Salvage Gardening

This summer we've been working hard on a project at the local high school that involves refurbishing an old, unused greenhouse as well as providing space for a "community" garden for students and staff to have full access to for growing food.

I took on the task of building the garden during the grueling Florida summer months, with no budget and very few people willing to spend hours out in the mosquito infested, high humidity, fire ant covered garden area. The temperatures average about 95* this time of year with a feels-like estimate of 105 or so.

It's not for the faint of heart, but when you make a promise... you follow through! SO, that said and out of the way. I had a task at hand.

How was I going to fill this empty area with raised beds, few helping hands and zero budget?








Well, fortunately I'm a picker. I'm a dumpster diving, trash loving, roadside warrior!
So, just about the time we had finished tilling up the area, laying down cardboard as a mulch (more trash to treasure) I was really starting to sweat over how we were going to pull off making a field full of raised beds in time for the start of the school year.

Then on my way home ...I saw THIS





Beautiful, right?



Perfectly good, beautifully weathered wood painted white on one side with latex paint. Some may argue that there's a risk of chemical leech from fencing lumber, but I'm not one of those people. I'm just not concerned with it, the wood is significantly weathered and half painted. It's PERFECT for the project!
So I called up a friend to rush over with her trailer in tow and we loaded up the 8 panels. .

We utilized as much of the existing structure as possible, to save on screws. SO we made cuts with a hand held circular saw down the three horizontal beams that hold the slats together, creating panels that were each two slats wide. Creating a board for the bed wall that was about 8 inches in depth. We also cut off the dog eared top piece of each slat to make the beds a bit smaller.

They come together at about 5.5" x 5.5" squares.Plenty large enough for a decent sized plot, 8 inches is a good depth too! So at this point, when we made out first bed... I was stoked! This was going to work!

And here it is! Our first raised bed made from roadside treasure! The muddy ground underneath covered up with some trash picked cardboard to help keep the weeds from reclaiming the area.

Add caption

We quickly got busy making more. 11 more in fact! 10 stayed at the school garden and two came home with us , as a self appointed reward for our hard work :)

We've been busy the last few days filling the whole area with mulch that we had delivered from a local tree trimming company. MORE material that would otherwise have ended up in a landfill, being put to very good use in food production. If this doesn't warm a heart, nothing will!



Next week we'll have a delivery of soil to fill the beds and they'll be ready for planting when the weather finally simmers down a bit.






 This is where the two extra beds found a home, at my new house and in the beginning stages of my personal garden.
You can also see the third salvage creation in the back of the photo. Palate compost bins! We've made three sets of these this summer! One for the school, one for a community demonstration garden we worked on and one for our home garden.

 We used large palates for the schools garden. Food scraps and garden waste will be dumped here and turned regularly. The composting process is pretty speedy when you tend to it and keep turning the material. We lucked out and scored some smaller, hard wood pallets for our home garden so they don't take up as much space.

And here he is, my lovely assistant Warren. He built these compost bins for me and I love him so much for it (among other things).







I'm pretty proud of the progress we've made. No money has been spent on this portion of the garden. Everything was salvaged and we already had the screws. It just goes to show that a nice garden space can be created on any budget! It just takes a sharp eye and the ability to think outside of the box. Pay close attention to the garbage you pass by every day!
You may find your new garden in there someday!

Re-defining granola and protein bars

I haven't posted here in almost a year!
The Florida busy season was kind to me and I've been running around slinging organic veggies and teaching workshops.

Now that the summer is nearly upon us again and things are slowing down, I should have time to blog again!

So I'm starting with my latest kitchen concoction craze!

I've been cutting grains out of my diet and adding plant based proteins to support my new weight lifting lifestyle. These little gems are an example of my Grain-free granola/protein bars!

Thanks to my trusty dehydrator I've been able to make enough variations of this portable and palatable treat to keep from getting bored of it!

The most important ingredient(s) in dehydrated bar making is a binder of some sort. A binder serves as a "glue" to hold all of the ingredients together My two preferred choices are dates and chia seeds. I use chia in every single bar I make and I often skip the dates to cut out some sugary calories. Also, a bar with dates tends to be a more chewy bar where as one without can be dehydrated down to a much crunchier bar.

This particular batch is made from:
1/2 cup chia seeds soaked in one cup water for 20 minutes or until a gel has formed 
one cup raw soaked almonds chopped (I soak them for at least 12 hours and pulse them in the blender or food processor)
one cup raw filberts chopped (you can soak these as well for easier digestion, this batch I didn't soak the filberts because I forgot! Fortunately nuts are forgiving)
1/2 cup dried cranberries ( I get these in the bulk section of the grocery store. i prefer to use dried cherries but they were out of stock this time around)
1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds
1/2 cup raw *LOCAL* honey (I emphasize local here because A- I'm supporting local bee keepers and B- because eating local honey is a great way to combat seasonal allergies)
1 tbs coco powder (the unsweetened baking sort. Using raw cocao nibs is preferred, but again... the store was out so I improvised)
1 tbs pumpkin pie spice

I mixed everything together and spread it and press out on parchment paper on my dehydrator trays at about 1/4 of an inch thick. Things tend to shrink a lot from dehydration so a thick spread is important.

I'm a fairly impatient person so I set my dehydrator to it's max temp, which is 155 degrees and I left it on over night, about 10 hours. Then the next morning I peeled the slabs of granola off the paper and cut them into bars. I wanted them a bit crunchier so I placed the bars back in to dehydrate for a couple more hours.

This is a really great source of protein and essential fats. The chia helps curb hunger and the cranberries help curb a sweet tooth!

The best part about making these bars is the variations are endless. You can substitute nuts and flavorings and fruits into a whole array of consistencies and flavors!

They make a great pre or post work out treat and are a much appreciated addition to a grain free/gluten free diet. YUM!

Kitchen Scrap Gardening

Some of my best backyard gardening results have come from what I call Kitchen Scrap Gardening.

Where most people see spoiled or useless foods, I see opportunity
for GROWTH!

Carrot tops! Cut them and throw them in the compost bin right?
NO! Even if there isn't any sign of growth on the carrot tops you can skewer them and keep them partially submerged in water in a sunny window and they'll sprout! These tops are ready for planting. They have healthy roots well over two inches long and plenty of greenery.
Sometimes with Carrots, you'll find them shoved way to the back of the fridge where they've been long forgotten. When you pull them out they may have white or yellow sprouts.
Set those puppies in a glass of water, the whole carrot if you wish! And place in a sunny window... the sprouts will turn green within a day or two. What a great way to teach the kiddo's about photosynthesis!



Celery is another super easy scrap to grow. When you cut the bottom nub off your bunch, don't toss it! Place it in a little water (make sure to change the water regularly or it will rot) Within a few days you'll have new growth from the center of the nub and eventually roots! Once you see the roots it's ready for dirt! Some people like to just plant directly into soil without windowsill rooting everything. But I prefer to get a good healthy set of roots before hand.

 

Potatoes! Letting potatoes sprout on their own is called "chitting". There's no difficult science here, you can have seed potatoes with very little effort. When the eyes start to grow just let them have their way! Once you have some good sprouts on them you can cut them down so each potato piece has it's own healthy sprout. Soak them in water over night and then plant away! Any variety of potato, including sweet potato will work, however It's my understanding that it's easier when you use organics. I've never tried conventional potatoes myself though.

Some more easily grown kitchen scraps are:

• Garlic
• rosemary
• pineapple tops (one of my favorite!)
• avocado seeds)
• onions of all sorts

So next time you discover something sprouted in your fridge, don't be so quick to throw it out! We have viable food all around us and nature often times does the hard part for us! Happy planting and Happy Gardening!
 

Repurposed Cloth Napkins

Not food related, but an earth friendly addition to my Garden!

I bought a bunch of 25 cent cloth napkins from goodwill, cut them in half and sewed them to a sturdy twine.

I'd like to stamp them or write on them, they're much like prayer flags and really add a nice splash of color to the back yard <3

Living Foods

Add caption

Why eat more raw foods?
I'll chop this down to a raw word version that's easy to digest for anyone. When put into simple terms even the most difficult bio-chemical lesson can be easily absorbed by the brain.

ENZYMES are why. In a nutshell.

More specifically, digestive enzymes are the ones we really want to focus our attention on right now.

Our pancreas produces digestive enzymes to battle, fight, break down, and help the body absorb nutrients from our food sources. The more processed and cooked foods we eat the more enzymes our body has to put out in order to get any nutrients out of it.

Why? Cooking food destroys enzymes.... and pretty much all nutrient content. The more you cook it, the less nutritional value it has. When you pulverize and process food enough to shove it in a box or can and label it with an expiration date you've pretty much killed every bit of recognizable life that food has... or, had.

For more reading on enzymes, I recommend The World's Healthiest Foods page on enzymes. This is a great website, when you're done reading about enzymes you really should click over to their food list. This is a great tool to bookmark for those interested in what specific nutritional value certain raw foods have.

If a pregnant woman wants more folic acid (folate), yet despises orange juice... there's asparagus!
If you're feeling run down and depressed more than usual, you may need a vitamin B kick, why not have a banana?

The fresher your foods, the more nutrients you can get out of them Not only because they HAVE more nutrients than something that's been cooked to death, but because fresh foods also provide the enzymes your body needs to get those nutrients out and absorbed into your system. Fresh and raw food do a lot of the work for you so parts of you, like your pancreas and your colon, have less of a work load.

An overworked pancreas and colon are run down and tired and susceptible to illness... like cancer.

So be kind to your body, help it out a little... or a lot! Provide yourself with the simple tools your body needs to function! Even adding just one raw food to each meal will lighten the work load on your digestive system. Keeping raw and living foods available to grab and snack on makes it easy to do!

Plant a garden! If you can't plant a garden, plant a pot. Have a fresh herb pot in your windowsill or some sprouts in your fridge. If you can grow a food, make sure the produce section of your store becomes your FIRST and LAST stop when you go grocery shopping. Keep bananas around, Apples, carrots and incorporate them into every day routines. Have one raw side dish at every meal. Chop an apple or celery stalk or throw down a hand full of baby carrots.

Adding living foods to your life can and will add life to your living!

Raw Apple Crisp

4 ingredient Raw Apple Crisp

1 large Organic Gala Apple diced
2-3 tbsp Organic Raw Honey
1/2 cup Almond Pulp
Dash or two of ground Cinnamon

mix all of your ingredients together
You may want to heat your jar of raw honey just a bit by placing it into a cup of warm water, raw honey tends to be a little more on the solid side than conventional honey. Use 2 or 3 tbsp depending on how sweet your sweet tooth is.

Transfer your mixture into a small deep dish or cereal bowl

Mash it down hard using the back of a spoon. The harder you mash it the more the juices of the apple will be released! Mash it until the surface is smooth and even.

Turn the bowl over onto a serving dish, you may need to coax it out by running a thin knife around the edges.

That's it! Sweet, crispy and 100% raw apple crisp style treat packed with nutrients and quite satisfying!

Cucumber Avocado Lettuce Wraps

 I was combing the internet today seeking inspiration for a flavorful, raw afternoon meal, armed with a rock solid craving for cucumbers! I ran across a couple of different lettuce wrap recipes and mix and matched to make my very own creation! Cucumber and Avocado Lettuce Wraps! I'm in love! And it's simple. No need for any exotic ingredients, this is pretty straight forward.

Two things I purchased today to add a little oomph to a rather blandly flavored few days I've had are:

• Ground mustard seed (REALLY was hoping for whole seeds to grind myself but I settled)
• Celery seed 

Both of these ingredients can be used very sparingly and still add quite a savory and full flavor to dishes with a lot f juices... in this case, the cucumber has provided all the moister needed to bring out the flavors. In this recipe you'll be adding a  dash of each of these... one shake! Maybe tow.

What you'll need in addition to the spices (this recipe is for a single serving, since I'm on my own in this house with the whole raw adventure) Organically grown of course!

• 1/2 ripe avocado cubed
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• One small or half of one large cucumber, peeled and grated 
• Handful of halved grape tomatoes
• Fresh herbs, I insist that you use dill for this because cucumbers and dill go together like... well, cucumbers and dill! I also grabbed some basil and thyme from the garden.
• Romaine lettuce leaves
• Sweet red pepper to garnish

 Combine the avocado, lemon juice, cucumber, tomato, herbs and spices in a bowl mixing gently until all ingredients are happy together, but not so much that they're turning to mush.

Now! Let it sit. Go do something else, fold the laundry, walk the dog, whatever. Just let it sit and soak itself up for a little while. Don't bother putting it in the fridge or covering it, you wont be gone THAT long. Just give it about 15 minutes or so to let all the flavors of the herbs and spices really leech into the natural juices of the cucumber.

When you come back give it another gentle stir and spoon onto your individual romaine leaves, and garnish with some sweet red pepper slices
.
I did three for myself and then my mom popped in and I forced one on her... she said it was very good so YAY... I totally agree, it's a very yummy dish. After 3.5 days of blandsville this was a welcome burst of flavor. I have a small amount left over that I'm going to store away for an evening snack. By then it should be busting at the seams with flavor!

If you try this recipe, or have a similar variation, please let me know in the comments!
OR
Find me on Facebook! ~~ The Manic Organic