Tag: Chickens

By Lisa Nourse

I love summertime — I love the green of the trees, the warm weather, and growing my own food. I especially love growing vegetables that will store well and provide that great summertime flavor in the middle of our gray and dreary Pacific Northwest winters.

We can a lot of our summer crops but canned vegetables just don’t retain that fresh-picked flavor. So we use a variety of means in order to enjoy fresh vegetables year-round. By overwintering some crops in the garden (Swiss chard, kale, and spinach), growing microgreens inside, and growing crops that will store for long periods of time, we manage to keep a variety of fresh vegetables in our diet throughout the winter months.

Winter squash is one vegetable that stores well so we grow a few different ones for use during the colder months. Stored correctly, some winter squash (Hopi Pale Grey, Blue Hubbard, and sometimes Butternuts) will keep until the next season’s crop is ready to harvest.

Many vegetables and fruits prefer cooler temperatures for storage but not winter squash. I find that they keep better stored at room temperature. Winter squash come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. They are beautiful to look at so you can store them in plain sight all over the house. Arrange them in a corner next to a potted plant, make a table display, fill a wire basket or old wooden box, put them in a child’s wagon, line them up on the fireplace mantle — you get the idea.

Here are a few of the different kinds of squash and pumpkins I like to grow.

Growing winter squash

Winter squash are fairly easy to grow but they require quite a bit of space. Fortunately, if you have a smaller garden there are some bush and semi-bush varieties that can be grown.

In addition to being delicious, most bush varieties mature faster than the larger vining types. A bush squash typically only takes up a 3×3-foot space. So you can fit three hills of squash (with 2-3 plants per hill) in a 6×6-foot area.

Semi-bush squash take up more room than the bush varieties but their vines remain shorter than the larger vining squash. They also have a tendency to produce a lot of fruit in the small amount of space they use.

If you are short on space think about growing a bush or semi-bush variety. Keep in mind though, because the foliage produces the sugars that feed the fruits, some bush and semi-bush varieties can be lacking on flavor. But there are some that are great. Here are a few of my favorites that we find have good flavor:

Bush Delicata

Cucurbita pepo, open pollinated. These oblong-shaped squash have creamy white skin with green stripes and flecks. The flesh is smooth and nutty flavored. The storage life of this squash is a little shorter than the harder-skinned varieties. I find they store well for about 3-4…

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By John Silveira

While we are waiting for the Coronavirus pandemic to subside enough so society can get back to normal, there are powerful and simple remedies we can employ to safeguard our health against this deadly disease and other serious maladies such as flu, heart disease, and various cancers. Research on the Coronavirus, in fact, has shown that getting plenty of vitamin D, which is provided readily by exposing your skin to ordinary sunshine, is one of the most important things we can do. If we can’t get enough sunshine, we can take an inexpensive over-the-counter supplement of vitamins D and K. Doing so will cut down our chances of getting Coronavirus by at least 50 percent and reduce the severity if we do get it, according to new research, and also radically reduce our chances of contracting other serious maladies.

This is one of the significant discoveries to have come out of the pandemic. In the wake of the half million dead Americans left behind by Coronavirus, the knowledge that vitamins D and K play such major roles in our health may save countless lives going forward. In the short-term, it may still save our life, or lessen the severity of illness, if we are unlucky enough to get exposed to Coronavirus.

The majority of Americans are deficient in vitamins D and K, especially in the winter and especially if you have darker skin. While 42 percent of white Americans are deficient, 75 percent of Hispanics and more than 80 percent of blacks are deficient.

Observational studies

The evidence for the beneficial effects of vitamins D and K come mainly from “observational health studies,” which are not as tightly controlled or as highly supervised as “cause and effect” studies conducted on thousands of participants over a period of months or years. These observational studies consist of data being compiled by doctors and hospitals treating COVID-19 patients during the current pandemic, and also include relatable studies that preceded the pandemic. Doctors are discovering through trial and error that many of the patients who are either avoiding getting infected or having better outcomes if they do get infected are the ones with adequate levels of vitamins D and K.

The more tightly controlled “cause and effect” studies are underway — dozens of them prompted by these observational studies — and they will come up with more exact data and conclusions that will be helpful fighting the next pandemic. Meanwhile, we have only these observational studies, and we think these front line doctors’ observations are worth acting on right now.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is not really a vitamin; it’s a steroidal hormone. But we’re going to go with convention and call it a vitamin. It comes in two forms: D2 (ergocalciferol) and D3 (cholecalciferol). D2 comes mainly from plant sources, while D3 comes from animal sources such as fatty fish, fish oil, animal livers, and egg yolks. D3 is also produced in our bodies by certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light…

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