345 The Heart Healthy Garden, Live!

Show Transcript

Ep. 345 TRANSCRIPT Heart Healthy, Live!

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

THE HEART HEALTHY GARDEN, LIVE! Pt. 1 (recorded live, Feb. 2024)

Debbie Arrington, Sacramento Rose Society

He is a very, very long time Sacramento County Master Gardener, since 1982. So he has a wealth of experience. And without further ado, this is Farmer Fred.

Farmer Fred

Thank you, Debbie. Half of what she said was true. Is it really Heart Health Month? Well, that's good. All right. It's good to see you. You all look familiar, but then everybody looks familiar to me at my age. And it's a pleasure being here, talking with the Sacramento Rose Society. I mean, I'm not going try to delve into too much into roses. I'll leave that to the experts. I'm a generalist when it comes to gardening. I can tell you a lot about how to plant a lot of stuff. And one of the things I like to do is eat what I grow. And that's what I'm going to talk about tonight, The Heart Healthy Garden.

It was back in 2012 when I had a quadruple bypass surgery and they told me, by the way, you have type two diabetes with an A1C of 11. Ouch. Anyway, the surgery went well. Although I got to tell you, I think surgeons lie. To repair the clogged arteries, they took out the clogged portions and they removed an artery that's in your chest, it’s called the mammary artery (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3741888/).

And the surgeon said, we really don't know what it does, but it's really good as a replacement artery. I go, that's okay. Well, I found out why you might want to keep your mammary artery: because in the winter time you get darn cold, that artery help keep you warm. What do you do? You either put on a jacket or you die. What's the choice here? Okay, I'll put on a jacket. Thank you very much. Well, the surgery went well and I was put on about nine different medications.

And what I wanted to do, as soon as possible, was get off those medications. I didn't want to be on anything the rest of my life. I wanted to find out, and I did the research going to scientific journals, going to websites that doctors respect and learning as much as possible, and coming back to them with information about how diet and exercise can reverse the effects of heart disease, high cholesterol, and diabetes.

Farmer Fred

After the surgery, I just put myself into high gear as far as eating right and exercising a lot. Although at the time we lived down in Herald in southeastern Sacramento County. We had 10 acres and I got a lot of exercise, shoveling mulch around with a wheelbarrow and a shovel and spreading it out by hand. I didn't have a tractor. So that was very good exercise. That's probably what kept me alive all that time. But anyway, let's dive in here and talk about the heart healthy garden.

That was me back in probably 2010 or thereabouts. I weighed at that time about 220. But I was moving, I was happy. I was still riding my bike and just moving a lot of weight, really.

(scenic bypass)

I grew popcorn. I used to sell it too, ornamental popcorn. This is an heirloom popcorn variety called 1884 Pennsylvania Dutch heirloom popcorn. It is excellent. It has really good popcorn flavor. If you have room to grow popcorn, try it. Try an old heirloom variety of popcorn, you grow it in much the same way as sweet corn (but don’t plant both at the same time!). The taste and consistency is very different from what you buy these days if you’re purchasing Orville Redenbacher or Jolly Time or any of those. It is smaller and it's crunchier too. It really is delicious. So try an heirloom popcorn, if you so desire.

(end of scenic bypass)

So anyway, after the surgery,I wanted to get off all those medications, I had to do something. And the first thing I did was to keep a food diary. Write it down. Write everything down that you eat and how long you exercise. You can easily do it online. The program I used at the time was Calorie King. Now I use MyFitnessPal. There's plenty out there that you can use, to just keep track of what you eat. If anything, what it does, it just kind of puts the brakes on you mentally from eating more when you see the numbers start piling up. It's amazing how many calories there are when you munch out of a bag of potato chips. You don't really want to do that.

I also  made little Post -It notes for everything to do, related to healthy eating, exercise, and psychological tips. Write it down, weigh it, measure it, read the label. For instance, there were postit notes for “Added sugar is your enemy”. “Soluble fiber is your friend”. “Breakfast like a King”. Lunch like a prince”, “dine like a pauper”.

“Use smaller plates”. You'd be amazed how you can cut down calories just by using smaller plates. “The kitchen closes at 730pm” (don't snack after dinner). And that's the other thing you note when you write things down in a food diary - the time that you eat. And it's amazing the amount of calories you can consume after dinner when you're doing nothing but watching TV or something like that. So if you remember to put the brakes on after dinner, you'll be much better off. “Eat more fiber,” “eat less sugar,”  “shop for bread in the freezer, not the shelf”.

Bread in the freezer is actually whole grain. It's a living grain. It's the entire grain, unlike breads that say they're whole grain, but they're stuck on a shelf with all the other bakery products. That grain has still been processed and part of the fiber has been removed. The most fiber you can find in a loaf of bread is a bread you would buy in the freezer section at the grocery store. Anyway, read that big board of post-it notes and see all that you have to do - or what I did - that helps you out to lose weight. (picture posted at the “Beyond the Garden Basics” newsletter, on Substack, of May 27, 2022)

And the one thing they told me after the surgery, because I was knocked out at the time, but they tell me they took a chainsaw to my chest and opened it up and used a crowbar to separate the rib cage and took the heart out, put it on a table and started working on me. And to sew you back together on a rib cage, what they do is they push it back together and then they put barbed wire or something like that around there. And they said, well, that takes time to heal. So for three months, you can't lift anything heavier than a gallon jug of milk and you can't ride your bike because you might fall off. So you mean I can't ride my bike? Not for three months, no. well, can I walk? Yeah, you can walk. And I said, well, how far can I walk? Well, just a little bit more each day. Like, just go to the next driveway. Well, at the time, I was living in the country. Everybody had 20 -acre parcels. There was a few hundred feet between driveways. I go, OK. So I think by the end of the second week, I was doing four miles, and that was fine. And at the end of three months, I bought myself a new bike to celebrate, and I'm back on the bike. Like I say, I ride my bike a lot. I do 100 to 125 miles a week.

I'm a biker. I've been riding a bike since I was five years old.  And it helps me clear out my head. And it does help you lose weight, because the more you exercise, the more you can eat. But “you can't out exercise a bad diet”, because your body will just start consuming more and more ultra -processed food, junk food. So you have to moderate the food and keep on a good exercise program.

And you have to have support. Fortunately, I have a wife who loves to cook. And I think it was more out of frustration that she said, “you're growing all this food. We got to do something with it.” Well, OK, let's eat it.

So we're big into eating what we grow. We dehydrate a lot. We freeze a lot. We process a lot. We have a canner. We have a dehydrator. We have a freezer. We have a vacuum sealer. And it's amazing how much you can save from a backyard garden to last you for months. We just finished the last summer tomato just a few days ago. They were green tomatoes when I picked them back in December, but if you put them in a cool room like a garage, they'll ripen and they were fine. They weren't as good as a summer tomato, but it's better than store -bought tomatoes, that's for sure.

You need the support, you need the help. If you can't get the cook to go along with you, you have to be the cook. You have to be the one, to keep you at it. So basically, surround yourself with believers, be your own cheerleader.

“Find your natural valium”. For me, it's riding a bike. There's nothing wrong with naps. And remember, it's not a diet. It's a lifestyle. You're changing forever. Taking baby steps will show you the way.

Enjoy the side benefits like buying a smaller wardrobe. I got at one point, I was down to 140 pounds and I'd never been that low. I mean, when I got married, I was at 180.

But to be, I think, 140 or 142 pounds, all of a sudden the extra large shirts became large shirts and became medium shirts. And then finally I went to the local fashion store in Herald, which is Tractor Supply Company, and said, do you have any Carhartt shirts in small? And the clerk just laughed and said, “no, you're in Herald. We don't carry clothes that small”. All right, so I ordered it online. That was part of the treat.

Farmer Fred

If you do have heart surgery and they recommend that you do some post-surgery rehab work, some heart rehabilitation work, do it. But try to nudge them towards doing it at a place of business, such as a hospital, that has an in-person cardiac rehab program, as opposed to turning on YouTube or whatever and watching. And maybe somebody calls you once a week, and asks, how you doing?

The Cardiac rehab program at the Lodi Hospital was great. I went there three times a week from May through August of 2012. they had stationary bikes. So I was back on the bike riding, before that 3-month wait! At cardiac rehab, they track your blood pressure and your heart rate and they give you lessons about how to eat. And that's where I learned so much about proper eating and all the tricks you can use to cut down all the calories that you consume needlessly.

So if you do get into a cardiac rehab program, try to insist that it's an in-person class where there is supervision and more than just exercising, where you get some, if you will, cheerleaders. These people want you to succeed.  I went in there, I told the nurse who was in charge of it, I want to be off all medications. And she said, “you can do it”. All right, let's do it. By December, I was off all prescription medications. The A1C (blood sugar numbers) were back under control, the cholesterol levels were down, the weight was way down.  All the doctors agreed. I had three different doctors, and they all said, okay, yeah, you're doing fine. Cut the medications off. Or maybe they just were tired of fighting with me, and said that. All right, that's my story about that.

SMART POTS!

Farmer Fred

I’m pretty picky about who I allow to advertise on this podcast. My criteria, though, is pretty simple: it has to be a product I like, a product I use, and a product I would buy again. Smart Pots checks all those boxes.

Smart Pots is the oldest, and still the best, of all the fabric plant containers that you might find. Smart Pots are sold around the world and are proudly made, 100%, here in the USA.

Smart Pots come in a wide array of sizes and colors, and can be reused year after year. Some models even have handles, to make them easier to move around the yard.

Because the fabric breathes, Smart Pots are better suited than plastic pots, especially for hot environments. That breathable fabric has other benefits, too. Water drainage issues? Not with Smart Pots. Roots that go round and round, chocking the rootball, like they do in plastic pots? Doesn’t happen with Smart Pots.

These benefits will help you get a bigger better plant than what you have gotten in the past with the same size plastic or other hard container.

Smart Pots are available at independent garden centers and select Ace and True Value hardware stores nationwide.

To find a store near you, or to buy online, visit smart pots dot com slash fred. And don’t forget that slash Fred part. On that page are details about how, for a limited time, you can get 10 percent off your Smart Pot order by using the coupon code, fred. f-r-e-d, at checkout from the Smart Pot Store.

Visit smartpots.com slash fred for more information about the complete line of Smart pots lightweight, colorful, award winning fabric containers and don’t forget that special Farmer Fred 10 percent discount. Smart Pots - the original, award winning fabric planter. Go to smart pots dot com slash fred.

THE HEART HEALTHY GARDEN, LIVE! Pt. 2

Farmer Fred

Let's get back to our talk about the Heart Healthy Garden, recorded live last February (2024) at a meeting of the Sacramento Rose Society.

The bottom line is eat more fiber. Fiber is good stuff. Fiber, soluble fiber, insoluble fiber. It's found in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes. It prevents or relieves constipation, as you probably know, from commercials on radio and tv.

Also, it helps to maintain a healthy weight. That lowers the risk of diabetes and heart disease. Insoluble and soluble fiber can help you achieve that weight loss. Insoluble fiber, you probably are very aware of, because that's the part, that's the Metamucil that you have heard about. It promotes the movement of material through your digestive system. It increases stool bulk. And where do you get insoluble fiber? Just about anything you can grow in the garden has insoluble fiber. Nuts, beans, vegetables, cauliflower, green beans, potatoes, wheat, are all good sources of insoluble fiber.

But the magic is the soluble fiber. Soluble fiber is sort of  a gel -like material that gets into your bloodstream. It helps clean out the cholesterol. It helps lower your blood sugar levels. And soluble fiber is found in conjunction usually with Insoluble fiber. So if the food has insoluble fiber, it probably has soluble fiber too. There's a whole list of the foods that are divided into insoluble and soluble fibers (link in the show notes). But oats, peas, beans, apples, citrus, deciduous fruit trees - which means trees that lose their leaves - carrots, barley, and psyllium, which of course is the big ingredient in Metamucil or products like that. I avoid the packaged stuff and just go with the food we can grow in the garden, which is full of great fiber.

So the other thing too that they don't tell you about insoluble fiber is it has an anti -obesity effect. I like that because it makes you feel more full. And if you feel more full, you eat slower, the brain and the stomach finally communicate and then you can cut down the amount of food you eat. So basically dietary fiber, soluble fiber really does great at that cholesterol and A1C, the blood sugar lowering.

Insoluble fiber can help you realize you're full, which is what you want. So how much fiber do you need? Probably more than you are using now. And you won't find this out really until you start writing down and keeping track of everything that you eat. And what's great about these computer programs like MyFitnessPal or Calorie King is they do all the hard work for you.  Let's face it, we're creatures of habit. We'll eat the same thing - maybe not every day - but on a regular basis. And once you have it recorded in the computer system. You just plug it in and it's done. There's at least two people here tonight under 50 years of age. For you, 25 grams of fiber for women, 38 grams for men. if you're over 51, men need 30 grams women need at least 21 grams. The average number of grams  for fiber consumption a day in America is 14, which isn't very much at all. How much is a gram? One ounce equals 28 grams, if that helps you out. And you can do the math as we move along here because everything's in grams.

So of course, I have a list of several easy to grow, extended harvest varieties of fruits and vegetables with the most soluble fiber that should be part of a heart healthy backyard garden (also in that May 27, 2022 Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter). In truth, just about anything you grow is going to have fiber. The ones I've chosen for this are  the plants that are easiest to grow and have the longest season of ripening or at least you can plant different varieties of that particular crop for an extended season of harvest. Because you might like, citrus for example. Did you know you can grow oranges here year round? If you have at least four trees, (five would be better) of different varieties of oranges that ripen at different times.

Here's four of them - the Cara Cara sweet orange, the Washington navel orange, the midnight Valencia orange, and the Valencia. Those four, plus one more, the Layne Late navel, will really give you oranges, fresh oranges, year round for you to enjoy. And we're not talking orange juice here. When you make juice out of whole fruit, you're destroying the fiber. Most of the fiber is in the flesh of the fruit, although some fruits, especially the fruits with thin skins, a lot of the fiber is in the skin. Such as  apples. Eat the apple with the skin on. Eat the persimmon with the skin on, like a Fuyu persimmon.  So December to February, you got the Washington navel, and we're going get into mandarins too. Most citrus, as you know, is ripening this time of year (winter).

February through early spring, the Mineola Tangelo and the Trovita oranges. Late spring through early fall, the Layne late navel orange. Also through summer and early fall, the Valencia. Late summer through early winter, if you like limes, the Bearss Lime does well here in California. And you can grow lemons year round too. But we'll stay sweet.

You know why I like oranges? It's because they're sweet. So I thought you were cutting your sugar down. Well, I'm cutting down added sugars. I'm trying to eliminate added sugars.

And you can grow citrus in containers. And if you keep them small, and you can keep them small by just pruning them regularly, now you might be saying, Fred, you sure got a lot of weeds in that pot in the picture. Well, actually what those plants are is alyssum. And alyssum is a low growing ground cover that is constantly in bloom, except when you first plant it or after a freeze. And I think that's when this picture was taken. Alyssum has been found to be a very big friend of the citrus industry because the alyssum attracts syrphid flies. Syrphid flies are a garden good guy. They're a beneficial insect that goes after the Asian citrus psyllid, which has been spreading the deadly disease  which is properly called huanglongbing, which is the citrus greening disease.

California’s citrus industry may be saved unlike the Florida citrus industry which went through hell back in the 1990s, because they didn't know what they had. Nobody had heard of citrus greening disease. Nobody saw that Asian citrus psyllid coming. By the time it got to California, we knew what we were dealing with.

DAVE WILSON NURSERY

Farmer Fred

You have a small yard and you think you don't have the room for fruit trees? Well, maybe you better think again. Because Dave Wilson Nursery wants to show you how to grow great tasting fruits: peaches, apples, pluots, and nut trees. Plus, they have potted fruits, such as blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, boysenberries, figs, grapes, hops, kiwifruit, olives and pomegranates. All plants, that you can grow in small areas. You could even grow many of them in containers on patios, as well. It's called backyard orchard culture. And you can get step by step information via their You Tube videos. Where do you find those? Just go to dave wilson dot com, click on the Home Garden tab at the top of the page. Also in that home garden tab, you’ll find a link to their fruit and nut harvest chart, so you can be picking delicious, healthy fruits from your own yard from May to December here in USDA Zone 9.  Also in that home garden tab? You're going to find the closest nursery to you that carries Dave Wilson's quality fruit trees. They are in nurseries from coast to coast. So start the backyard orchard of your dreams at DaveWilson.com.

THE HEART HEALTHY GARDEN, LIVE! Pt. 3

Farmer Fred

Let's get back to our conversation at the Sacramento Rose Society recorded last February about planting the heart healthy garden.

All right, let's talk about beans. I like beans. Beans are an easy crop to grow in the garden. Shell beans, black beans, black turtle beans, kidney beans, navy beans, great northern beans, pinto beans. 1 .6 to 2 .2 grams soluble fiber per 100 grams. And for a crop, that's a very good amount of soluble fiber. The one sheet I gave you from Harvard University that lists the insoluble and soluble fibers in all the common foods that you could possibly grow.

You'll see that a good amount of soluble fiber would be in the high ones or in the twos. There aren't too many that are more than that, but we'll talk about those. But beans are easy to grow. In fact, an old nurseryman once told me, “the reason people don't have success planting beans from seed is they tend to water it too much.” What you need to do when you plant that bean seed, water it. Don't water it again until something pops up out of the ground. Because if you water something that hasn't popped up out of the ground, it could rot and that's what happens with beans. So go easy on the water with the beans. Beans, bush beans especially, stay nice and tidy  and they're easy to harvest, so you don't have to be scurrying up a vine or something to capture them. Potatoes are a very high insoluble fiber crop if there ever was one. Potatoes, and we're talking white potatoes and sweet potatoes, 2.2 grams soluble fiber per 100 grams of potato.

Potatoes are planted from slips of what are called “seed potatoes”. It's not a seed, but it's a seed potato that's been approved for planting. It's disease free and they're hard to find sometimes, but usually nurseries get them and they get scooped up really quick. But seed potatoes get planted here in  January, February, March, August, September, and December.

Farmer Fred

This is not one of those slips. This is an actual seed. The Clancy potato. It's a red potato. It's planted directly from seed. The seeds are easy to find and they are very delicious red potatoes. It was the All -America Selections winner back in 2019. It's just an amazing little potato. If you do like to grow potatoes, remember they like the heat. So when you go to plant potatoes, you want to do it when the weather is warm, especially sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes like to be planted in April, May, and June. They really need the heat. Sweet potatoes have a lot of good insoluble and soluble fiber as well. But this Clancy, I highly recommend it because it's easy to plant this potato, directly from seed. You plant them, you let them grow, and then you have to harvest them. Now, if you plant potatoes in the ground, part of the problem is, did you find all the potatoes? No? well, don't worry. They’ll sprout again for you, except the area turns into a potato jungle. People can have potatoes happening for years because they never can find them all.

Well, the way around that is to plant potatoes into containers that you can easily empty. Something like a Smart Pot, a large one, and that you just turn it over, dump it out when the plant starts turning brown, when the leaves start turning brown. If you want to get all the potatoes, just flip that Smart Pot over and pull out your potatoes.

That's the easiest way to do it. Thanksgiving, yes, that could be actually a good game on Thanksgiving is send the kids out to the yard and have them turn over Smart pots.

All right. Peas, I love peas. And we are growing a lot of cool season peas right now. We start them in summer, though. We plant them in September and they will set their peas probably by November. And they keep producing and producing and producing, the snow peas, sugar snap peas. They last and last and last. We love the sugar peas, the snow peas, like the Oregon sugar pod, one of my favorites. The key for having an extended harvest for anything in the pea family is plant a row every two weeks or so. And they can be bush peas, they can be peas that grow on a vine. What we use to grow our snow peas on, which are a vining pea is a tomato cage.

By September I've already - if I may borrow a rosarian term here - shovel pruned some of the poorer performing tomato plants and so I have tomato cages available. So I'll put that tomato cage around one of the sugar pea plants and use that for support, to have it grow up on. There's a lot of beautiful peas out there to choose from that you can plant here in the cool season. Remember peas are a cool season plant. You want to plant them like I say September through March and that's about it.

But you can get very colorful looking peas and shells, but you may notice that once you open those nice purple, dark purple or blue shells, the peas are green. But still, peas are easy to grow and to have a continuous crop every two weeks. Plant some more.

Figs, figs have a lot of soluble fiber and insoluble fiber. 1.4 grams per two figs. Yes, two little figs have that much.

This is one of my favorite figs, the Violet de Bordeaux. It's a smaller tree, and the reason I like this tree is because it has two crops a year, a Breba crop in the spring, usually in late spring and the main crop, September, October. And I'm still mad Scrabble does not approve the word Breba in their dictionary, but it's a word. Fig varieties produce a Breba crop, an earlier crop. They include Celestial, Excel, Flanders, Ischia Green, King Fig, Latterula, Texas Everbearing, and the Violet de Bordeaux. Those are all good figs if you want two crops per year from your figs.

Other garden crops with soluble fiber, and I put this list down here just because some of them might be a little bit more difficult to grow. Artichokes, avocado, eggplant, peanuts you can grow, but they're kind of tough to find. If you think digging for potatoes is hard, try digging for peanuts, but they're down there. Almonds, of course, zucchini, and persimmons. I love persimmons. The Fuyu persimmon is probably my favorite fruit tree of all time. The Fuyu persimmon is non -astringent, which means if you see a ripe one, it will have a little bit of “give” when you gently squeeze it while it’s still on the tree. You can pluck it off the tree and eat it, and your mouth won't make funny faces at you. It's not that puckery. Now, other varieties like the Hachiya, you can't use till they're just totally soft. But the Fuyu you can eat while it's firm. And most of that good fiber, it's in the skin. And that's why we like to slice and dry the persimmons with the skin right on it. And when you dehydrate them, you keep that fiber intact.

Avocados was on that list. Avocados has a lot of fiber. I was amazed. One person claimed that one avocado,

has 10 grams of fiber. And, wow, that sounds great. Well, maybe I'll grow avocados. And maybe you won't. Anybody here have a successful avocado tree that produces fruit? “I have a plant in my house”. That doesn't count. I know. They don't grow here? No, no, no. That tree in the picture right there is growing in the Arden Arcade area of Sacramento. Yours is  a green leaf plant. Enjoy it as a house plant. It's probably a Hass.

The Hass is the standard avocado down in Southern California, which has no business trying to be grown here. They are developing avocado varieties for the Central Valley for agriculture that can take the summer heat. That's one of the big problems with growing avocados here. It's just too hot here. You may note that most of the avocado growing areas in California are in cool coastal climates from Santa Barbara to San Diego, all up and down that coastline, where it doesn't usually get over 100 degrees or so. And at night, it doesn't usually drop below 45 or 50 or so. Avocados need impeccable drainage, but they like moist soil. Go figure, how do you do that? Well, it can't be heavy clay soil, that's for sure. But I say try it. If you want to grow an avocado tree,  just pick a variety that has the best chance for survival here in the hot Central Valley. This one particular variety that you see here is either a Zutano or a Bacon.

I’ll mention the four varieties of Mexican avocados that actually have a chance of working here if you've got the right spot in your yard, an area that's protected from too much sun and too much wind. The Mexicola, I don't really want to have to explain A flower and B flower, but basically let me tell you that part of the problem of growing avocadoes here is pollination of an avocado tree. And sometimes you need two different varieties, an A flower tree and the a B flower tree, in order for pollination to occur. So you've got the Mexicola, you've got the Stewart. Notice the different colors too. Now, a lot of people don't like the Mexican avocados versus the Guatemalan avocados, which you would find in the grocery store, because you're used to a creamy texture. The Mexican avocados have more of a nuttier, crunchy texture, but you may like it. The Zutano, I know people growing Zutanos here, and Bacon. So those are the four that have a chance of growing here, if you want to try it. But again, there's two school of thoughts about the A flower and the B flower tree. The two school of thoughts are, yeah, you need both trees. And the other school of thought is, just plant one, because The tree is under so much stress here, it'll produce both flowers, just trying to grow.

All right, anybody recognize that? It's an artichoke. Yes, that's no joke. But artichokes are an acquired taste.

And it seems like if you really want to enjoy it, you've got to slather those leaves with a lot of butter and mayonnaise and stuff like that. Well, there goes your health product, but it is high in fiber if you like it. I've discovered when I've harvested it, that it's really best grilled. You can actually grill that whole head. You cut it in half, coat it with olive oil, and grill it for about two or three minutes aside at medium heat and then serve it.

But I like it for the flowers, because it attracts beneficial insects and all sorts of beautiful bees. And it's just a gorgeous, gorgeous flower on the artichoke. I believe that's the Imperial Star variety in that picture.

If you have the opportunity, try to plant heirloom varieties of vegetables instead of the newest hybrids. They did a study, and it was like a 45 -year study, of backyard vegetable nutrition. This was at the University of Texas. (link to the study in the May 27, 2022 Beyond the Garden Basics Newsletter). They compared the nutritional analysis of vegetables grown in 1950, and these are vegetables that made it to market, so these are supermarket varieties, versus 1999. Notice the drop off of nutrients. Protein drop from 3 .3 to 2 .9, vitamin A almost in half. more than half, 3,500 to 1,542, in ascorbic acid, vitamin C was down. calcium was way down. And they're trying to figure out,  why was there such a big difference over 49 years? What happened in the agricultural industry? What did they do that caused the nutrition levels in broccoli or anything to go down? They concluded that the most likely explanation was changes in cultivated varieties. Emerging evidence suggested that when you select hybrid varieties for yield, crops do grow bigger and faster, but they don't necessarily have the ability to make or uptake nutrients at the same, faster rate. So when you develop hybrid varieties in order to get to market first, if you're a farmer, that's important, you get more money if you get there first. However, breeding a hybrid variety for speed or content, something has to give. And what usually gives, I think we all discovered, it's flavor for one thing, but it's also nutrients. So choosing heirloom varieties for your garden can be a lot more nutritious.

What's the fiber content of roses? Rose petals are edible. They have an amazing amount of fiber. This was a study done by a university, and I think this is the one that was published in a peer -reviewed journal, Transformation and Agro Industry, back in 2019 (link in the show notes), entitled “The chemical composition of rose sunflower and calendula flower petals for human food use”. And roses won the fiber race. So if you wanted a high fiber content pedal to chew on, gather 100 grams of rose petals and munch on those. Because supposedly those leaves are just full of fiber. Rose petals can be characterized as a source of fiber for a food to be characterized as a source of fiber. It must have a minimum of three grams of fiber per hundred grams and it does have that with 3.2% fiber, so it is considered a human food. Whenever I read studies, and I learned this while battling doctors to convince them that diet and exercise can reverse a lot of diseases, that you quote the journals they have to read, the AMA journal and all the hundreds of journals that are out there.

One thing you have to be careful about these journals, is finding out, who paid for this study? Who did this study? So you have to flip through it all, you read the criticisms of it because a good, peer -reviewed study will have any shortcomings it may have listed. You gotta make sure that the authors of the study aren't on somebody's payroll in the food industry. And so I wanted to know who paid for this. I figured, hmm, “I bet (CA-based famous rose hybridizer) Tom Carruth paid for this”. I don't know. But no, it was actually funded by the government of Colombia to do that study.

Okay, and another study said that rose is a beautiful and fragrant plant with a variety of medicinal and substance uses. Various parts of rose, such as the fruits, flowers, leaves, and bark, can be used in various product development, including cosmetics, food, pharmaceuticals, and engineering. The medical benefits of roses include the treatment of inflammation, diabetes, dysmenorrhea, depression, stress, seizures, and aging. Well, I'd never come across the word dysmenorrhea before. I'll be polite here.  It's cramps, female cramps. But they discovered in their studies, and it was an interesting study to conduct, but they studied by giving women with cramps a full body massage with rose oil, which reduced the pain. That rose oil has an amazing amount of great benefits to it for controlling dysmenorrhea. But who knew?

You can go ahead and go online and read that whole 90 page thing and all the work they did in putting together the study, “Beneficial medicinal and material applications of rose” (link in the show notes). It was a very thorough study.

When you do an internet search, for heaven sakes people, for garden information or pest information, be careful. Google's got a great way of pushing stuff towards the top that people have paid to be there. So what you do in your search, let's say you're having an aphid problem. Well, you'd put aphids in the search box, but then also type in .edu, or better yet, because you're in California, UC, or UCANR, which stands for University of California Ag and Natural Resources. That's going to take you straight away to great information that you can use that you know has been peer -reviewed and studied and is effective. The Vegetable Research and Information Center, vric .ucdavis .edu, a great one, as well. For good vegetable information, the California Backyard Orchard, homeorchard .ucdavis .edu. For fruit tree information, with information you'd ever want to know about taking care of that tree from birth till death. The IPM program, Integrated Pest Management Program at UC Davis, ipm .ucdavis .edu, is also a good source of information.

Thank you, by the way, for listening to the podcast. The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast just keeps growing. I couldn't retire if I wanted to. Thanks so much. Thank you for indulging me.

Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred comes out every Friday. It's brought to you by SmartPots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Garden Basics, it's available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast as well as an accurate transcript, visit our website, gardenbasics .net. And there, you can find out about our newsletter, Beyond the Garden Basics. And thank you so much for listening and your support.