Easy Vegetable Gardening With Aortic Disease

Easy Vegetable Gardening?

A small vegetable garden can generate as much food as you can eat, or store. Here is a typical day: sweet potatoes and their leaves (tender and delicious), late tomatoes, peppers, fresh herbs.

Easy vegetable gardening! Oxymoron?

You don’t have a lot of digging to do for butternut squash, here seen hanging in our little fig tree.

People ask me how my garden grows so well, with all that North Carolina clay.

I just reply that it’s the easy vegetable gardening approach, aka The One Straw Revolution.

It really is easy.

Clay is rich in minerals, and the worms that were ‘seeded’ into the soil during construction (to keep out rabbits and deer, and control flooding), do all that work. I just dig little holes or a shallow trench with the hoe, to plant seedlings or seeds.

Weeds?

Three tricks to that:

(1) Little and often, just yank a few out, every day, and

Typical late summer produce from our small vegetable garden in North Carolina.

(2) Broadcast clover to keep down the weeds, and fix nitrogen in the soil at the same time.

(3) No compost heap. Just scatter vegetable waste and weeds back on the ground where they came from. Even dense okra and tomato stems dissolve back into the soil in no time. Sure surprised me.

Furthermore, easy vegetable gardening keeps you in touch with planet Earth and the rest of the biosphere. It calms the nerves, relaxes the mind, and it’s good for your training.

You are what you eat, it’s been said.

In my opinion, medicine should be:

• 45% diet
• 45% exercise of mind and body
• 9% kindness
• 1% pills.

Unless you have aortic disease, and then for a little while, at least, it’s 100% surgery, thank goodness.

Keep on trucking, my aortic companions.

Wishing you happy trails,

kev aka FitOldDog

Age 75, and not dead yet. Photo by Sue, during a 35-mile easy spin to see the horses on a lovely day this week.

I don’t remember doing any work to grow those butternut squash, they just appeared from some food trimmings. Delicious, roasted in the toaster oven with a little brown sugar.

Oh Yes! Please ask your doctors to explain this picture to their patients:

Grey is muscle, white is fat, clear ring around the central white spot (bone marrow) is the femoral bone.