also appeals the part of me which tries to keep everything in my life as simple as possible.  If I'm stuck somewhere without walking shoes, I can walk in dress shoes, as long as they fit properly, and the pedometer is optional. 

For those of you who plan and fantasize about starting an exercise program,  but never really seem to get started, walking may be your best choice.  Just make sure your shoes fit, pick a route you find appealing, start with a distance appropriate to your current physical state, and walk.