It seems that many of us are some combination of bored and crazy right now. But, as I like to say, there is often two ways to look at things. One of the best stress relievers for people who like gardening is, in fact, gardening. And yes, it is possible to start our gardens indoors and then get out and plant some vegetables and herbs when they are ready, like us, to get out there. So this is an episode about general tips on what vegetables and herbs are okay to grow or start indoors.
I first talk about ways to get involved in community gardens and specific programs in your community. In Massachusetts, we have a program (Mass in motion) that has all kinds of education programs around planting vegetables and eating healthy foods. Their website can be found here. You can sometimes call your City Hall to find out what’s going on in your area.
The edible schoolyards project has a bunch of cool videos and PDFs, as well as tips to start your own garden.
This YouTube video will show you how to start basil plants from cuttings. You can start now with a cutting from the grocery store and grow an entire plant from that cutting.
This video shows you how to grow many different vegetables by cutting off the root and from the grocery store vegetable. It is actually a surprisingly easy thing to do.
This video is from Daisy Creek Farms. They focus on fast-growing, high nutrient vegetables. They have multiple videos about how to grow from purchased and cut vegetables.
This video demonstrates Growing multiple vegetables from seeds.
I also discussed a large NIH study that examined the lab values of people that followed a diet with lots of healthy fruits and vegetables versus a diet high in processed foods. Not surprisingly, the indicators for risk of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes were much lower in the group eating the produce. Then they switched groups. The group eating the produce started eating the processed foods and the group eating the processed foods started eating the produce. In 4 weeks, the lab values switched again.
All this is a long way of saying that this time might give us the opportunity to look into ways that we can grow some vegetables or herbs, either indoors or outdoors. And maybe even learn to cook with them.
Food for thought.
As always, feel free to contact me on my website contact page, which is on healing outside the box.com.