End of summer backyard

It's the time of year here when the cicadas change the soul of their song. Instead of the raucous, celebratory screech of high summer, they sing in a minor chord, sad to be saying goodbye to the scorching heat. (Not that the days are much cooler now, but the nights certainly are.)

Sometimes we make the most of them by picking their old skins off trees - sometimes there are hundreds, if not thousands of discarded exoskeletons clinging to a single tree! Our chickens love them as a crunchy treat, you see.

I promised in springtime (and here) that I'd give a run down on successful and not so successful vegetable seeds I was trying. So I'll do that today, saving the lowdown on my anti-cancer winter vegetable plans for later in the week. Oh, and before then, a word on inspiration and rows vs random in the garden.

Mainly what I want to say about the garden is how magnificent, as always, it has been this summer to go out the back and pick huge amounts of super healthy food! What fun it's been, too, to create it. I love the creating part, the way it alters the landscape so profoundly, and how tiny seeds can turn into so much.

Beans. I professed a love for scarlet runner beans, not only for their taste while young, but their productivity. Ha! It's been a disappointing season. Usually we give a lot away, but we didn't even have enough for ourselves, really. A bean grower at our Farmer's Market told me that bumblebees damage scarlet runner flowers, and we have a lot of those big furry pollinators. It could also be due to growing them in the same place for several years in a row. Time for a change of location next year, and possibly of bean type!

Cucumbers. There have been some failed plants. But one of the seedlings I got from a church fair, possibly labelled burpless, gave us a real surprise. It was rampant, probably because it's growing in a spot that housed a compost bin for a couple of years and has been gorging on the resulting nutrients. But the many fruit are yellow with stumpy black spikes. They don't taste quite as good as the green version, sadly.

Slow-bolt coriander. Forget it. What a disaster - sure, it didn't bolt, but it barely grew, either.

Florence-ribbed zucchini. I loved it! Well, as much as you can love zucchini. But my husband and someone else I gave a plant to said they prefer plain old zucchini. We've had a wild plant of that, too.

Artichokes. Dead. Yes - death by aphid attack and a gardener who never got around to spraying them. I'm hoping the plants will emerge again in spring.

Tomatoes. We have gorged. The cherry tomatoes have been abundant and sweet, and it's been wonderful to have these big, tasty brandywine tomatoes, so different in flavour and texture, but so full of character. I'll definitely grow them again next year. (Does anyone know if the photo below is tomato blight? Because now the plants are much browner, and green tomatoes still hang, but don't ripen. The cherry tomatoes are less brown, and still ripening.)

Capsicum. We've eaten a few because the branches are so heavy that some of them snapped off! Mainly we are waiting for these huge beauties to turn red. These are Dulce espana, and are not long and pointed as I'd expected!

Peaches. Our own peaches, for the first time. Tastewise I can't rave about them, but they are ours! The 'dwarf' tree, however, looks bigger than it should. I bought some golden queen peaches at a market last week, and was reminded of how sublime they are. Nothing beats a perfectly ripe golden queen peach - they have such intense flavour. They're big trees, though, and we don't have the space.

Grapes. The green 'Niagara' grape vine I bought from the Warehouse a few years ago is giving us its finest crop ever. Divine.

I could go on - we have a lot of stuff packed into our little section! But I'll end with flowers. We've had sweet peas, cosmos, marigolds, poppies, lavender, sunflowers and borage scattered around the garden. They're gorgeous and I hope help attract pollinators and beneficial insects. 

I'll miss my summer evenings in the garden, weeding, watering and harvesting. The dark is coming earlier now, faster and faster, and soon we'll make soup and light the fire. But not quite yet.

Loving knitted vegetables

Welcome to a garden with a difference. The vegetables are made of real WOOL!

In the weekend Anna and I went to our local museum (the Waikato Museum), and this is one of the displays. A staff member's mother knitted these vegetables three or four years ago. It's testament to the power of wool that they are still going strong despite very frequent handling. They are Anna's favourite thing there, and she ran straight to them when we got through the doors.

She grabs one of the harvest baskets they have in the garden shed, and starts filling it like mad. The shed is also home to garden tools (safely but frustratingly permanently strapped to the walls), and dress-up style butterfly wings in case a little one wants to do a little bit of pollinating.

It's more fun than the real garden at home, I suspect, because everything can be harvested immediately and no one gets told off for pulling inch-long carrots out of the ground! Anna does, however, love being outside with me in the garden. Not long ago she asked for it to be just her and me in the garden one evening. Plus our cat, of course, who like all cats loves his owner's company out in his territory. She didn't help much, and watered the concrete path instead of the plants, but lay around and enjoyed the atmosphere.

The leaf to the right is from our zucchini plant, which continues to be prolific. Indeed, I'm about to eat leftover zucchini fritters for lunch. 

Stay tuned for a 'real' garden post!

My anarchic diet: anti-cancer eating

I walked through the supermarket the other day and the shelves were full of brightly packaged, minimally nutritious cardboard loaded up with oil and sugar. It was a good feeling to know that the things I wanted to buy there were few, and pretty close to the way they were when they grew (can I include the dark chocolate in that category?). 

Thank goodness for our garden!

For the last three weeks or so I've been eating quite differently. Before that I had what to most people looks like a really healthy diet. Except now I realise it wasn't. My motivation to gorge on vegetables and ditch the white flour and sugar completely? Death by cancer. I'll come back to death at the end. Where it should be, after a long, healthy life.

Here's a link to a recent report stating that the World Health Organisation is expecting a tidal wave of cancer soon. Just in case you imagine I'm being being needlessly paranoid.

When the most recent deathly blow struck in my circle of friends, it occurred to me that when people get cancer they often make lifestyle changes. I thought I'd find out what they were and make them now. I did so, and I thought you might like to know what they are.

1. diet
2. exercise (I won't comment on this; suffice to say this remains my year of walking, which is likely to become my life of walking)
3. meditation/stress relief. I wrote about this in my last post, and I'll write more on it in future, I'm sure.

There's a lot of alternative therapies out there for cancer and quite frankly I think they're mostly offered by charlatans. I've cast my science-trained brain over what I'm doing - not in the minutest detail, I'll admit, but nothing I read clashed with anything I know - and there seems to be enough evidence for me to take the plunge.

Short-as-possible science-y bit about how tumours form
Most of us regularly have tiny tumours inside us as a result of our normal cell division gone a bit wrong. A healthy immune system kills them off while they're no bigger than a pin head. Sometimes the immune system slips up, though.

They still need to obtain oxygen and food to grow beyond pin head size, and the only way to do that is to get a blood supply. To do that they trigger our body's process of inflammation. You know what inflammation looks like - when you cut or bang yourself this same process kicks off, the redness reflecting the blood and immune cells being sent to the area. Inflammation is absolutely needed to repair tissues. Cancer cells, however, hijack that process. They make a nasty substance that disarms the arriving immune cells so they don't even try to fight the tumour. They enjoy the uncluttered delivery of nutrients from the extra blood.

I need to point out here that studies show that people with generally higher levels of inflammation throughout their bodies, as measured in their blood, have much faster cancer progression.

The cancer cells also send out a signal that forces blood vessels to approach them and sprout new branches. Voila, a tumour with an established network of blood vessels. Now it can really get growing.

Now it needs lots of glucose to fuel it. Tumours are glucose-greedy, which is why the PET scans commonly used to spot cancer simply measure where most of the body's glucose is being consumed.

How to interrupt this process
Firstly, I write from the point of view of someone who doesn't have cancer. I want my body to knock back those pin-sized tumours every time. If I had an established tumour, I'd have it cut out.

For me now, the biggest changes are as follows:

1. Keep my blood sugar low and steady. Eating white flour and sugar - yes, even Granny's scones and pancakes - raises our blood glucose more rapidly than anything that existed when humans were evolving (except maybe honey and nectar, but these would have been miniscule parts of the diet). Remember cancer feeds on glucose. In a double whammy, our bodies respond to high glucose levels by making insulin and IGF (insulin-like growth factors), and these hormones promote inflammation.

(Note here that recent published studies have shown that people with blood sugars in the upper range of normal are more likely to develop dementia, and that sugar is at least as great a heart disease risk as saturated fat.)

Action: eat oats with no added sugar, bread made from 100% wholemeal flour (most shop grain breads use white flour and chuck some colour and a few grains in), no biscuits, cake etc. I do indulge in a couple of squares of 72% dark chocolate after dinner. I eat several pieces of fruit a day, which is fine because not only is fruit laden with nutrients, its sugar (fructose) is bound up with fibre, which slows down the sugar release, and water, which makes me full before I eat too much. This is slow-carb eating. Lentils, beans etc are also great slow-release carbohydrates (with some protein for good measure). Brown and basmati rice are slow-release carbohydrates, as are root vegetables apart from potatoes. White pasta: not for me, thanks.

2. Watch my fats. Not so much the amount, but the type.

In the last half century there's been an explosion of something else our bodies previously knew nothing about: vegetable oils. Olive oil, of course, is ancient, and unsurprisingly it's really good for you. It's one of the few oils that doesn't have much omega 6 in it. There are three omegas - 3, 6 and 9. Olive oil has the 9. Fish oil has the 3. Most vegetable oils have mainly omega 6. Ancient diets had a close balance between 3 and 6, but our enormous intake of vegetable oils mean we generally get at least 20 times more 6 than 3! Given that this stuff gets turned mainly into our cell walls, that's a big deal, because omega 3 walls are way, way better than omega 6 oils.

Too much omega 6 promotes inflammation. You remember that baddie.

Food summary:
- I cook with olive oil, but this means using low frying temperatures, because it has a low smoke point, and smoking fat is bad news (carcinogenic). I also use saturated fats like coconut oil and butter in moderation (whereas the omegas 3, 6 and 9 are what make up unsaturated fats). For high heat frying I use rice bran oil, which isn't ideal but I don't have an alternative at present.
- I eat grass fed organic red meat (thank you Wholly Cow) and milk, because (in the words of Gareth Morgan) you are what you eat eats. These days many animals are fed grain instead of grass (and insects etc for chickens); their meat, milk and eggs are correspondingly high in omega 6 fatty acids. Studies show that increasing the omega 3 content of their diet - either through feeding them grass (quaint idea in some countries, I know) or flax seeds - increases the omega 3 levels in the people who eat their meat and drink their milk. I give my hens flax seed and greens to enrich their eggs.
- no bought biscuits or crackers. Almost every baked good from the supermarket contains trans fats. These are baddies.
- we never eat rancid fat. Dark yellow stuff on the outside of butter, oils that are old or exposed to light - bad stuff. And margarine never crosses our doorstep - the omega 6 content lets it down.
- ground flaxseed is easy to add to things like porridge and smoothies. It's delicious and cheap, and contains lots of omega 3 oils. I bought a second hand coffee grinder to grind the seed, and store it in the fridge.
- we eat fish and oily fish.
- this is a slightly separate subject, but processed meats (ham, bacon, salami, sausages) are clearly linked to bowel cancer. A sad but well-established fact.

3. Lots of fruit and vegetables
Many fruits and vegetables have substances in them that interfere with the tumour development pathway, either at the immune system level, by blocking the formation of blood vessels or causing the cancer cells to commit suicide (which our healthy cells naturally do, but cancer cells remain immortal). Lots of vegetables are needed, cooked and raw, at lunch and dinner. Load your plate. A jam sandwich won't suffice.

Food summary: Every vegetable is good, but the following have been shown to be particularly anti-cancer: mushrooms, berries, turmeric, herbs, tomatoes, the garlic/onion family, colourful fruits and vegetables, cruciform vegetables like broccoli and cabbage. Green tea (sencha, matcha, gyokuro) has something in it that interferes with the creation of new blood vessels. Ginger has a similar effect, and a few slices of root ginger soaked in just-boiled water for 10 minutes makes a delicious infusion. Strain before drinking.

Phase 1 of yesterday's lunch - kale and zucchini. Stir frying vegetables in olive oil
and garlic makes them taste so much better! I love it with a bit of salt and pepper,
and some shavings of parmesan cheese.

4. Avoid chronic inflammation. We know how cancer loves to dance with inflammation. Also, when part of the body has to continually heal itself, there are more cell divisions, which increases the chance that one will go wrong and produce cancerous cells.  That's also why smokers get cancer - their lungs are always under attack and having to heal. That's also why some viruses are linked with cancer (hepatitis and liver cancer, HPV virus and cervical cancer).

Action: keep away from exhaust fumes, vapours, smoke and generally inhaling small particles. I don't even need to mention smoking, I know. (On that note, I hardly ever drink alcohol so I've made no changes there, but there are seven cancers absolutely known to be linked with alcohol - see here for more.)

So there you go, I've just blown away the easy, fast food Western diet, haven't I? It takes more time and effort, and possibly more money, although I leave a heck of a lot of stuff on supermarket shelves that others don't, so I'm not sure about the money bit.

What I haven't blown away is the enjoyment of food and a full belly. I feel more satisfied eating this way and I love what I eat. It helps that I enjoy cooking and exploring new recipes, as well as gardening.

My family hasn't completely caught on, especially the children. I'm working on it.

Weight loss: it's inevitable on this kind of diet, I think. I was already lean, and I've got leaner, to the point where I'm going to have to beef my calories up to stop getting too bony. Excess weight makes you more prone to cancer, so losing a bit is no bad thing for many people.

Yes I will eat cake at birthdays!

Regarding the deaths
In the last four years I've been to three funerals, each in February, and each as a result of cancer. I'm 40. In two of them the victims were under 50. In two of them they were mother and daughter. In that time there were several other people I knew or knew of who also had these tragic death celebrations held in their honour.

Watching my once vivacious friend die slowly and fairly gruesomely was probably the saddest thing I've seen. (I've lived a sheltered life, I know. No television helps.) The frequency of cancer deaths makes me not only sad, but terrified! I can't even describe how much I don't want my family to watch me die like that, or for me to watch any of them. That thought really takes the shine of that chocolate cake, the french bread and the icecream. I really don't feel I'm missing out.

Further reading:
1. Anticancer: a new way of life by Dr David Servan-Schreiber
2. Appetite for Destruction by Gareth Morgan and Geoff Simmons (even if you don't usually like Gareth Morgan, I loved this book and learnt a lot - even though I thought I already knew a lot about nutrition)
3. This recent article on cancer prevention.

Ruminating

Our mind is the most important thing we have, and most of us spend more time looking after our hair and clothes than our mind.

That sentiment is what got me going on meditation. Sometimes I think that everywhere I turn gives me the same message, even if I'm not looking for it, and meditation is the message I'm getting right now.

Nothing to do with meditation, but I do love reeds.

I've heard over the years how great it is, and meddled in it a few times, but the frequent migraine headaches I get have now pushed me hard in that direction.

The headaches get set off by any stress, worry etc, even if it's mild and brief, and that's where meditation comes in. It actually changes the brain. MRI studies show that certain brain parts involved with focus get bigger with daily meditation. But of major interest to me is that the amygdala shrinks. This little beast is concerned with the 'fight and flight' response (i.e. stress) and launches adrenalin release. Yes, it shrinks. Experiments with rats have shown that their amygdalas enlarge when stressful things are done to the poor rodents, and stay that way when the stress ends. I think my amygdala got pumped up quite a few years ago and it needs some serious slimming.

Since I read that, it seems like every magazine or book I pick up espouses the benefits of meditation, or the benefits of not 'ruminating' over the past or the future.

The mind-body link is powerful, no? Even thinking about food when you're hungry makes the saliva flow. Yesterday I spoke at a funeral, and in the lead up to it just thinking about the prospect made something near my stomach contract (maybe it was the adrenal glands on my kidneys?). So ruminating over things is of course causing changes in us also. Here are some snapshots of my ruminatings: I wish I'd never done that. Imagine what he/she must have thought of me. How could he/she have been so cruel. I was so useless at that. Farewell, rumination.

So, without further ado, here are my actions:

1. Begin meditating daily. I'm using an online guided meditation here which has a free 'take ten' programme, where you do a 10 minute meditation listening to a charming monk (who is also a handsome youngish Englishman called Andy, trained in the circus arts) talk you through simple mind exercises each day. Andy's TED talk is here, and it's compelling and enjoyable. He's the one who pointed out that most of us spend no time at all looking after our precious minds.

2. Enrol in a Vipassana meditation course. Johns Hopkins University have just completed a study on Vipassana meditation as a way to prevent migraines, and one of the researchers involved has told me via email that the study is just ending and the results should be out later this year. I can't wait that long. I have already managed to meditate away some of my migraines after the pain has started, so I'm diving in head first with a 10 day course that involves no talking, only fruit for dinner and rising at 4.3 0am!

I suspect that although the migraines might be what have sent me down this path, the benefits will be enormous, both to me and those around me. Maybe one day I'll even be glad of the frequent achy head I once had.

Beach break

I'm desperate to start blogging again. I've missed being here!

Here are some photos from our recent holiday in Raglan, on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island. We hired a house for four nights. It's a wild and beautiful place.

This is Whale Bay - a popular surf break.

Friends came out to dinner, and we took an evening walk as the sun set. The rocks were hot from the day's sun, and radiated warmth underneath us as we rock-hopped. I love the way the colours and silveriness of the sea change as the sun dips lower.

Anna and I kayaked together one day.

Fish and chips were eaten (not by me).

There used to be farmland here, once the native vegetation was cleared. Fortunately many of the paddocks have gone and the bush is returning. I love the wiry trunks of the kanuka trees (or are they manuka - I can't tell except I know kanuka grow taller).

I used to think the east coast with its white sand beaches was the only coast for me, but my husband's surfing habit has me wondering whether I could be a west coaster after all.

Barefoot walking

A couple of treasured blogs that I read have recently included a New Year's resolution of sorts: I shall walk. I'm with them on that, doing it and loving it.

Once upon a time - as in from 40 years ago stretching back to the dawn of humans - people didn't have to take daily walks as a separate part of their day. It was just a necessity to get somewhere. How things have changed. We need to purposely drag our soft bodies out of our upholstered chairs and car seats and get moving, because our bodies are not designed to slob around for extended periods.

I've continued to be fascinated with the idea of 'natural' human movement, how far we've diverged from it, and how we can get back to it in a pleasurable way. (I wrote about my initial discoveries of this concept here and here.)

Here are a few pics of a walk I do often. During term time I drop Anna at school and stride home this way. In the holidays I get up early to do it before Ian goes to work. We are so lucky to live just a couple of minutes walk from a beautiful natural place.

This cave woman forages as she walks... well,
for her chickens at least. They love greens. And
a girl who feels the cold can't resist a pinecone
 when she thinks about how easy they make
it to light the fire in winter.

Did you spot my barefoot shoes? I love them, although they look creepy, and stink after a few days (they are easy to wash though). I can walk over stones without so much as flinching thanks to their tough sole. It is fabulous to feel my feet walking as they should. I have some pretty barefoot shoes too, and on the rare occasions I have to wear 'real' shoes now (e.g. when doing DIY tasks where things could crash down on the top of my feet) it feels like I'm clomping around with a couple of barges on my flippers.

I've been going barefoot since November. For ELEVEN YEARS until June last year I wore orthotic inner soles and thought that supportive shoes were a moral imperative if I was to avoid the pain of plantar fasciitis.

But here I am nearly three months later, relying on the support of nothing but my own muscles, tendons and bones, with completely pain-free feet. It's a beautiful thing. I do, however, do certain stretches daily to give my feet a helping hand.

Also, I rarely walk on concrete or asphalt. I choose grass verges instead of the footpath (dog poo alert!) but most of all I go off-road and cross-country wherever possible. Healthy feet enjoy and need to walk over tree roots, hillocks, sand etc.

But the best thing about these shoes, as you can see, is that I can pick flowers as I walk.

Sunshine at Christmas

Here I am, living on the side of the planet that tilts towards the sun in December. It's where I want to live, but I do prefer Christmas in the cold and dark! I spent two or three Christmases in this way, in England, where I would stroll home in the dark at 4 pm and see lovely Christmas lights twinkling in people's windows. I could eat roast meals at lunchtime and feel pretty good about it.

(It seemed very unnatural to have darkness at 4 pm though. The Christmas lights were the only good thing about that.)

Here the children wake at 5.30 am because the sun has risen, and it doesn't set until around 9 pm. There's absolutely no cosiness happening. So our Christmas break involved a lot of beachgoing.

(Excuse the dates on the photos. Why would my camera do that, out of the blue?)

Day after day the children swam and boogie-boarded, the latter preparing them for the surfing future their father is determined they will have. They're keen for it, too. They learnt so much about how to judge and cope with waves, and they had huge smiles on their faces the whole time!

It would be nice, though, to spread out the big celebration times of the year - Christmas, New Year and a summer holiday. Here they are all crammed together. The worst thing about it, I think, is the end-of-year events that all fall just before Christmas, distracting us from putting time into preparing for the big C. No gingerbread houses got made in this family!

But I don't mean to complain, just muse. New Zealand is the country I want to live in. This was very clear on New Year's Eve when we wandered with friends from a barbeque party down to the beach. It was a still, stunning evening, and the waves rolled in gently. One of our friends made up games for the children - who can write their name the biggest in the sand? Who can do the farthest long jump? Who can find a feather, a shell and a leaf? The children were in thrilled a 'We're at the beach and normally we're in bed by now' kind of mood, and we all loved being right there in that summer evening on New Year's Eve.

My chicken, his curry

I tried, I really did, to keep my old brown shaver going. We've had her for about two years, and she's been the most magnificent layer, giving us almost daily eggs even through her second winter. But a few months ago, her egg shells began to grow thin, then petered out completely. Her shell gland had given up the ghost, leaving us with sloppy egg innards in our nestbox. After three or four such messes, the eggs stopped altogether.

Her big red comb shows she's still hormonally fine to lay.

(Yes, I had supplied extra grit, and I saw her eating it, but it was to no avail.)

She was chicken number five in a coop and run that was straining to cope with the number of greedy, pooing chickens. She was giving us nothing in return for her keep, and worst of all she was a bully to the three young brown shavers. So I made the call.

A friend works with a Fijian Indian man who had said he was happy to take chickens off our hands - for the table, you understand. I phoned him and quizzed him. Yes, he knew how to kill chickens quickly and humanely. Yes, he would butcher and eat her. He can't bear our bought chicken meat - it's bland and watery, he said, and is no good for currying. The old, strong, slow-grown meat is far preferable, apparently.

So I delivered her on the day of slaughter, in the finest eco-packaging (i.e. tucked up in a cardboard box). I was relieved not to have to do the deed myself this time, but still felt quite shaky knowing I was catching and transporting her to go to her death. In the event, he was such a nice chatty chap, picking me a bag of fruit from his home orchard, that I wandered out of there without a second thought!

I'm glad she's met such an environmentally friendly end: the curry pot. Apparently she tasted great.

not being good

I don't want my children to be 'good'. I never tell them they're a good boy or girl. They certainly hear about it when they're kind, generous, imaginative, thoughtful etc, though.

What people often mean when they say a child is being good is that he or she is obeying an authority figure. Sometimes that is the right thing to do, and sometimes it's not.

I think what we really want our children to learn to do is the right thing. After all, did Nelson Mandela live his life being a good boy? To many people he was a terrorist!

The Nazis were being good boys doing what Hitler told them to. Throughout history there must have been millions of times when terrible things were done in obedience to authority. Those people needed to do the right thing, not be obedient.

We only have 15 years or so to teach each child what the right thing is in a multitude of different circumstances. So when I tell my children what to do, I always explain why, even though it takes extra energy to do so. I'm not always going to be there, so they need to know the reasons behind the choices available, rather than blindly obeying.

I don't trust whoever might be doing the telling when I'm not there. Which one day will be pretty much all of the time.

(What 'right' things are today's terrorists trying to do? Oh, people are complicated, aren't we?)

Candy doll time

We've been in the thick, colourful, energetic fog of a Christmas ballet production. It had an icy theme - ironic considering it's summer time. When it comes to Christmas in New Zealand, there's still a chunk of it that harks back to the 'old country'.

We're out the other side now, and almost a bit sad about it. There were many hours of rehearsals, many hours of waiting while others danced, much awestruck watching of the big girls dance en pointe (what kind of ancient torture is that?). Much consoling and pleading: you can go backstage without me in the wings, my brave girl! Mama wants to watch from the audience for at least one performance! 

By the time I got to do that - and not without a last-minute burst into tears by Anna, and urgent words from me about being brave and strong, followed by yet more wiping off black tear trails of stage makeup from her eyes - I got to watch.

It was magical. It was especially so for me, because I knew how much work had gone into it. I admired the dancers, and especially their teacher, so much! Of course when Anna was on the stage I only had eyes for her. My girl with her perfect timing, her tireless smile, her ability to be in front of the others so that those who needed to copy her when they forgot their steps could do so. I was proud of her.

But best of all was that she conquered her fear of being up there without me in the wings.

Actually, no. Best of all was the seemingly endless hours we spent together at rehearsals. It was lovely.