Good morning, Funny how folks can have such strong feeling
about a group of incredibly nutritious and downright healthy veggies. Responses
from “I can’t live without them” to “nothing green is going to pass my lips”
Greens are incredibly easy to grow and depending how you
grow them, they do not take up a lot of room. If you harvest leaves instead of
plants, you can harvests for months. The main reason I plant new seedlings of
kale and chard is the kale gets to looking like 2 foot tall palm trees and the
chard begin to look like leafy baobab trees. This makes them hard to keep
covered.
Besides their ease of growing they are very high in vitamin
C. I suspect why everyone thinks of oranges first for vitamin C is most likely
advertising or maybe the story of how the English got one of their most noted
nick names of “Limy”. They would pack citrus on their ships to help prevent
scurvy due to vitamin C deficiencies. It just may have been a bit difficult to
pack peppers and leafy greens on a long voyage pre refrigeration days. But take
a look at this list of goodies that have more Vitamin C than the advertised
King of “C”.
Who hasn’t purchased a wonderful looking orange, pealed it
to eat, only to find the interior to be not to dissimilar to packing material.
This is really quite disappointing. Pithiness is not a problem with greens
because you eat the whole thing and you do get to see what eat.
Besides vitamins greens are loaded with antioxidants. If I
understand these things properly, they help heal aging or damaged cells. These
cells left untreated can morph into a bunch of nasty’s of which cancer is one
of them. Not saying by eating greens you will avoid these nasty’s, but they may
go a long way towards preventing them.
I might add a very good friend was diagnosed with one of
the gender specific cancers. One of the treatments that were suggested to her
was to eat lots of greens. This put the cancer into remission and we look
forward to hearing from her next checkup. Follows is a link to many of the
wonderful attributes of greens.
One can eat greens raw or cooked. Deb says whenever a recipe calls for greens,
she will use what green she has on hand. Each green has just a little different
taste and can change a recipe just by changing the green.
Something we have done is to dehydrate greens and add them
to any recipe. In a crumbled up state you get the goodness but not necessarily
the look of greens in a food dish.
Also for lots of wonderful green recipes, check out the
Chard Cornicles on facebook.
Besides if you are serious about local produce, greens are
a very good choice. As noted above how I grow greens, they are quite different
from other winter veggies that I grow. Carrots, onions, kohlrabi, beets,
parsnips… you have to grow a whole new plant to get a harvest. This can be
difficult during the colder parts of the winter, but greens will keep producing
all winter long.
And leave the oranges on the rack and eat yourself a bunch
of greens. Your health will thank you for it!!!
What a wonderful rain this week. As of Wednesday afternoon
we had received 2.4 inches with a yearly total of 14.9 inches. Just about
average. Nice and slow so a real soaker although I did notice a little overland
flow but nothing like a cloud burst rainstorm.
Summer vegies are fading real quickly now, what with the
cooling and lower light levels. It is
only 5 months until I replant them for next year.
Greens are coming on (Asian, chard, kale, broccoli raab)
Kohlrabi are continuing to bulb, maybe a small harvest of spinach next
week. After a few complications with the
boc choy, I should be transplanting soon. My peas are up for over wintering and
an early spring harvest. Things are
looking pretty good. Oh and one last note, the sweet harvest is done and
poundage was pretty good considering 2 beds had RKN. Final tally of 531 pounds
so we should have sweets for awhile.
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