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Category Archives: healthy eating

Oh Oh…IgG-o

26 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by wystansimons in chickens, healthy eating, spring, starting a garden, turn lawnscapes to gardens, Uncategorized

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Queen of Procrastination, I have avoided writing this post for 19 months A record? Hah.  But now, after lying dormant, the Suburban Gardens blog entombed perhaps and clinging to a reed like a sleeping caterpillar, now emerges transformed! And from henceforth —-

Wait, let me start at the beginning.

Two summers ago,  HUGE CHANGE plopped into the Simons Gardens world like a massive chickie poo.  One of our doctors suggested an IgG test for food sensitivities.  In our constant quest for optimum health, Wystan, Edward, and Oskar (yes, we cudgelled the poor lad into it) pressed a stabbed finger onto a special paper card in six places and the doctor mailed it off. When this IgG test came back from the lab it showed a fairly high level of antibodies to chicken eggs. 

And eggs isn’t all, as you can see from the list above. Oh drat.

I had heard that some doctors suggest low level sensitivity to eggs is more common than many people realize.  Dr. Terry Wahls, for instance, (Wahls Paleo)  But I had ignored this advice, like any normal person would do.  Eggs are awesome!  Most of my life I ahve eaten an egg or two a day.  In 2018 in pursuit of better health, Edward and I had ditched sugars & grains, and had filled our plates with veggies but also LOTS of eggs , butter,  meat, and nut flours.  I often ate 4  eggs a day.  I didn’t feel that well after 6 months of eating “Paleo,” but it was hard to say why… I had unexplained stomach aches. And Edward never did lose weight the way you would expect, considering how many carby things he cut out.

So, we gave up the almonds, and the eggs….

AND , True Confessions (this hurts dear readers, sob) we gave up our hens. It just made no sense to keep them. With Edward and Oskar’s help I packed up my chickens and drove them to live on a mountainside in Middletown MD.  Our friend Ben Friton, of the Reed Center for Ecosystem Reintegration took them in.  He tells me they seem very happy.

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Photo credit Ben Friton

There is more to the diet quest, if you have the stomach for it (couldn’t resist).  Those stomach aches didn’t really stop with removal of eggs and almonds. At summer’s end 2018 we tried out live blood analysis, at the insistence of a friend and just to prove how healthy we now were.  The magnified image of a single drop of blood on the screen revealed parasites, bacteria, and undigested food particles in my blood. Nearly every red blood cell had a PacMan like creature inside it.  Our holistic nutritionist proposed I focus on well-cooked veggies, stews, soups, and cut back on harder-to-digest foods, like butter, oils, nuts, meat. Many of the very foods that the paleo diet had us tanking up on, to avoid carbs and sugars. Waaah what’s left?? I whined.  I admit, I was bitter.

But finally, after  sulking a while, I noticed that on a mostly well-cooked veggie with some meat, + fruit eaten with raw veggie diet my stomach aches were gone. I felt better. My chronically bloated stomach is gone, as long as I can stick to it. Which I am not so good at doing. Nothing wrong with healthy fats as long as you have the chops to digest them — I wish I could!  I loved the keto/paleo thing, and it really does cut my sugar cravings to eat fats.

But where does this leave the blog Suburban Growing? Admit it, you only loved me for my chickens.  Chicken-less Gardens lack sex appeal, somehow, but then even the gardens were hacked apart following the torrential rains of fall 2018, dug up to accommodate sump-pump drainage pipes and so on.

The new year breathes fresh ideas and exciting change. The Simons Gardens will be relocated this summer to a tiny borough in Pennsylvania: Bryn Athyn, my husband’s hometown.  This time we will living on the top of a hill, on 2 acres with a southern exposure, tons of sunshine…and also colder winters and a two week delay on springtime, my husband points out.  He would have preferred the challenges of Florida gardening I think.  But Bryn Athyn brings us closer to family.

I don’t want to get carried away, just because we have more land than before.  Remeber, we are older now. But, might there be a few just a few chickens in our future? well.  Maybe a small orchard?… a composting toilet perhaps in the garden shed? and certainly reforesting the edges of the large lawn so there is less to mow….right?

There are green building issues to consider too,  to make this house right for our family.  Is there such a thing as a sustainable that is low-impact way to renovate a house? I hope so. The renovation shows I watch at the gym are terrifying. Heave ho and off to the landfill with piles of tiles and granite counter tops, to be replaced with other tiles and granite counter tops… What is the point in eating organically if we are filling the planet with the leftovers of our insatiable consumerism?? So, the quest for ways to grow food, put up food, and live sustainably will take this blog into 2020 and beyond. t revealed that I am highly s

Suburban Growing, like the phoenix (or the caterpillar) rising from ashes (chrysalis please!) is ready to fly again. 

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Cornucopia

16 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by wystansimons in healthy eating, sustainable living

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Tags

fall gardening, herbs, permaculture

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWv2O_MDIqF/

This has not been a stellar year for the Simons gardens, as I may have mentioned before. And even so, EVEN SO, once you start really paying attention to what is growing in your yard it is amazing what there is there to eat.

For instance, how about this. Scrolling through Instagram (cell phone use has spiked these past few weeks) I found this GORGEOUS photo of steamed Brussels sprouts leaves wrapped around meat and rice. Looks yummy. I thought this even a thing? eating the leaves of plants from the brassica family?? Brassicas are the cole crops, that is broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, etc. That’s great news for us since we can grow the leaves pretty well. It’s what comes after that just doesn’t work out. At this moment I have big beautiful  leaves on plants that will probably never see broccoli heads or Brussels sprout bulbs climbing a stalk skyward. At our house, if the chickens don’t break in and get them, them get MUNCHED by caterpillars — or could it be voles?

I went out into the garden with a flashlight tonight, and harvested a quick handful of  beautiful Brussels sprout leaves from the two stalks that survived, and chopped them into my Indian/Asian fusion invention (chopped onions with tons of curry, tumeric, and garam marsala, ground meat, diced scavenged thin-walled peppers and last of the green tomatoes, currant, diced Granny Smith) and we ate this over steamed cabbage noodles. (Thin slices of cabbage steamed, another idea that I stole from Instagram, many thanks to Amara and Martin!) I meant to get a photo for you all, but it was so good…we ate it all up without a technology stop in the middle.

It was difficult year for the Simons Gardens — first cold, then dry, then very wet, and cold again — just contrary! our green beans, tomatoes, and pepper plants struggled!! — and yet. And yet the soil gave us enough peppers for lots of salads and some to slice up with onions and freeze. The garlic heads didn’t grow large, but three bunches are dried and hanging on the kitchen wall. Jars of dried herbs lie in the cupboards – lavender, sage, oregano, thyme stored with  leftover stay fresh packets from vitamin bottles to preserve them.

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We didn’t get that many cherries from our trees, but more than before. We ate and froze some  blueberries, black raspberries, and strawberries. We did great with salad greens! Grew onions for the first time ever.We only lost one hen over the summer, and the little chickens raised by the adoptive mother last spring have laid their first little girl eggs.

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Then let’s not forget the piles and piles of pruned crape myrtle that I made everyone cut into sticks and stack on the kindling pile!  Looking over this year in our gardens as we wrap up our harvest, I’d say yes, in spite of the frustrations we’ll do it again. It can be maddening. But we love growing things. And there is something to be said for learning to let things go, recognizing how little we control, appreciating what good arrives in our basket or on our plate.

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There is always more to learn, always more to understand about the way weather and soil and insects and even irritating #*%#!! voles operate together, a symphony that we hardly understand.  So we make guesses. We chop down tall foliage to create more light, raise beds higher to ease our aging backs, build new enclosures to better rotate the chickens, and set up rain barrels locally in more gardens to simplify watering in the coming year.

But for now as cold creeps over the ground, we’ll cover our beds with leaf mulch to rest them and us for a season.  Enjoy the fireside. Crush the dryer sock full of lavender in the laundry room….and dream of what might be possible next season…

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Lunch

05 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by wystansimons in chickens, healthy eating, sustainable living

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Tags

chickens, permaculture, sustainable living

 

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Even in a suburban garden, you sometimes get to witness remarkable wildlife in action. Such was the case the other day when I turned around while feeding my chicks, to find a magnificent clean up operation going on.

Maybe I just identify with beings that stuff their mouths. I really do like and appreciate the snakes on our property just much as I dislike and cuss at the mice and sparrows that invade it, spreading their vermin inside and out. True, those grungy sparrows are just trying to make a living and get dinner — but then, so is the snake.

Even if snakes are not your thing, I hope you can appreciate this remarkable achievement in a young snake’s life –

 

Go snake.

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Mischief Managed.

Enjoy this piece? Check out the “Part Two” at my other blog, embracingchaos.net

 

 

 

Snubby

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by wystansimons in healthy eating, sick chickens

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Tags

chickens, gardening, sustainable living

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Snubby the Chicken gives me a Look

Sunday night I sat rocking a chicken on the swinging bench after a busy day and a busy week, feeling guilty. Edward had found her squatting on the run floor that morning, and when we came to remove her from the rest of the flock that night it was obvious that she was on her way out. So I just sat on the swinging bench and looked at the beautiful gardens and the evening sky and rocked her and thought about her life. Then I set her still wrapped in an old towel into the earth, to give her body to improve the soil and nourish a tree.

This chicken had the kind of life that makes a vegan and vegetarians cry.  She was no real breed – a “sex-link” created for high productivity. Her face had been snipped when she was a chick, so she has a funny snubby thing instead of a beak. This meant she was at a disadvantage for keeping herself groomed for vermin, and for pecking up bugs out of the soil. Chickens are de-beaked regularly as a way of stopping them from pecking (injuring, killing) each other when great numbers are confined together. When I bought this batch of young hens from the local Feed Store I was shocked. This happens all the time, but we humans never see it. I complained to the store manager, and of course she never sells any of those now – but there are chickens being snipped every day of the week, and sold somewhere else.

Further trauma was in store for Snubby and the others in her group of six as they adapted to their new home and tried to find their places in the pecking order with my other hens. Then during July and August raccoons found a way into our chicken run, killing chickens night after night before Edward, assisted by Trumbull the dog, discovered their sneaky access point.  (Trum is still always on the lookout, every night…hoping…)

For a while then Snubby the chicken had relative peace. New young hens were added to the flock, and acclimated. She got lice (probably) and got dusted with the flock to relieve her of them. But when she got the yeast imbalance “vent gleet” this winter as most of the flock did, when everybody else overcame the yeast overgrowth, she never did. Her butt was all dirty feathers. She looked more and more poorly lately, and I wasn’t sure what it meant – but I was too busy with spring garden prep, and spring’s craziness to do more than worry and feed and pasture her well. And that wasn’t enough. She lived just one year.

For animals (or humans) to have good resistance to disease, they have to be bred for that. So much of who gets what is in the genes of any animal system, and there is plenty of sloppy breeding, or breeding for productivity, fast over every other trait. But still plenty is in the feeding, and the animal’s life. Stress is a huge factor. The nutrition to useless carbs ratio in their food. Exercise.  Animals will be healthiest eating a diet as close to what they would eat in nature as possible, and having the opportunity to scratch, or wallow or run depending on what their species loves to do. I am sure these words will sound foolish to some. However, if you are eating animals, or eating and drinking what animals generate, the food can only be as good as the level of care those animals receive. Think about that.

Do you eat eggs? Do you eat chicken? Hamburgers?  Most of the animal products you find come from creatures that have been raised in unnatural or cruel situations, in cages, away from the sun, unable to scratch and peck, unable to stretch out, unable to forage in the grass or wallow in the mud — sometimes unable to move.  Mother pigs caged for their whole lives lest they become violent, chickens in caged one on top of another but still producing daily eggs, steer standing in pools of manure, fed corn that causes them stomach pain and sickness, chickens raised in barns so crowded that they cannot move and trample or attack each other, piglets so bored that they bite each other’s tails off in frustration. Essentially, eating those eggs, that pork, that roast chicken, you are eating poison. It is only a matter of time before you or your offspring develop cancers or digestive issues or auto immune illnesses or you name it.

A toxic setting produces toxic products. This should be so obvious to anyone who reflects on production costs: you can never, ever get something good for nothing. But we make ourselves blind, we think only about the dollars we are saving, buying the “sale meat.” We feel in fact virtuous when we save a few dollars. A few cents. We pay many, many dollars for expensive drugs, for expensive surgeries, for vitamins,  for medical care of all kinds to repair the damage when it’s too late — but we don’t make the correlation. Human health = farm animal health. This is not an issue for the wealthy, a shee-shee fruity goofball issue, nor a political attack point.  It is basic science, and basic business, and practical fact. You get out what you put in.

So to you, dear sad ugly funny faced chicken, thanks for opening my eyes to see in the flesh what I had been told was true. Thanks for the eggs you laid for us. Maybe someday the government will stop giving tax dollars away to fatten the pockets of wealthy big corporations, and instead support the small farmers who are doing things right. How can we make better food available to more people? And this is as true for vegetables as it is for meat products – toxic growth processes produce toxic plants. It’s just that vegetables can’t feel pain and misery while waiting for us to figure it out.

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“Huh! If she really loved us she’d let us get to that kale again!”  “You said it sister.” “I’m gonna go find me a worm.”

WHO Says?

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by wystansimons in healthy eating, Uncategorized, Using Your Garden

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Tags

eating for health, growing, winter gardening

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This is a blog about gardening, growing you own food in a suburban setting. Creating your own food stream. Today we spend a minute or two on the why of gardening, on the larger picture of what we eat, and why, and who says so. It’s all my pediatrician’s fault.

I sat in the pediatrician’s office this week with one of my kids who was getting a physical, looking at the Food Pyramid he has posted on the back of his examination room door.  To educate growing minds, presumably, about how to be healthy, be strong, and live long.

Sigh. In every other way my pediatrician is such a brilliant guy.

The first problem I have with Food Pyramid is that in every version the whole bottom layer, the widest layer, indicating “eat the MOST of this!” is made up of carbohydrates, a completely unnecessary food source. (The body can make glucose from fat, and fat from glucose. Check it out for your self about carbohydrates ) Don’t get me wrong – carbohydrates taste yummy. I love them. Many people can digest starchy veggies like carrots and even potatoes ok without triggering an huge insulin problem. And some number of people can eat the various grass seed heads that become bread, pasta, cakes, cookies without any ill effects. Good for them. But alas,  even though I am not celiac, and am otherwise pretty healthy, meaning that I am not overweight, nor dealing with diabetes, nor dealing with ADD or ADHD, and have none of the auto-immune diseases so common today, I cannot eat grain-based foods without getting sick.  This is just from being intolerant. What does that mean? Although I love to lie to myself about it, grains trigger a host of symptoms, particularly when mixed with sugar, as in pies, breads, bagels, cakes, crackers, doughnuts, pasta etc,etc. Instantly, itchy bumps form at my hairline and behind my ears, in my eyebrows. My ear canals itch and crack open and ooze liquid stuff.  I can get away with a little cheating – I am not celiac – but if  I persist in eating grain based foods for long enough, allergies, colds, and ear infections follow.  If I just have a little bit, I only risk increasing my interest in them – and it is so hard to turn off the carbohydrate machine, once he is aroused.

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From 2016

The next problem I have with the FDA and food charts is the amount of influence large corporations seem to have over what is printed on the chart.  For instance, Big Sugar. How is it that sugar on the chart at all, even as “eat sparingly”?  Sugar is an addictive substance (come on, you know this. Do you really need a bunch of research mice to prove it?) Who eats sugar sparingly? Besides, it is now added to most stored-made foods. From lunch meats to pasta sauces to mustard. Even though my ear canals were telling me first, Dr. Lustig and the World Health Organization are there to remind me that sugar is liver-toxic. (Why believe my ears? see for yourself about Dr Lustig, and WHO sugar guidelines)  And then as far as corporate influence goes there’s Big Dairy. Dairy is in the third row on the Pyramid, after vegetables and fruits. In the newest FDA recommendations it has it’s own spot, in your glass:

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Current FDA recommended daily allowances diagram

Just speaking personally, I began to claim my health back about a decade ago when I mostly cut out dairy, which I only did in support of one of my children who was on a special diet.  That was when I stopped having seasonal allergies. Wow. If I want to have seasonal allergies again, all I have to do is enjoy dairy in the season. Especially if I combine it with wheat. Believe me, I have tried this. I experimented with grassfed raw dairy to see if that was any better — I am very fond of dairy, much more so than sugar — but nope. Apparently I am not alone in this (Dairy Products, by Dr. Gina Shaw, MD )

On the top of the Food Pyramid is a tiny space for fat and sugar. WE talked about sugar, but why is fat up here, at the top? My best indicator of what I should eat or not eat is how I feel when I do it – that’s the only measure that has ever been any good to me.The fads come and the fads go. I tasted some “low-fat” foods and could tell right away that they would irritate me. All sugars, no fat. I know that I need fat desperately. I notice that I will not over-eat of fat. It stops being appetizing. When you need fat, you know it! When you eat too much straight butter, butter becomes unappealing.  I notice that naturally occurring fats, such as butter on my vegetables, bacon with my green vegetables, avocados and olive oil with salt on my salads tastes SO GOOD!  I have read that the vitamins in greens and broccoli are absorbed best in the presence of fats, because they are fat-soluble vitamins. Vitamins A and D.  This could be true – how would I know? I am not a scientist.  But what I know for sure is that eating dark green with butter or bacon tastes awesome , and makes me feel great. Whereas pancakes with bacon fat makes me feel stuffed and uncomfortable. And Gluten Free crackers with butter don’t hurt me much, but never really satisfy, even if I eat the whole bag…

By now it should be obvious that I have a very crummy digestive system. You may be wondering, what does work, Wystan?  Thanks to the support of my sister Ann (also on a quest for her health), I have discovered some wonderful things. The broth of bones cooked for 24 or more hours, with carrots, onions, garlic, celery, mushrooms, and some meat cubes makes such a delicious stew. Chicken bones cooked overnight, allowed to cool, and then reheated for another day release amazing things from their marrows for a fabulous healing chicken vegetable soup. Awesome with curry!!  Bacon fried up with onions and any kind of greens (kales, mustard greens, collards – each has it’s unique texture and flavor) are nourishing for hours. Greens steamed a minute and touched with butter are delicious, if you find you don’t want bacon. Brussels sprouts chopped are also delicious sauteed with butter or a slice of bacon chopped up with onions. Then there’s fermented foods: one head of chopped Cabbage, pounded with sea salt, stuffed into a mason jar and left alone for four days in the dark makes amazing, buttery sauerkraut. It’s alive with probiotics, and chases away colds, it’s true, but I eat it because it tastes so – yum- well, I don’t know anything that tastes quite like it! Wonderful! Especially if you add some fresh ginger and red pepper flakes.

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Homemade sauerkraut

Vegetables are dah BOMB. But as with any source of food, you need to know how to work magic on the raw ingredients. Years before we began to fry Kale up with butter or bacon and onions, kale I bought would wither in my fridge. It looked so – ugh. Dull. Scratchy! How was I gonna put that weird stuff in my mouth?? Yuk. But steamed in a little water, and touched with butter, and your tongue AND your body tell me YES! You want this stuff!   There is a reason people eat have eaten collards with the ham bone or a piece of fat back for hundreds of years.

This season, I am going to do my best to put my garden where my mouth is – increasing the rows of kale in my garden by about 100%.  🙂 (Like I said, we didn’t use to like kale much.) The temporary greenhouse that we have struggled to finish (it’s getting there!) will be temporary only in the sense that the plastic walls and roof can be rolled up part of the year. It will be a permanent part of growing. In terms of “growing my own” there is nothing we eat more of right now than salads and dark green vegetables, and this simple structure should allow us to keep growing our own well into winter. We’ll see! Always so much to learn – whether it’s tuning in to your body’s messages, or tuning in to what nature has to teach you outside it. When choosing your seeds, listen to what you love to eat, and listen to what your soil and climate want to grow. It’s always a dance.

But as for what the FDA’s Food Pyramid knows that can help you – fahgeddaboutit.

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