Our Backyard Homestead

Gluten free is the future for me

I have spent most of the last decade of my life thinking I was too young to feel so bad.  Shortly after The Tornado was born, I invested time in attempting to get medical answers when the pain was so bad that I could barely climb the stairs in our two story house.  Encouragement to go to physical therapy and a diagnosis of a small amount of arthritis in my spine were all I came away with.  You have a baby and two very young children, your body will heal the orthopedist reasoned.  Arthritis in my spine at age 30?  How does that happen?  Eventually, the pain in my hips subsided a little and I learned to live with the rest.  My children passed the age of being carried on my hip, yet the pain did not go away.  I have attempted not to dwell on the nagging question always lurking in the back of my mind of if I feel this bad in my thirties, what will I feel like in my 50s or 80s?

The decision to embark upon our major elimination diet was solely for the sake of my two children who have struggled with food sensitivities since they were born.  Eating ultra healthy would be a benefit for the rest of the family as well.  If I dropped those few pounds that were causing the clothes to fit a little tight, it would be a nice reward for the effort involved on my part.  Within a week, I started to see much greater benefit than dropping a few pounds.  Chronic issues such as major sinus congestion were disappearing.  The itchy ears were itchy no longer.  But, the greatest improvement was yet to come.

Around the three week mark, I got out of bed one morning and realized that my body didn't hurt the way I was used to.  The pain in my hips that had once kept me from climbing the stairs had vanished.  The spot of arthritis had disappeared.  Maybe I was just having a good day because this was too strange to consider to be a result of our diet.  However, over the course of the next few weeks, my body felt better than I have felt in a decade.  I had so much more energy and came to realize just how much chronic pain I had been in, but had learned to ignore.  I had no idea how much of my energy was going towards just surviving the day.  No wonder I felt tired all of the time!

This past week we began to experiment with adding gluten back in beyond a few spelt trials.  This past week, the muscles in my back felt like they were on fire, yet it didn't register that it could be related to the food.  By Thursday, with only a few minor exposures to wheat, my sinus congestion was getting much worse.  I chalked it up to allergies.  Afraid that I was getting a little too paranoid about what I was eating, I threw caution to the wind and ate a honey wheat hamburger bun at my niece's birthday party.  It was the only thing that I ate that was different.  I brought our own condiments and chips to the party.

Within 30 minutes of eating the hamburger bun, every bit of pain was back in full force.  My entire back radiated with burning muscle pain.  My hip pain was terrible and severe to the point that I was struggling to walk.  It was awful and I never want to feel like that again.  I am still in shock that one little hamburger bun could make me feel that bad.  A few hours later, the pain had subsided somewhat and by Monday it was almost completely gone.

James 1:2 says to consider it joy when experiencing various trials.  As I have journeyed through the past decade of being the obnoxious mom that won't let my kids eat the foods all their friends are, it has been difficult to keep the joy.  Especially when the allergist and pediatricians left me feeling as though I am over top and because my kids don't have hives or come up positive on their tests, I must be exaggerating their symptoms.  Today I have great joy in a future with specific and big diet changes.   When we began our elimination diet I prayed that the problem foods would be obvious, but I didn't realize that the prayer would be answered for me.  I thought this was all for my kids!

Devestation

 

Gardening has brought me so much appreciation for things I wouldn't have imagined.  From bible verses to poetry to history that has come alive with new meaning.  Monday morning about 1 AM, our entire town was pummeled with golf ball size hail.  I don't know of a single neighborhood in our town of almost 10,000 that was spared.  My garden took quite significant damage but I am so thankful that I live in an era where there is a grocery store full of produce down the road.  I can't imagine how devastated I would have been to walk out and survey the damage if I had no other options for feeding my family.

I wrote to tell my grandmother about the storm and her response is so full of wisdom and a mindset sorely lacking in our country today I had to share:

I had missed the reports on hail in Tx.  I am so sorry. It is a devastating experience.  Have lived thru' several. One extremely bad when I was younger. We lost windows, siding, roofs and crops plus other things--School couldn't even start as it broke all the windows out of school also. At the time I did not fully realize my Dad's profound attitude. They had lost all their crops--our income for the year--Dad went out and checked the losses came in hugged Mom and said there's a lot of ice out there have you got some cream Ma--let's make ice cream. We kids went out gathered the hail stones and ice cream we had. A valuable lesson I have never forgotten   In those days we bought sugar and flour in 50 to 100#'s at a time. the rain water came in after the windows were all broken and ran on those supplies destroying them also.

Sadly, we lost one of our chickens.  Scared out of her mind (the very small chicken mind), she squeezed a hole in the chicken wire and escaped from the coop, only to be nearly immediately killed by the hail.  One of our cars was severely beaten but thankfully did not have broken windows.  Our roof will almost certainly need to be replaced, but it could have been so much worse.  I think of the town in Iowa that was nearly wiped off the map by a tornado and know I have much to be thankful for!

As for the garden, it took a severe beating.  My lettuce was nearly ready to harvest and it was pummeled to pieces.  The kids and I salvaged what we could and I picked out bits of gravel, twigs, mulch and who knows what else.  It was covered in dirt but after multiple washings it was edible and quite delicious.  We also lost most of the kale but were able to rescue some that was turned into several smoothies and a delicious side dish with dinner.  There were two broken off flowers from mutilated sunflowers came inside to add a little sunshine to the counter.  We did our best to make lemonade.

The floating row cover worked well for the small hail we had a few weeks ago.  I do think the tomatoes would have been a total loss if it had not been there, but as you can see, it is not effective against golf ball sized hail.

I had just planted these sunflowers a few days before.  Not too late to plant from seed.

The blackberries took a severe beating.  Nearly every branch is broken like this one.  If we get any berries, it will likely be about a third of what there would have been.

This was a new fruit tree I had picked up.  Hopefully it will recover.

We had already lost all of the peaches due to some late freezes after the fruit had set.  Now it appears we lost a better part of the tree.

All dents from the hail in a bag of mulch.

A close up of the damage to the floating row cover.  I think this one looks a little like it could be the face carved on a jack o lantern.

A baby pear from the neighbors pear tree.  I am sure that pear harvest will be minimal as well.

The dark dirt looking substance is huge piles of the shingle material that was beaten/washed off of our roof.  There are huge dents in the shingles and we have not climbed up there to inspect the chimney but I am certain it took quite a beating as well.

Leaves and twigs/branches are everywhere littering both the front and back yard.  The poor trees are looking rather bare.

 

Thrive

Last year, I heard Howard Garrett mention two things on his radio program, Thrive and Sweet Almond Verbena.   Ironically, my commercial for Thrive comes from my experience growing the verbena.  After hearing Howard rave about how wonderful the verbena is, I got online and ordered two, one for me and one for my mom.  Being mail order plants, they were tiny, not more than about 3 inches tall.  I thought for sure that it had been a mistake to order them.  I planted mine in a pot, my mom put hers in the ground.  A month or two later, my plant was double to triple the size of my mom's plant.  I had given my plant a few waterings with Thrive added and low and behold, once she did the same, her plant took off as well.  From 3 inches to over three feet our plants grew at amazing speed and bloomed all summer with the most fragrant flowers!  Unfortunately, mine does not appear to have survived the cold winter days.  However, my mom said her plant is coming back to life.

I am reluctantly linking to Howard Garrett's website but there is limited info online about Thrive.  Unfortunately, in the past year, I feel that his radio program and his website have become nothing more than a big commercial for his new organic living store.  While I absolutely commend his efforts and appreciate more and more choice in where to find organic products, it is disappointing to tune into the once very helpful radio program and hear nothing but "buy this at my store!"  That disclaimer out of the way, here is the picture of an experiment with grass that convinced me to give Thrive a try last year.  While this is a sales video aimed at retailers, it quickly explains how Thrive works.

I do believe that Thrive was very helpful in my garden last year.  I did not do any trials of my own but my plants seemed stronger and healthier than in years past.  It was enough of a change to convince me to use it again this year.  Maybe I will turn one of my growing bags into an official experiment this year.

 

Weekend Roundup 4/3 - part 2

When I said that I wanted to get up early this morning as I went to bed last night, 4:30 am was not exactly what I had in mind.  However, since that 4:30 wake up call came with over an inch of rain, I will deal with early.

I took a big gamble by planting my tomatoes early this year.  There have been a handful of nights since planting that were down in the 30s, but covered with frost cloth, they have done very well.  I was concerned that the frost cloth was not allowing enough light in to keep them covered around the clock so I finally got around to switching out to floating row cover.  The two look very similar, but the floating row cover is much lighter and allows more light in.  I will leave them covered until they outgrow it. 

Tonight I will put the frost cloth over the top of the row cover because temps are predicted to be about 40, which means at our house it will more likely be around 35.  The other benefit of using the row cover is for protection from the elements.  Yesterday and today, as the winds blow fiercely, the tomatoes were spared from spending the days blowing about which can stress the plant.  They were also protected from the powerful thunderstorm and hail that we had last night.  If you are going to be successful with tomatoes in Texas, I firmly believe that row cover is a necessity!

Here is a shot of how the tomatoes are doing.  I am quite amazed at how big they are.  It appears that my potting soil experiment is so far quite successful as the tomatoes in the bags are about double the size of the plant in my raised bed.  I am not sure what that means other than I need to get around to soil testing.

For someone that said they were not growing tomatoes this year, I sure have a lot of tomatoes planted.  I believe I am now up to 11 plants.  On the left in the above image is another early girl.  It took some significant freeze damage soon after I bought it and I thought I had killed it.  It has been sitting on the back patio for the past month and after being much neglected, had recovered so well that I decided the determined little guy could have some real estate in the garden.  On the right is a Black Cherry heirloom variety.  I am crossing my fingers it will do well.

The corn is continuing to sprout, some of the plants are now about 2-3 inches tall.  The carrots are finally sprouting.  No sign of any of the lettuce I planted by seed.  The New Zealand spinach is sprouting well, but the other two spinach varieties have not sprouted yet.  I am afraid that I killed my potatoes.

We harvested our first lettuce from the garden last night.  It was quite yummy.  Evidently I will need to get better at planting it from seed so that I can have succession plantings.  So far I am failing with the seeds.

It makes me very happy to see basil popping up all over!  I believe the plant on the left is borage...or a weed.  Now that I think about it, I believe it is a weed.

This seedling makes me excited too!  The Malabar Spinach is popping up.  It is not yet coming up in the bed where it was planted last year.  This is where I had it two years ago.  I plan to trellis and let it grow in both places this year.

Blooming blackberries is another sight that makes me happy!  I have been digging up blackberry plants and have several to give away.  The are proving to make good on that warning on being invasive.  However, as long as you dig up the new plants, then the invasive nature is not a major issue.  And, it gives me plants to share!

I also worked on my kitchen window bed for an hour our so.  I have some serious affection for perennials.  I think it is just amazing to put in a plant and then see it return year after year.  I may live to regret this decision, but in the half of the space that is still empty, I am planting several varieties of mint.  I have had peppermint and spearmint in for two years now.  Now that I have a dehydrator, my plan is to begin drying it and making my own mint tea.  The new varieties include chocolate mint, ginger mint, apple mint, English mint and mountain mint.

Weekend Roundup 4/3

Wow, how did it get to be April already?  It seems the more I cross off the gardening list, the longer the list gets.  Of utmost importance this week is to address my irrigation.  After three seasons, my drip irrigation is beginning to fall apart.  Since it looks like we are in for a drought kind of summer, I must figure out watering very soon.  So far, neither Walmart nor Lowe's have had the drip irrigation sets that I have purchased in the past.  If I can't find replacement pieces, I am not sure what I will do.  I am not happy with the current fan sprinkler I have been using since it is wasting way too much water.

We spent a few hours working over the weekend.  I was out there a total of about 4 hours and Matt helped for about an hour.  However, the help he provided saved me at least 2 hours and likely a few bruises and a sore back!  My goal is to keep the garden as weed free as possible.  Last year when we had to add a fence to keep the dog and chickens out, the weeds around the fence were a nightmare.  I have slowly been adding bags of soil to kill the grass/weed mix along the perimeter of the fence. 

This year, I bought some edging bricks so that we can weed-eat around the bags and not instantly destroy them.  My goal is to eventually have a pretty little growing strip around the fence both inside and out that we can use to grow veggies (on the inside) and flowers and herbs (on the outside).  There was one corner that was overrun with extremely deep rooted weeds combined with fire ants.  Awesome combination!  Thankfully, Matt was able to get enough weeds out so that we could get cardboard laid down under the fence and then he set the soil bags on top.  As you can tell from the picture above, there is still more to be done, but the area he completed was by far the worst!

Here is a view of the side fence.  The good (though inexpensive) potting soil is going on the inside of the fence.  The bags on the outside are very cheap topsoil and are going on their second season of weed killing in new locations.  I was pleased that the plastic held together when we attempted moving them.  I planted zucchini in the first bag and eggplant in the second.  I am not sure why I wanted to try eggplant because I have never cooked with it, but maybe we will like it?  In the background you can see how we are slipping cardboard under the fence and the putting the bags on top.  This should prevent the weeds from growing in between the bags like they did last year and thus the mess of bags, weeds and fire ants that Matt had the pleasure of working on today.

I began planting in my mini retaining wall planter today.  I put in four banana peppers, alternating with marigolds.  The kale and mustard greens seem to be doing quite well.  I also planted beets and peas just beyond the greens, neither of which sprouted thanks to our lack of rain and my lack of keeping the soil moist in the absence of rain.  I am about to plant beans where the failed beets and peas are.  I just need to finish the debate in my brain whether to plant pole or bush beans in this space.

It appears I will need to break this into two parts since it is now past bedtime.  I have more pics of the tomatoes and how well they are doing as well as a few other odds and ends I want to make sure to get down since I am trying to keep a weekly journal.