Sprouting Seedlings and Strawberries

Our strawberries are starting to ripen. We are getting about four ripe strawberries per day which seems piddly, but I thought it was understandable since I have only three planter's worth. However, I realized today that we are losing a lot of our harvest to birds and other critters. When we went to pick our strawberries today, three of the ripest berries had bite marks out of them. I also found a strawberry on top of my fence. It looks like something started to take off with it and dropped it. I'm not sure how many we've lost, but even a couple a day is too many, so I draped the bird netting over the strawberry plants that I've been planning to use for the goumi and lingonberries.

The bush beans, cucumbers, snow peas, and komatsuna that I planted two weeks ago have all sprouted. The frequent rains helped me a lot in keeping the seedlings moist, and the strong sun we've been getting in between the rains really helped the seedlings grow quite a bit.

I planted the snow peas an inch apart and I thinned them down to two to three inches apart a couple of days ago. The little pea sprouts were delicious in our dinner salad and a welcomed change of pace. I thinned the komatsuna tonight, and it looks like the slugs really like them, since they were full of holes. Nevertheless, the young seedlings were a tasty addition to our dinner salad.

The lingonberry plants arrived about two weeks ago, and they went into the ground in a patch that I had mixed well with peat moss. Longonberries like soil high in organic material and thrive in an acid soil. I have a large bag of pine mulch that I will be placing around the plants to help lower the PH.

The goumi plant arrived today from Burnt Ridge Nursery and I was pleasantly surprised. It is a lot taller than I expected and the packaging was innovative and efficient. The creeping raspberry plants were very very tiny and I felt vastly overpriced for the size. They do not look well, but I read that they are very easy to grow and thrive in just about any soil condition, so we shall see. We set the goumi and the creeping raspberries outside since I did not want them to get spoiled in a controlled temperature environment. Hopefully, we'll be free of die off this weekend so we can plant them!

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GAPS/SCD Bread

I made nut bread this weekend. We ran out over a week ago, and we've been too fatigued to get caught up. We're definitely having more good days than bad these days, but we had another wave of die off this past week. So I let a few things slip. Nut bread and apple sauce were a couple of things that we let go. We missed the bread sorely. When it's toasted and topped with apple sauce, it tastes like apple pie, so it is often the yummy ending to our dinners.

Mid-last week, a few days sans nut bread, I woke up in the middle of the night with a severe cramp in my left calf. This occurred once more within the next few days, and my calf was very sore whenever I was walking around. Muscle spasms like this are a sign of magnesium deficiency, and nuts are a wonderful natural whole food source of magnesium. My body was missing the bread too.

Even though the die off has not abated, I decided enough was enough. It is time to make the nut bread. My nut bread recipe is based on many of the GAPS and SCD bread recipes out there, except brazil nuts make up about half of the nuts in my recipe. Brazil nuts are a rich source of selenium, which is an antioxidant that prevents cellular damage from free radicals and help regulate thyroid function. Selenium deficiency is often associated with gastrointestinal disorders, so chances are good that someone with gut dysbiosis may have a selenium deficiency. Selenium also attracts and binds with mercury, which is an added benefit since Todd is still detoxing from the mercury in the amalgams that were removed a couple of years ago.

Here's my routine for making nut bread:

• Preheat oven and line the bottom of  two loaf pans with wax paper. Grease pans with lard.
• Process almonds in food processor until it resembles a fine corn meal. Add brazil nuts and process until it turns into a thick nut paste. Remove a pyrex bowl's worth of nut paste.
• Add eggs, melted ghee and lard, and salt. Blend until well mixed.
• Add back the nut paste I set aside and eggs one at a time until all the nut paste is used up and the mixture is between cake batter and bread dough in consistency.
• Scoop batter into the pans and bake.

The full recipe is on my recipe site under Almond Brazil Nut Bread. 

After the loaves have completely cooled, I cut them into thirds and wrap each section in wax paper, plastic wrap, and then aluminum foil. One section is set aside in the fridge and the rest go into the deep freeze. The sections thaw quickly, so I take them out of the freezer when we finish the last piece of the current section. Todd and I share a slice a day, so each section lasts a few days. Nuts are very nutrient dense, and it doesn't take a whole lot for you to get the benefits of the vast array of nutrients in nuts. Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride says that nuts and fruits should make up no more than 15% of your diet, and I know that nuts are especially high in energy, so it's further reasoning to ration our nut bread.

The whole cooking process takes about an hour and a half, but then there's cleanup of the food processor, cooling the bread, and packaging it to put away. It's a lengthy process, but it's worth it. Just one day after eating the bread, all pain in my calf is completely gone.

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