Jeff Marchand

Im very glad to hear your labs are good.  I can imagine needing to buy foods your daughter needs that you should nt eat is tricky.  I live alone and prevent eating sweets (by big vice) by just leaving them in the grocery store aisle.

Kathleen,

How is your blood sugars, liver enzymes and cholesterol levels?  If they are nt were your doctor wants them to be the results can be no joke.  I count myself very very lucky to be here. I choose to take prescription meds over dying or worse given that stroke is in my family history.  

Have you tried Intermittent Fasting?  I never liked the carnivore diet because of all the cholestrol.  But I am no expert.  I.F. worked for me.   But weight will come back if/when you stop just like any other diet.

My blood type is B+.  I had gout for years.  Allopurinol is a cheap generic drug that lowers your uric acid and has very few side effects.  A rash is the most common. Take it every day and you wont get a gout attack again.

What I found out later to my great chagrin is that as has been mentioned previously is that gout is associated with metabolic syndrome. My blood sugars and cholestrol were elevated.  I  had uncontrolled diabetes and heart disease.  Had a heart attack and needed a triple by-pass.  So I urge you to take your gout as seriously as a heart attack , as the saying goes.  I know I just "should'ed" you but it comes from the heart . Pun intended

Ive shed quite a bit of weight  and my blood sugars are in the low normal range now, admittedly with  some assistance from the pharmaceutical industry.  I know many on here will disagree with that approach but at least I am alive to be disagreed with.

I should also mention another fun thing I am dealing with is Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease aka "non-alcoholic fatty liver disease" from a lifetime of carrying around extra pounds.  This could eventually leave me needing a liver from a dead person if my excess weight is ignored.

See how awesome those extra pounds are? They can kill you slowly via diabetes, liver disease or a stroke all while making you suffer from gout or quickly via a heart attack.

Anne, no I did nt soak them.  You think thats the missing link?  I doubt the farmers do but Ill try it!

I did nt want to take Sam Potter's thread on why he cant grow carrots hostage so I thought I'd post the veggies I cant grow for unknown reasons. Maybe you have suggestions or maybe you have your own impossible yet very common veg that refuses to grow in your garden. For the record I can grow carrots. Takes alot of weeding but I can grow them.

My two crops I cant seem to grow are sweet peppers and corn.  Maybe I dont have the right temps for green peppers but the plants do great, they flower but no fruit. I gave up years ago.  Its the corn that I find baffling. Farmers all around me grow acres and acres and acres of the stuff no issue.  i cant seem to grow the damn things!
I had made a dozen mounds to do 3 sisters, planted 2 seeds per hole and watered, and waited and nothing! Without the corn I cant grow the beans to climb up them ! Its a bit embarrassing too because I got into a discussion earlier this summer with Paul on whether corn is a food or not (see crop rotations and permaculture thread) and the blessed things refuse to grow!

Makes me angry.  Oh well there is always next year.      

Can't argue with you there.

gustibus non disputandum!  Which is Latin for lets stop arguing and eat!  


p.s.  its not

I just asked Google what the life expectancy in Europe was a thousand years ago when no one there ate corn

"In the 11th century, the average life expectancy at birth in Europe was roughly 20 to 35 years. However, this historically low number is heavily skewed by high infant and childhood mortality rates, where up to half of all children died before reaching adulthood "

So the same.   By same logic  wheat, rye,  brassicas, beef , pork, and fish are best avoided.   I think we are starting to run out of foods safe to eat.

Of course modern medical science , sanitation, the rule of law and the historically peaceful era we live in have played a significant role in allowing you and I to live well beyond what was expected at birth a thousand years ago.

 It would seem that many people (including you) think corn is healthy.  And many people (including me, mark and several doctors) think corn is not healthy.  You say "hard to argue" but ...

No doubt that a person subsisting on corn alone would become very ill. But surely the same can be said for any food crop.  Most corn today is grown today for animal feed, ethanol and high fructose corn syrup.  All very unhealthy uses but surely the blame for that falls on the growers not the crop.  Our current corn growing practices and uses are contributing factors in our current obesity epidemic.  

Context, it seems to me , is king.  If eating corn as part of a varied diet is detrimental to a person's health how on earth did the Meso-Americans survive and flourish for millennia?  They ate corn , with beans and squash, sunflowers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and amaranth amongst many other crops.  Corn was the cornerstone of their diet just as wheat was for Europeans. That is why I find it hard to argue that it must always be unhealthy, especially when grown as part of a diverse garden to provide diverse nutrients to the gardner .   Permaculture is a design science and in science, when a hypothesis is proposed and there is a proven counterfactual  the hypothesis  is either rejected or modified. To me the pre-Columbian history of America refutes the claim that corn is always unhealthy.

I have read Mark Shephard's book with great interest.  I seem to recall his complaint about corn is when its grown in massive industrial hundred acre plantations and the GMO varieties bred to maximize sucre content for cattle feed and ethanol production. Those corn plants are not food. Humans would die trying to survive on just that corn. But those are not the corn I am growing and I not growing just corn!

I am talking about open pollinated heritage corn with much higher protein grown on a garden scale with beans , squash and sunflowers.  Those four sisters sustained meso-america for millennia before the Spanish came.  So its hard to argue that they are not food or unhealthy.

We need carbohydrates for energy.  Yes we can grow potatoes and I do but the Irish found out the hard way what happens when you rely on potatoes too much.  Corn is easier to store than potatoes or squashes too .  Variety is the spice of life and diversity is safety.

paul wheaton wrote:Crop rotation has been proven, over and over, to be an excellent strategy ...    for monocrop systems.

A few positions I think about in this space (and the "you" is "me"):

  - if you are thinking of crop rotation, you are doing it wrong

  - if you are thinking of a block of monocrop, you are doing it wrong

  - corn it out

  - wheat is out

Move to a system that will pump out food without any seeding, fertilizing, irrigation ....   without any care at all ... the only effort is on harvesting.  That is the permaculture goal.  To design a system so well that years can pass with zero care.  And with zero care it grows more food and is spreading.

Geeze I dunno I have seen videos of Geoff Lawton's Zatuna Farm's kitchen garden and he seems to grow in blocks and certainly his interns seem to weed and water and do plenty of work. Is that not permaculture?

Why would corn be out if a person does a three or four sister's garden?

I believe a for a person to grow their own calories with varied crops (who wants to live off of just potatoes?) they would need a fairly substantial size garden say 1/8th of acre per person if it were space efficient and weeded to maximize production.  Many people are not lucky enough to have that much space to allocate to a garden.  A weed infested higely pigely garden with zero maintance would have to be much much larger no?

I know what you propose worked for Master Fukuoka but for how many others? Is that how you are getting your calories?

There are millions of small scale gardens who rotate crops to break pest cycles and to not deplete soil nutrients who leave the soil richer than when they found it. Elliot Coleman describes a garden rotation in his books where each preceding crop benefits the next proceeding crop in a virtuous circle . A management system that can be done on the land indefinitely while improving soil health and the local micro and macro fauna seems to me to be the very definition of a permanent culture.  

Finally a well managed vegetable garden can be a thing of beauty and peaceful place for a hardworking gardener to  bask in the glory of his or her hard labours at the end of the day. For me if my permaculture farm and garden is neither beautiful nor peaceful I am doing something wrong.  Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder so other's  mileage may vary.

Just my two cents.