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Sparkle (2)
I'm one of those people that enjoy traveling for three to four days max and, then, I'm ready for my cozy bed and all the comforts of home. I was reminded last night about just how blessed I am to have "the comforts of home." Our travels brought us past quite a few homeless people, and as I was enjoying my hot shower last night with my favorite soap, the shower head I love so much and the smell of a fresh, clean, sun-dried towel, I was reminded of just how blessed I am. Those people we passed don't have the "comforts of home." They don't even have the privilege of a hot shower every night or something we take for granted as much as a clean towel. They don't have the choice to grow a garden in their yard either. What a blessing to have even a small yard that we can give a function to other than just looking pretty!
We spent the day today enjoying that very privilege. We enjoyed the morning in our yard pulling weeds, harvesting and planting new seeds. Then, we took a trip over to the community garden to do the same. The best part...all our work brought home a bunch of yummy, fresh produce. What a beautiful way to enjoy the day! Here's what we got out of the front yard alone...
Check out this fun Candy Cane Beet. It's an old heirloom variety...so sweet and festive! We even eat the leaves of the beet...tastes just like spinach.
For lunch, we enjoyed the fruits of our labor. Just add soft-boiled eggs and some local, raw cheese.
We love salads around here...even the kids love them!
Oops...caught :)!
God created our bodies to need lots and lots of fruits and veggies. The average American gets two and a half servings total of fruits and vegetables a day, but we should be eating five. Even worse, most Americans get their daily intake from nutritionally depleted fruits and vegetables. "What?!?!" you say. "Well, I'm fine...I buy fresh fruits and veggies. No cans and frozen stuff in my house." Nope...sorry, still depleted.
Let me explain. The vegetables and fruits you buy at your grocery store are shipped from all over the country, or worse, the world. I never quite understood this problem until we grew our first crop of tomatoes. First off, they were bright red, but never mind that...the taste blew my socks off! I found it strange though, that they would sit on my counter-top for a few days and would already be starting to go bad. How did the grocery store tomatoes sit around for a week or sometimes longer? Not to mention, why do they not taste anywhere near the same as what was coming from my front yard??
Well, it's simple. The tomatoes are grown with hybrid seeds engineered to give a certain shape, size, yield, color, etc. They are sprayed with chemicals to keep the bugs off, and synthetic fertilizers are added for a speedy growth. Then, they are picked from the plant before they get to turn red and gassed with ethylene—a colorless, flammable gas derived from petroleum. Picking tomatoes green and ripening them artificially is what makes them taste bad, according to Brett Clement, managing editor ofThe Tomato Magazine.
"Why?" you ask. So, that the grocery stores can offer you inexpensive tomatoes all year round. You see, tomatoes are grown and harvested only once a year. In Florida, we can sometimes squeeze in a second season with a Fall crop, but for the most part, tomatoes are planted in the Spring and harvested in the early Summer. As demand grew (or maybe our patience shrunk) to have access to tomatoes all year long, growers learned to use science to accommodate us.
It's not just the tomatoes. Most of all "fresh" produce you get in the grocery store is not in its most natural state. Something has to be done to it for it to look perfect, ship across country and still have a shelf life. The more we "mess" with our food, the more nutrients we lose. The longer it spends in shipping and sitting on a shelf, the more nutrients we lose. The more chemicals used in
