Winter Greens

February 8, 2009 - Good news - no matter where you live, you are never more than 3 days away from fresh, local greens. I don't know why we didn't start doing this earlier in the winter, but now that we are starting to crave crunchy fresh greens (and cringe at the grocery store prices for organic mixed greens), we have started sprouting again.



All you have to do is drop some mung beans, alfafa seeds, or any other sprouting beans into a mason jar. Soak them in water overnight, then rubberband some cheesecloth around the top of the jar, and drain. Lay the jar on your kitchen counter and let them go to work! Rinse and drain about twice a day, and after three or four days you'll have a special treat that tastes like spring time! Joe's the sprouter in our house, so I can't say I've got much experience in this, but I sure was grateful of his work at breakfast this morning when we ate them with our eggs.

Speaking of eggs, here are two of them that went into the pan this morning -

Notice anything unusual? The one on the left is normal sized and the one on the right is twins (a double-yolker)!

Oh, and my book of the moment is The New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman - another celebrity in the organic growing world. This book is fantastic and gives excellent, easy to follow advice on creating an organic garden. I first opened it the other day looking for how to manage pests in the garden organically. Here's what I got - "The systems of the natural world are elegant and logical. The idea of striving to create life-giving foods while simultaneously dousing them with deadly poisons is inelegant and illogical."

Great, but then what DO you do about them? He argues that it is the 'stressed' plant that ends up diseased, and that if we give plants what they need, they will be less likely to get 'sick' - very much the case with humans as well, no? Pests are not the problem, but rather an indication of a problem. In short - grow healthy plants with nutrient rich soil and plenty of breathing room and you shouldn't even have to THINK about spraying nasty chemicals (even the 'organic' ones) on your food.

Makes sense to me...