7 Things Healthy People Do Every Morning

1. Drink A Glass Of Water As Soon As You Wake Up

This rehydrates your body, revs up your digestive system, and gets things flowing. You may notice positive changes like clearer skin and better digestion. Bonus points if you add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice or a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar

2. Do Not Check Your Email Or Phone For At Least An Hour

Do you sleep with your cell phone next to you and grab for it first thing when you wake? This is not a good habit. If you choose to resist the temptation to check your email and Facebook feed until at least an hour after waking up, you’ll find that your mind is more clear, focused and happy.

3. Think Of One Thing For Which You Have Gratitude

This sets the stage for positivity throughout the day. If you come up with three or five things, even better.

4. Step Outside And Take A Deep Breath

Fill your lungs with fresh air. This only takes 10 seconds! It reminds you that you are alive and breathing.

5. Move Your Body

You don’t necessarily have to do an intense workout before breakfast, but moving your body even a little is a great way to get the blood flowing and shake the body into wake-up mode. Simply doing a few stretches is a great option. Or turn on your favorite song and dance like no one is watching.

6. Take Time To Eat A Healthy Breakfast

Rather than reaching for a box of cereal, focus on getting real foods in your body. Eggs, soaked oats, and smoothies are all great options. (And they really don’t take that much time to prepare.) Try it out.

7. Say Your Affirmations

Look into the mirror and say something positive to yourself. Some ideas:

• I radiate beauty, confidence and grace.
• Every cell in my body is healthy and vibrant.
• I feel great when I take care of myself.

 

 

SOURCE: MIND BODY GREEN AND BE FOOD SAVVY

Salad Dressing Mixology

Our organic veggie members have been getting A LOT of leafy greens lately. It´s easy to run out of inspiration when making salads, but there are plenty of options and flavors. This is an easy guide to making the perfect dressing.
Fresh lettuce + a good dressing + a few toppings = a delicious salad

Some of the toppings we love are: pumpkin and sunflower seeds, artichoke hearts, tomato, cucumber, grated carrot, apple, nuts, crumbled cheese, sundried tomatoes, citrus segments and homemade croutons.

Super Easy Baba Ganoush

Hey guys! We have a lot of eggplant at the farm these days. We often do, it’s one of the easiest things to grow around here, and once a plant gets established it will keep on producing for months. Other crops, like carrots, or lettuce, need to be planted every 3 weeks to keep the love coming.

Now you may also now that I’m a mom of four busy boys. So when it comes to recipes, my main criteria are fast and delicious.

I made a killer baba ganoush dip the other day, and it was so easy, I just have to share.

First, grab a bunch of eggplant, enough to fill a baking dish (or less if you don’t want that much dip). Prick them with a fork. Then bake them at around 225 C until they’re totally squishy. They’ll turn dark, they’ll deflate, and if you poke a fork in there, you’ll know if its squishy or not. This should take about 30 minutes.

Now, if you have kids, it’ll likely be time to go pick them up from school, or someone is having a crisis that you’ll need to go tend to, so feel free to just take ’em out of the oven and leave them until you can handle them.

Then of course, if you’re like me, you’ll have a million other things to do, and your eggplant will just be staring at your from the top of the stove, wondering when you’re going to finish the recipe. At this point, you should put them in the fridge because there just isn’t time!

After a day or two, you’ll realize, hey, the kids are at school, or in bed, and I’ve got some time on my hands, let’s finish that baba ganoush.

So take them out of the fridge, cut them in half lengthwise, and scoop out the squishy flesh into a blender. Add a handful of sesame seeds (or tahini if you have it), garlic, olive oil (you can omit if you used tahini), salt, and lime juice (or lemon if you have it). Blend!

Now if you’re a culinary genius and you have that kind of time, you can roast them on a grill to add a charred flavor. You can also omit the part where the whole roasted eggplants sit in the fridge waiting for you. After roasting the eggplant, just wait until they’re cool enough to handle, and you can get right to the blending part!

Baba ganoush tastes even better after a day in the fridge, so make sure you make enough to save some for the second or third day.

Enjoy!

4 Tips to Enjoy Your Veggie Membership to the MAX!

CSA (“community supported agriculture”) programs are a wonderful way to eat the freshest, highest quality, and most nutritious produce available in your area. Here are four tips to help you make the most of your program:

1. Be flexible and creative

A CSA share offers a wholly different experience in eating and preparing food than shopping with a list at a grocery store. With a CSA, you must be willing to relinquish a certain degree of control over what you eat because you never know exactly what you’ll get. Meals take on a life of their own and the process is wonderful!

2. Devise a strategy for handling extras

There will be some weeks, especially at the peak of the summer harvest, when you will wonder how it’s possible to eat that many vegetables before the next round arrives. The good news is you don’t have to. Focus on eating the produce that spoils first, such as salad greens, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Then wash, dice, and freeze the leftovers. or share with friends!

3. Read the farm’s newsletter diligently

A good CSA farmer is involved with his or her community. At Rancho Buen Día we send a weekly email to our members with a list of the vegetables they will be receiving, a recipe or two and storage or preparation tips about some of the less common produce that we harvest.

4. Visit the farm

Members are always welcome to visit the farm and to contact their farmers with any questions they may have. It strengthens the relationship between consumer and farmer – always a good thing – and encourages transparency. Farm tours are a lot of fun for kids, too, especially when they realise that the same vegetables they eat at every meal come from a place they’ve visited.

10 cosas que hemos aprendido con una membresía de verduras

1. Ser miembro de un programa de verduras o Agricultura Sostenida por la Comunidad (ASC) es una excelente forma para descubrir nuevas recetas y nuevos vegetales favoritos.

2. No es necesario intimidarse por las verduras que no conozcas, muchas también son nuevas para nosotros, pero siempre te vamos a dar ingredientes que son fáciles de preparar de varias formas y lo que sabemos sobre ellos.

3. Entre más fresco el vegetal, menos preparación requiere. Así de sencillo. Además los vegetales recién cosechados tienen más sabor que los que encuentras en los supermercados.

4. Es bueno dar prioridad a las verduras según el tiempo que se mantendrán frescas. Y hay trucos por si empiezan a pasarse, por ejemplo, si las hojas verdes (acelgas etc) empiezan a marchitarse simplemente guísalas en lugar de comerlas crudas.

5. Empieza a decidir qué comer, no a base de tu antojo sino de lo que haya en temporada. Puede ser difícil en un inicio adaptarte, pero cuando veas que los tomates de herencia están maduros ¡los comes ese día!

6. Las verduras en los supermercados están limpiecitos; han sido procesadas, empaquetadas y trasladadas. Los vegetales ASC llegan directo de la huerta, así que es natural que encuentres un poco de tierra y muy de vez en cuando algún bicho. Es parte de la experiencia y no estás comiendo químicos dañinos o pesticidas.

7. Ser un miembro ASC requiere de tiempo en la cocina. Recomendamos que selecciones el tipo de membresía que mejor se adapte a tu estilo de vida y hábitos de cocina.

8. Gracias a la lección #7 gastas menos comiendo en la calle. Teniendo tanta comida fresca en el refrigerador te motiva a comer sano y en casa.

9. ¡Las ensaladas cuando tienen una buena lechuga son más sabrosas! Hemos visto hasta la gente más “carnivora” servirse dos o tres veces las ensaladas preparadas con nuestra lechuga mixta.

10. Pertenecer a un programa ASC es la excusa perfecta para salir de casa. Visita la huerta, enseña a tus hijos de donde proviene su comida y reconéctate con la tierra.

Es una experiencia muy divertida que además de sabrosa, ¡fomenta un mejor estilo de vida!

Composting: a quick-start guide

Compost is my favorite part of farming; decay is an absolute miracle of life! You start with a big pile of brush, that looks like garden refuse to most people, and you end with a warm, moist, sweet-smelling, black and crumbly fertilizer that boosts yields, strengthens plants against pests, and adds flavor to vegetables.

Ryan riding along….adding nitrogen-rich material to the compost pile!

If you want to get started in your back yard, start saving your fallen leaves. Just rake them into a pile and leave them.

Next to your leaf pile, you’ll want to lay out a thin, 20 cm layer of leaves, at least 1 meter by 1 meter.

When you have kitchen scraps (including paper towels, napkins, and coffee grounds), throw them onto your square layer. Grab a handful of leaves from the pile next to your layer and cover it to keep away flies and animals.

Whenever you do some weeding or pruning in your garden, add a new green layer to your compost layer cake. Cover with leaves. Rinse and repeat!

My compost layer cakes in the front, and carbon-rich materials in the back waiting to be integrated into the cake. The pink compost pile on the left is from bouganvillea petals! How pretty!

It’s a good idea to water your compost layer cake at least once a week. More is fine, less is fine.  Decay is a forgiving craft.

Tips:
–don’t worry too much about having perfect layers. It’s just an easy way to get the carbon rich material (brown, dead leaves or grasses) next to the nitrogen-rich material (manure, or green leaves and weeds) to speed up decomposition.
–Build your pile in the shade so that it stays moist. Cover with a tarp if you have one to lock the moisture in.
–As you add layers, use a pitchfork or rake to pull material from the center towards the edge. You want to maintain straight edges, otherwise you’ll end up with a dome instead of a flat cake. A dome will cause rain and water to run-off the pile rather than soaking-in, and microbes need that water!

Our new community recycling program at Rancho Buen Dia

We asked the community to bring us carbon-rich material that they were otherwise throwing out. It’s been a great success, and we now have a lot more to work with! Thank you! After working with the material, we’ve realised that we’d like you to keep sticks to a minimum. While sticks are compostable (on a scale of years rather than months), they make the pile a lot harder to work with. So until the day we have a bobcat tractor to do our heavy lifting, please send us stick-less garden refuse.

We are also accepting kitchen scraps. A lot of you want to minimize your garbage, but don’t have space or time for a compost pile. You can bring those scraps to a bin we have set up right in front of the farm stand in Todos Santos and we’ll add it to our compost piles, where it will go into making next year’s organic vegetables even more nutritious!

 

Sauerkraut Workshop

We are so excited! This Wednesday, April 6th we are hosting our very first workshop at the farm. Nutritionist, Elizabeth Campbell will teach us hands on how to make sauerkraut and share in depth information on the health benefits of fermented foods and how to incorporate them into our lifestyle and diet. Join us – it’s going to be lots of fun.

Here are all the details:

Quiz: How many days to harvest?

Rhythm.

The whole world has a rhythm.  The rains fall in the summer.  The desert turns green.  Now in January, the desert is drying, turning yellow.  In March we’ll feel the wet fogs roll in off the Pacific and we’ll see the white Plumeria blooming in the desert, along with the yellow Palo Verde and the Mezquite.

Food used to be a part of that rhythm.  In the US, every household would plant in the spring after the snow thawed.  Spinach and lettuce would be the first to harvest.  Winter squashes and pumpkins wouldn’t be ready until fall.

Here in Baja, the return of longer days marks planting time, so most people started to plant in January.  Other cultivars, that aren’t sensitive to the shortening days, were able to be planted in September as well.

These days we are very cut off from that essential rhythm.  We have food imported from all over the world so that we can eat our favorites whenever we want them!

Here’s a quiz to see if you can guess how many days of sunlight and water go into your vegetables!

1. Spinach
2. Zucchini
3. Baby Lettuce
4. A full head of lettuce
5. Green beans
6. Carrots
7. Tomatoes
8. Spaghetti squash
9. Onion
10. Green onion

 

Write down your answers (in days) on a piece of paper and then scroll down.  A month would be 30 days, two months are 60…

Keep scrolling!

 

 

 

1. Spinach  45 days
2. Zucchini  55 days
3. Baby Lettuce  30 days
4. A full head of lettuce  50 days
5. Green beans  60 days
6. Carrots  60-70 days
7. Tomatoes 120 days (that’s four months!)
8. Spaghetti squash  90 days
9. Onion 120 days
10. Green onion 50 days

 

How did you do? It takes quite some time and accurate planning for crops to mature and provide a steady supply of produce!

Introducing: Our Wheel Hoe

An old farmer was asked at a conference what his worst weeds were.  He named off two, and then grew quiet, trying to think.  Finally he said, “well, we don’t let them get big enough for me to identify what they are”.  That is the key to weeding a garden!  If we can get to them when they’re little, it saves the energy and time it  would take to chop down or yank out a mature weed.  Also, getting them small, we avoid the weeds from going to seed and planting more of themselves.

We worked for a while with a saddle hoe for tiny weeds; it’s lightweight and cuts the weed just under the surface of the soil.  But now, we love working with our new homemade wheel hoe!  We may be just a little too excited about it, but hey, new tools are fun!  We put it together out of a kid’s bicycle wheel and an old gas-powered cultivator’s handles.

This baby allows us to weed an entire pathway with just two passes, which is a huge increase in efficiency compared to a traditional saddle hoe. We are always looking for ways to optimize our production methods so we can offer even more variety to our CSA members and veggie stand customers.

What do you think of our homemade wheel hoe? 🙂

Saving Seeds

Artículo en español: http://bit.ly/1P0o550

We save our heirloom seeds; mostly as a step towards self-sustainability–reducing our reliance on outside imports is a huge goal.  It’s why we make our own compost, why we ferment our own fish extract, and why we got into growing our own food in the first place!  We currently save our heirloom eggplant, pepper, and tomato seeds.  

There are many more reasons to save seeds; during the 1900’s there was a startling drop in the number of heirloom varieties due to lack of gardeners saving and trading their own seeds. When farmers rely on commercial seed companies, any seeds that sell slowly simply get dropped from production and disappear. Saving seeds is important for preserving genetic diversity.

This loss of varieties translates into lower genetic variability in our food plants. Lower variability means lower adaptability to stresses such as disease or climate change. Each time a seed variety is lost, we lose another chance to feed ourselves in a world of changing climate and shrinking resources. Saving seeds also helps retain plants´ pest resistance.

Every year we select plants that grow the happiest on our farm.  Over time, we’ll eventually create our own strains of heirlooms that are acclimatized to our specific, local conditions at Rancho Buen Dia.

Each plant has a different was of harvesting its seeds; we harvest the tomatoes and peppers when they’re ripe, which means the seed is already mature.  Saving pepper seeds is simply a matter of grabbing a ripe fruit, picking out the seeds, and letting them dry out before packing them into an envelope.

Tomatoes are only slightly more involved.  Their seeds come encased in gel to help them pass through the digestive system of animals unharmed.  To save them, we first have to mash the fruit in a bowl of water, let them ferment for a day or two, then drain the water, rinse the skin and tomato bits off, and dry them out.

When eggplants are ripe for eating, their seeds are still a little immature.  So to save their seeds, we have to let the fruit ripen fully on the vine.  Our heirloom Rosa Biancas are easy to spot when they are ripe: they turn from white with lavender stripes to yellow.  Then, we cut them open and pick out the seeds, let them dry, and pack them away for planting time.

For a great article on the historical practice of seed-saving and breeding, we enjoyed this article from the New Yorker.