Plants for a healthy living

PLANTS FOR A HEALTHY LIVING

The active gardener can derive immense benefits to a healthy life style from his garden.

The exercise value alone can be significant but add in the fresh air and sunshine, the home grown fruit and vegetables free from pesticides and then the visual pleasures of flowers and scents and you have a great start to a healthy life.

Home grown produce will be free from the harmful pesticides and herbicides used as routine on commercial crops. Crops grown in UK come under very strict control ensuring that only safe and approved pesticides are used, but imported crops from all over the world do not have the same regulations and controls as we have here, so food health is a gamble. If you grow your own food crops you reduce the need to buy imported foods.

Even a small garden or allotment can provide a small family with most of their annual needs in fruit and vegetables and cut flower for the house with good cultivations and careful planning.

The Scottish diet gets a bad press, however, a lot of effort goes into promoting healthier foods and into encouraging people to cut back on the high fat fast foods, junk food, and fry ups in favour of  eating  more fruit, vegetables, nuts and grains.

The availability of cheap instant food has allowed people to take the easy option with the minimum of cooking. However in time, we may well revert to a healthier diet as promotion runs at full tilt with good and entertaining cookery programmes on TV on a daily basis.

I was one of the lucky ones. My father came from rural Poland where there were precious little shops so people grew their own produce. He always had the garden filled with fruit and vegetables and had an allotment all his life. I got to appreciate the taste of fresh fruit and vegetables at an early age. However, there was always a bit of wicked temptations in youth. It was normal on a night out to have six pints followed by a donar kebab, but with my healthy background I only had five pints and a single fish, nae chips. Well, you have to start somewhere.

The Problems

The human lifestyle has evolved a lot faster than our bodies’ ability to keep up with the changes. A lot of our food is refined, processed, treated with chemicals, and supermarkets have taken over as our main suppliers. Their concern is profits, not healthy food.

Our diet is responsible for the massive increase in poor health from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer and hypertension.

Everyone knows the answer, but it is not easy to change the old habits of excessive drinking, smoking, junk food, too much TV/computer and not nearly enough exercise.

It is very hard to leave the car at home, and not watch those very interesting TV programmes, but with a wee bit of Scottish determination and will power we can make a few changes.

The body does need some fats to function properly, so the occasional chip is good for us, and a wee nip or glass of red wine every so often, purely for our medicinal needs will keep us in good form.
It’s all about moderation.

Then if you can combine more exercise into your routine your on the right track. After an hour at the gym I was ready for my shower, but my daughter wanted an extra fifteen minutes. She had been counting calories and knew that it would take fifteen minutes of lost calories to burn off the large slice of gateaux she had waiting at home as her reward.

The Foods

As I have always had a garden it has been easy to integrate plenty of fruit and vegetables into my daily diet, especially from early summer onwards.

Forced rhubarb started the season stewed and added to my morning muesli or in puddings and crumbles.

My muesli has added sultanas, dates and many nuts, so I am well on my way to achieving my daily five portions of fruit and vegetables. Later on fresh picked berries are added over the summer and autumn months. Frozen berries are used for a mixed fruit compote which complements, breakfast and desserts.

Lunch and dinner may well be a salad with home grown lettuce, tomatoes, and radish or a cooked meal with cabbage, turnip, onions, garlic, sweet corn, beans, beetroot or whatever is in season.

Preparation of foods is important to get the best out of them. Do not wash food excessively otherwise some vitamins existing on the surface may be lost. Go easy on the creams and yoghurts with fresh fruit as the calcium in these can lock up some of the beneficial vitamins and minerals.

The Superfoods

It is beneficial for healthy eating to include as wide a variety of foods as possible as they all have different levels of nutrients, and several are known to be very high in antioxidants and specific vitamins and minerals.

Superfood status is given to those possessing the greatest levels of a particular feature, or having a wide range of health benefits.

My garden will always have the following essential crops.

The chokeberry, Aronia melanocarpa comes at the top of my list. It has the highest level of vitamin C and anthocyanins, an antioxidant that gives the berry its black colour, than any other plant. Antioxidants are very beneficial to sufferers of some cancers, heart disease, ulcers and many other conditions.

Blackcurrants come close behind with very high levels of vitamin C, then saskatoons and blueberries.

Rhubarb is a must have plant that can be used all year round with forced, fresh and frozen sticks. This was covered in last weeks feature.

Garlic is used in cooking numerous dishes to impart its attractive pungent flavour, but as a health food, it is said to help sufferers of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and some cancers.

Cabbage and all the other brassicas including Brussels sprouts, broccoli and kale are available all year round. They also have high levels of vitamin C, dietary fibre and multiple nutrients useful against heart diseases, cancer and inflammation.

Kale is especially nutritious with powerful antioxidant properties.

Beetroot is delicious in soups and savouries and is very high in antioxidants, magnesium, sodium, potassium and vitamin C. It is important for cardiovascular health, and has been shown to lower blood pressure.

Demand for allotments shows that the message is getting through for the need for a healthier lifestyle, but in Scotland we still need more people to jump on the bandwagon.

End

A Fresh Start

  NEW PLANS FOR 2011

 The beginning of January is the perfect time to look back over the previous year and analyze your gardening activities so that you can learn from your failures, build on your successes and plan new ventures. This applies to both my gardening activities as well as my painting projects.

Of course we are always at the mercy of our unpredictable weather and climate change brought on by global warming seems to be giving us a more extreme climate. New weather records get broken at a more frequent rate, whether it is the warmest summer, coldest day, the highest rainfall, or the heaviest snowfall.

Keeping in touch with weather forecasts is more important than ever before so we can plan seed sowing, planting, weed control and soil cultivations at the best times. It is even more important to make sure any spraying for pest, disease or weed control is done when a few days dry weather is forecast. There is nothing more infuriating than to have completed crop spraying then see it all washed off a few hours later. Last year was a very difficult year for spraying as the rain was never very far away.

The garden and allotment have never been subject to routine. There are so many new and improved plants to try, and ones that were previous favourites have gone out of favour if they have not been able to cope with a wetter climate. However I may be making a wrong assumption. Just because we have had four wet years and two severe winters in a row does not mean you can expect this to be a pattern. Prior to this we have had years of mild winters with hardly any snow, 2006 was a heatwave and my memory from childhood records seeing the first winter snows every year in November

However, it is great fun to experiment, so although I have tried many grape varieties outdoors in Dundee and discarded most of them, I will still continue with other varieties. Our climate may well get warmer and drier again and maybe I just have to find the right variety for Scottish conditions.

Paintings

With winter starting at the end of November, gardening has been put on hold till the snow melts and pruning and digging can continue. However the winter landscapes have been brilliant for painting ideas, so I have been going through the phase of planning art projects for the year ahead. The recession has had a big impact on art sales in the middle price bracket, but less so for smaller paintings. There is also a trend towards simpler images on unframed large stretched box canvases. So projects are being planned for a series of watercolour winter landscapes with minimalistic images, and some contemporary figure studies on large box canvases.

Now that could keep me occupied till next autumn unless of course we get a great summer and I will find it hard to choose between the spade, the hoe, the trowel or the paintbrush.

Flowers

The wet years have really sorted out the roses. Climber Golden Showers was always very reliable as was shrub rose L D Braithwaite, a gorgeous deep red, but they just could not withstand attacks of blackspot disease. Spraying with Dithane was not effective with the continual rain. They and many others have been dug out. The climber has been replaced with shrub rose Graham Thomas which is much stronger and will be trained as a climber.

I have a lot of very steep banks around the house where access to cultivate is a problem, despite a fair bit of terracing so these will be planted with drift of Fuchsia Mrs. Popple, Shasta daisies and some flag iris. This permanent planting will help to stabilize the bank.

Some of the bank was bedded out with spray chrysanthemums last year. I am hoping that these will survive the winter outdoors and grow again this year as a drift, of close planted stems that will not need any attention. Time will tell.

Vegetable Crops

Most vegetables cropped very well last year resulting in gluts of the usual courgettes, cabbages, lettuce, beans and sweet corn.

This year I must grow a wider range of crops and less of each as I am only feeding two people.

Although last year was a bit too wet for onions, I grew a Sweet Spanish Yellow variety from seed.

It was late, but produced an excellent crop that stores very well. I still have plenty firm onions left. I will grow that one again this year but must sow it a bit earlier.

Another success to be repeated this year was a super sweet type of sweet corn, and Swiss Chard Bright Lights has been very prolific, so I do not need so much, especially as we use a lot of Kale leaves in stir fries, and that is just as healthy.

With brassicas both cabbage Golden Acre for summer and Traviata, a savoy for winter will be grown again as well as Brussels Sprouts Wellington.

In the greenhouse it is hard to get a better tomato than Alicante for a large fruit full of flavor and my favourite cherry type is Sweet Million though the seed is expensive and not supplied in large quantities. Do not sneeze when sowing that one.

Fruit Crops

I grow just about every fruit available for eating fresh in season, in jams, compotes all year round, puddings, scones, pies, crumbles, smoothies and juices. It is very important to make sure selected varieties are the best for our local climate and soil. I have not always got it right, so there are many changes to be made this year.

I have several apple trees that provide eating apples from August till mid winter from those in store.

However,  I have too much Arbroath Pippin, (the Oslin) which is very early but does not keep so some branches will be changed to new varieties by grafting this spring.

Pears have the same problem as I have a large Comice tree that gets wiped out by scab in any wet year. Grafting will also be done to replace some of it. I will retain some Comice just in case we go back to warm dry summers again, as there is nothing to beat Comice in a good year.

Raspberry Glen Ample suffered a terminal root rot disease slowly killing the row over several years. The symptoms indicate it could be phytophthora. This fungus disease is spread in soil water so could be a problem if drainage is poor, or during prolonged periods of wet weather. I suspect the disease came in on infected new raspberry canes. There are several strains of phytophthora, some being quite specific to one plant host whereas others can attack a wider range of plants. I must have the latter as I also lost a white currant, and a gooseberry and some blaeberries also got infected. These were growing beside the raspberries, but lower down the slope. Different strains of this disease causes potato blight, sudden oak death and many other plant diseases.

I have replaced the raspberries with a new variety called Cascade Delight bred at Washington University and selected for tolerance to root rot. Hopefully the new canes planted last year will give me some crop this year. I will be sorry to lose my Glen Ample as it is an excellent variety.

I will also replace the white currant but will choose a different location.

I planted a new perpetual strawberry, Malling Opal last year, but it did not make a lot of growth so I will need to assess its performance this summer. It was replacing another perpetual, Flamenco which stopped producing runners, then died out. Perpetuals help to extend the strawberry season into the autumn without any protection.

Last year I tried another superfood fruit called the Chokeberry. Botanically, it is known as Aronia melanocarpa and the popular variety in Viking. The fruit can be a wee bit astringent if eaten fresh. Even the birds leave it alone till the end of summer, but it makes a terrific jam, compote, a deep red wine, and a very healthy smoothie. The berries are almost black and very high in vitamin C and antioxidants. The Aronia has one of the highest levels of anthocyanins of all known plants. The health benefits of aronias are being studied by food scientists. I have a batch of these sown in a tray and hope to have some plants by summer.

I now await delivery of a new cherry tree on the very dwarfing Gisela 5 rootstock, as well as a new grape vine called Solaris which I will try outdoors on a south facing fence, and hopefully I will see some white seedless grapes from a new vine, Perlette planted last year in the greenhouse.

End