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Showing posts with the label gardening

Beyond Back to Normal

Four years ago, I was headed for disability. I mowed my lawn in sections over a period of days. I was so exhausted at the end of workdays that I held assignments until I could review them the next day. I often found mistakes.  Three years ago, I was up to rehabbing my garage, but after a few hours' work I felt like I'd been run over. Progress was slow.  Yesterday, though, I mowed the lawn, finished painting the fence, put up a trellis, planted a honeysuckle under it, put down two bags of mulch and two bags of top soil, fixed the gate, touched up the paint on that fence, and painted the Great Stuff on the house. This may be the most I've ever gotten done in one day. For the first time in my life, a long to-do list became a to-done list in one day.  The weather helped: it was 55-78 degrees and not very humid. I took a lot of breaks. But still--I got it all done. I am now beyond back to normal. Regular readers know I follow Dr. William Davis's program over at DrDavisInf

Fermenting with L. Gasseri; Supplies; Order

L. Gasseri BNR17 Lactobacillus gasseri BNR17 is one of the bacteria we use over at Dr. Davis's Inner Circle. It's part of the SIBO yogurt because it creates seven bacteriocins (bacteria killers); it's also been shown to reduce waist size. So instead of making more yogurt with it, I fermented it with apples, carrots and spices (recipe here ). It's delicious, and it got rid of a lot of gas and bloating. My belly feels a little smaller too--always a good thing. I fermented it in my redneck yogurt maker with the heating pad set on high for three days. The bacteria digest the carbohydrate (greatly reducing the carb count) and it gives the apples and carrots a tart taste.  You can get L. gasseri BNR17 from Dr. Mercola's web site--it's in a product called BioThin . Once you ferment something with it, you can use the fermented food as a starter for the next batch; you don't have to keep buying supplements.  * * * * * Supplies Food choices are getting worse. I had t

Plants Arrive Early; Path Puzzle Solved!

It was a perfect weekend for gardening. I pulled weeds, pruned the roses and cut down five-foot clumps of ornamental grass. The dead grass made such a tall pile that I wondered what to do with it. The trash bin was full. You can't compost it since it doesn't break down-- That's exactly what the paths between the raised beds needed. I put a thick layer of the grass and some dead perennial stems on the paths where they'll last a long time and help block weeds. I'll still put down cardboard and mulch to make it look better, but this helped solve two problems at once. Mail-order plants are already arriving, leafy and green. It's much too early to plant them here at the northern edge of Zone 6, where it's a month away from the last average frost. Maybe the nursery doesn't have enough employees to take care of the plants, so they're sending them out. In any case, the seedlings and geraniums growing in the basement have a couple of hydrangeas to keep them c

New Food Reviews; Optimizing Projects

I love novelty. Despite getting in trouble for trying new foods (I ended up in an ambulance once), I enjoy new foods enough to keep trying them.  With the flu going around the office, I thought I'd try fermenting L. casei shirota in pawpaw fruit puree. Pawpaw is a mango-like fruit native to eastern North America. It's very sweet, but fermentation reduces sugar. I cooked the raw puree before fermenting it, then had a few bites with some pork. A few hours later, I was vomiting. It's been days and I'm still not feeling right.  Despite the web full of articles on the amazing properties of pawpaw fruit, it contains neurotoxins . Even members of the Lewis and Clark expedition might have gotten sick on it .  Fortunately, I have fermented pear juice. I put a few capsules of Floristat in the bottle and left it on the counter for a few days. It tastes good and makes my stomach feel a little better.  Finally, Mark Sisson has come out with a healthy queso dip in his Primal Kitchen

Better without Guar Gum & Erythritol

Since ditching the guar gum and erythritol, I feel like I'm 41 again. It was the age I started doing low-carb and had the energy I should have had in my 20s. The problems I had until recently--the pounding heart and breathlessness--are gone.  With this newfound energy, I dug up a boxwood bush and a juniper and potted them for a focal point among my raised beds, having dismantled the fire pit and put the stones along a border by the garage. Tonight I moved some of the beds a few inches to make room for pavers. The spaces between the beds have a thick mat of weeds, thick enough to make weeding a major undertaking, but not thick enough to stop erosion. Back in Denver in a dry, shady part of my yard, it took me years to win the battle of the goatheads in the driveway reclamation area. I'm not going to win such a battle in lush, green Indiana where my weeds are inches from rich soil of raised beds.  "Use gravel for paths!" people say. "Use wood mulch!" "Use

Quest Bars, Coconut Milk Hazards, and More

I used to love Quest bars. They were an easy snack or even a light meal replacement with low carbs and no junky ingredients. Those ingredients have changed, though. They now contain erythritol (sugar alcohol) and corn fiber. Since I'm one of those people who can't eat erythritol without getting stomach cramps, I won't be eating any more Quest bars.  Likewise, certain brands of coconut milk. Several brands contain guar gum, a thickener, which also gives me a stomach ache. Emulsifiers like guar gum can thin the mucus in your gut, allowing things into your bloodstream that don't belong there. I was feeling bloated and getting facial edema after having coconut milk with guar gum. Since changing to a brand without it (Native Forest), the problems have disappeared.  Oddly, Splenda (sucralose) doesn't seem to bother me.  * * * * * A friend who gave me a little bit of a hard time about being unvaccinated just got COVID. Fortunately, he's doing OK. Three years ago, I tho

Pwned, Ivermectin, Electrolytes, Lawnmowers and Stir-Fry

Have You Been Pwned? If you donated to the Canadian truckers via GiveSendGo, your personal information might have been compromised by hackers who attacked the site. No bank information was apparently compromised, but names, emails and locations were hacked and in some cases publicized. To find out if you were a victim, go to  https://haveibeenpwned.com . If you were pwned, make a complaint to your state's attorney general. To be safe, protect your accounts. One way is to put a freeze on your credit so that nobody can take out a loan in your name (IIRC, this is a free service with the credit reporting agencies). You can also use a fee-based service like LifeLock, which monitors your credit and accounts opened in your name. Ivermectin Study from Malaysia This randomized, controlled study didn't find that ivermectin had any effect in older people with comorbidities who had COVID. In fact, the ivermectin arm did a little worse than the placebo group as far as severe illness (the pr

Happy Thanksgiving!

 It's Thanksgiving, and at my house, that means it's time for...stratifying seeds to plant next year.  Native perennial seeds. Click to enlarge. Eighty-seven plants are going to replace the last strip of lawn along the south side of my house next year. I am feeling up to the job! But first, most of the seeds will have to put in a wet coffee filter in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for a month or two. This simulated winter will let the seeds know it's time to sprout. Then I will plant them in seed trays and put them under LED lights in the basement. The plants should be full-grown in 2023.  As for Thanksgiving dinner, somehow I don't miss it this year. I disbanded my meetup group a few years ago and the cousin I spent Thanksgiving with last year is visiting relatives in Kansas. Before the meetups and the cousin, Thanksgiving usually meant a big, noisy affair with little kids running around screaming and adults who didn't make two words of conversation because they

Late Summer Joy

I'm interrupting this delta variant/Afghanistan nightmare/vaccine passport/Australian lockdown/throw-the-unvaccinated-under-the-bus mess to bring you some late summer joy. A butterfly enjoys the asters in my back yard. A monarch butterfly caterpillar munches on milkweed by the driveway. A praying mantis sits on the garage, mugging the camera.  Summer harvest from my garden: ox heart slicing tomatoes, roma cooking tomatoes, Anaheim chiles, jalapeños, and a Right Stuff bell pepper. Biggs caught and killed the rat that was eating the tomatoes--good dog! Pickled peppers. Don't you love it when the lids go "tonk"? Only three grams of carb per quarter cup--should you want to eat that much! Three-herb marinara, made with tomatoes and herbs from the garden. No pesticides or funky ingredients, and just 13 grams of carb per half-cup serving.  The canning recipes are from the Better Homes and Gardens Complete Canning Guide, 2015. The three-herb marinara is a favorite of mine, b

The Problem with Going by the Science

Finishing my garden projects without aggravating my pinched nerve has been impossible. Weeding overgrown areas, pulling up the weed barrier under the weeds, hand-tilling the soil, grading it, then planting was about the most I could do without hurting myself--but then the lawn had to be mowed. Putting off mowing it just makes it harder later. The weather going from chilly to hot within two weeks offered a very short window to get everything done, but almost all of the nearly two hundred seedlings I started are in the ground.  The worst part about my pinched nerve is that I don't sleep well. It makes my left side buzz and keeps me awake. At that point, doing yoga just makes it worse--all that helps is aspirin.  So after weeding, tilling, grading and seeding a spot by the driveway this morning, I stopped for the day spent a pleasant hour enjoying some coffee and reading what the Indiana legislature was up to. They've set up a process to create urban agriculture zones, prioritized

Flowers and Iron

This weekend, I was well enough to wear myself out doing landscape projects. I added to my shade garden, then spaded up an 8x30 foot plot on the corner. The next day, I put down some old bed sheets donated by a neighbor, weighted them down with bricks, and started setting out a hundred home-grown perennials in Xs cut in the sheets. It was hot, sunny and humid. Halfway through, a storm was coming. I worried the sheets would billow up in the wind and break some of the plants, so I threw down two bags of mulch, grabbed the clothes off the line, went inside and watched the rain come down in sheets. When it stopped I finished planting, looking like someone from Dirty Jobs when it was over. Being too tired to cook, I got a low-carb burger and small fries at the drive-through and came back home. In spite of two days' hard work, from the street, the house looked like hippies lived there: tall grass, a missing picket, and of course the bed sheets and plants that were all either little o

Adrenal Fatigue and Thyroid: Still Fiddling with my Medications

DIYing my adrenal fatigue and low thyroid has been a challenge. At least I'm over the brain fog and can read and think more clearly. After my ears got dry and itchy again--which seems to be a symptom of low thyroid for me--I upped my thyroid dose again. I also lowered my adrenal cortex dose since I was gaining weight, even with the increased NDT (natural desiccated thyroid medicine) and decreased carb intake. The cortisol (an adrenal hormone) will make you gain weight if you take too much. I hope this is the last time I need to up my NDT, since my current dose costs $80 per month. I can't even pay for it with my HSA (health savings account, a pre-tax deal in the US). At least the adrenal cortex is cheap, and hydrocortisone is $5 a tube. The adrenal cortex, which I take in the morning at at noon, started turning me into a morning person. I was up at six doing dishes, vacuuming the house, and packing a lunch. I was tired around 10 PM. Since backing off a little, I'm ba

More Fallout from my Bike Wreck

There's a lot of talk now about how factors besides genes and current diet affect health and weight: the health of your mother when you were a fetus, your diet as a child, stress, and environment. Another is wear and tear. A few years ago when I fell off my bike and broke a tooth and knocked two others out of place, my dentist said that the two knocked out of place would likely need a root canal someday because of the injury. It could be two weeks, it could be two years, he said. Now, nearly three years later, the canine that was injured is abscessed.  Between being lethargic (doing nothing but watching Netflix when I got home), wearing my winter coat when everyone else was in shirtsleeves, and having an odd appetite (I've been living mostly on Quest bars this past month), I should have known I was sick. But I have a high threshold of pain. Finally, my face swelled up Friday morning and I made an appointment with my oral surgeon--the one who did my dental implant and g

Start Seeds for Herbs and Vegetables for Under $100

There might be nine inches of snow at my house, but yesterday was time to start gardening. Plants are expensive and it pays to start your own from seed. I've heard of people who spend an absurd amount of money to grow a garden . This isn't one of those guides. If you have some basic gardening equipment and a place outside to grow plants, you can start growing herbs and vegetables from seed for well under $100. You can re-use the most expensive equipment (a hanging fluorescent light). Before you buy anything, though, assess your situation and make a plan. If you have a sunny porch or yard and you're willing and able to frequently tend to some plants, you can make this happen. If this is the case, first, look up your average last frost date and length of growing season (click here if you're in the US). When I plug in my location, it tells me my average last frost date is May 17 and my growing season is 132 days long. With that information, I can see what I can grow he

Many Refuse Bread & Other Good News

Pre-low-carb, a Sunday afternoon would have found me taking a four-hour nap. Since I no longer need them unless I'm sick, I've been working in the yard today. A couple of women came by while I was trimming the front yard. The hedge trimmer seemed to frighten them, but they stopped anyway and offered me some bread, which I told them I couldn't eat. One of them said quite a few people had told them that. The new portion of lawn I planted last year is still going, despite my lack of caring for it after I fractured my right arm in a bike wreck last year. The two roses I planted are sprouting leaves as well--they should look like this in a year or two: Salet, introduced in France, 1854. Photo from http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/consumer/factsheets/roses/salet.htm Mortgage Lifter tomatoes (an heirloom variety) are coming up in seed trays in the basement, and there's already volunteer lettuce growing out back, even though it snowed a few days ago. Yester

Evidence-Based Gardening

Long ago, nobody messed with Mother Nature (much). Mostly, nobody knew how, and the traditional ways were common sense. Along came the chemical age, and then the backlash. Some say anything from a lab is harmful; others say Mother Nature alone is not enough. Of course, I'm talking about gardening. In general, gardeners seem to be on one side or the other: chemicals should be avoided entirely, or the only good bug is a dead bug. (Conversion is possible, though: a friend of mine was fervently anti-chemical until her apartment got a bedbug infestation.) Jeff Gillman, a professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota has chosen a different side: looking at the evidence. His book The Truth About Organic Gardening tips over some of the sacred cows of both camps: For instance, natural pesticides aren't necessarily safer than synthetic ones (good to know if you eat organic fruit, since natural pesticides are used on organically grown fruit). And bug sprays can make an inf