Organic Food, Vitality & Health

We are part of nature and our bodies work best when they harmonise with the seasonal rhythms.
The upward moving essence of Spring creates tiny shoots of green energy. Spring foods rejuvenate and help us loose the Winter build up in the body of salt and fat. During the Summer months everywhere you look nature gives us a bedazzling array of colourful fruits and vegetables. Apricots, strawberries, blackcurrants and raspberries, shiny red tomatoes, colourful peppers, orange carrots, delicate pink chives, showy red lettuce, pale green peas and cascades of orange flowers turning into crisp, green runner beans.
In Autumn the harvest is full of fragrant, warming foods, sweetcorn, pumpkins, leeks, onions, garlic, mushrooms, pears, apples, figs, blackberries and rose hips; fragrant, warming foods.
The cold dark days of Winter encourage the process of slowing down. and we are nourished during this reflective period with the dense textured, earthy flavours of root crops, parsnip, swede, turnip, celeriac, beetroot, Jerusalem artichoke and potatoes. If we break the magic of the seasonal alchemy we create disorder in ourselves and the world around us.
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Pumpkin is a type of fruit indigenous to the Western hemisphere. Pumpkins have been an important food throughout the Americas for a long time, in Mexico pumpkin seeds dating back to 7000 BC have been found. The pilgrims when they arrived in America began to grow pumpkins and these early settlers sent the seeds back to England, today pumpkins are grown all over the world and are a staple item in many cultures.
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Autumn is the season of harvest. It is a time to gather nature’s fruits, a time to celebrate and a time to preserve and store for the winter months ahead. Many of the best Autumn fruits are not cultivated so you will need to go foraging or better still so that we do not loose diversity start growing some. Blackberries must be the best known wild gathered berry, though of course there are plenty of cultivated ones now available but there is a far greater sense of satisfaction if you pick your own blackberries have been gathered for 1000’s of years, blackberry seeds were found in the stomach of a Neolithic man dug up on the Essex coast. Blackberries are a good source of vitamin C and provide a fair amount of iron. The blackberry leaf and root is a powerful astringent and the berries are used to treat diarrhoea and anaemia.
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Boiling, roasting, baking and grilling all work by transferring heat from a source into the food. The molecules of the food itself don't change, they just get warmer. Microwaves work differently. A microwave oven uses a device called a magnetron tube, which causes an electron beam to oscillate at very high frequencies producing microwave radiation. Microwave energy alternates between positive and negative polarity billions of times a second and the same oscillation is induced in the molecules of food particularly water. Heat is induced from the considerable intermolecular friction. This friction deforms the molecular structure of the food. In genetic engineering microwaves are used to weaken molecular structure to make it easier to insert new genes.......
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Barley originated in Western Asia and was one of the first grains to be cultivated during Neolithic times. It became a staple crop in the Middle Ages.......
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Don't forget the animals and insects that live in your garden this autumn. Try not to be over zealous with tidying up your garden. A windfall apple left lying can provide nutrition for a wide variety, from lacewings to badgers......
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The greatest vitality in the life cycle of a plant is in the sprout. As seeds germinate they spring into life and become superbly suited to our nutritional needs......
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Aloe Vera is a spiky cactus-like plant of the lily family and is native to tropical areas. Although there are over 200 species of aloe there are probably only three or four with medicinal properties.....
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Garlic is one of the oldest cultivated plants. Recipes using garlic have been found in the cuneiform script of ancient Babylon dating back at least 5000 years.....
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Involving astrology in the growing cycle is centuries old. Hesiod wrote a lunar agricultural manual in the eighth century BC; Cato and Pliny both mention lunar planting, and Roman farmers are known to have farmed with reference to the lunar phases.....
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