Both Laura and I grew up tending and eating from the family
garden. I (John) used to run up and down the block bouncing between
dad’s garden and grandpa's garden. I learned to grow
vegetables, herbs, ground fruit, fruit trees, and fruit bushes.
Laura’s mom tended to a vegetable & herb garden with walnut
trees and raspberry bushes. All kids should have it so good.
My experiences in the local retail garden nurseries taught me more
about nourishing garden beds for better yields. This complimented my
additional study of raised garden beds and aquaponic systems. Each
garden enhancement I learned didn’t come easy. I lost my health
using commercial gardening products. They were the catalyst to my
liver damage and eventually my heart failure. Laura’s mom was
more organic in her gardening. As a result, Laura’s health was
pretty good for a number of years longer after we were married.
As a result, nothing we would like to use now damages or limits the nutritional
quality of the food we can grow. Nutrition is more than protein, fat,
and carbohydrates found in our food. It’s the trace minerals
and proper soil bacteria that makes the best gardens and therefore
the best food.
Growing the best food doesn’t stop when it leaves the
garden. As we need protein in our diet our gardening includes some
animal husbandry. Knowing what our food needs for food and growing it
greatly enhances the quality of all of our food and eventually our own
health.
Then, we added food preparation technics. Different technics
preserve different nutrients or unlock them for our consumption.
Enzymes and some prebiotics are usually best served raw. Minerals
often need to be cooked or fermented loose before vegetables will release them.
Sometimes alkaloids are needed to defeat the anti-nutrition found in
seeds and roots; hominy is an example of this. Many probiotics we
need come from fermenting and fermented foods. Salt is the key
ingredient to breeding the best probiotics in meats, vegetables, and
our intestinal flora. So many condiments, pickles, cured meats, and
vegetables fill this bill.
We also go into food storage and packaging methods like
dehydration, freeze drying, bottling, and constructing unique charged
storage areas designed to reduce rot and preserve fresh foods.
It’s not just our animals that need special care to be the best food
they can be. Plants often benefit from insects like bees pampering
them. Everyone should think about keeping bees. Better produce yelds come
from a more verbose number of pollinators; not to mention the sweet treat
of honey gracing our efforts.
And since we’re omnivores and require some nutritionally
dense meat regularly, we included animal husbandry in with our
gardening. We’re looking at farming rabbits, ducks, geese,
chickens, turkeys, sheep, goats, cows, snails, crayfish, trout, carp,
and eventually maybe sturgeon. This also means we’ll be framing
feed insects and critters with home grown feed crops for our animals.
We’ll incorporate the complete mineral retirements for ourselves
at the soil level. So, each level we step up the food chain condenses the
nutrition till we get to the final stage before dinner.
Our advancements are to include “Pasturoponics” and
“Husbandroponics” to compliment our slightly more
advanced “Aquaponics”. Recycling minerals and using
healthy soil full of probiotics enhances plant development. We have
developed ways of using several different animals wastes in our
hydroponic soil systems. You see, fish is great but... chicken, beef,
mutton, kid, goose, duck, rabbit, (you get the idea) is better.
We use the science of the earth to simplify our systems while
producing the largest most nutritious fruits, vegetables, meats, and herbs
available. Getting the nutrition into our food isn’t any good if
we don’t know how to get it out again. We’ll even discuss how
to prepare different foods to get the nutrition that we’d like
and need around the activities of our busy days.
See you inside!
