Health from your Garden

Your good health is down to you

2009-10-23T09:13:00Z

One thing is sure in this world: only you can establish total wellness and health. Unless you want it, and are sufficiently motivated to gain it and keep it, no amount of outside support will succeed. Taking responsibility for your own health should be a prime personal objective. Succeed and you will achieve a more enjoyable and successful social and working life, irrespective of your age. Best of all, you will be reducing your dependence on medications and other medical services, whether ‘free’ or private.

Many countries are struggling to fund an expanding medical service. There is a growing mentality that ‘if the service is free, I should use it to the full and demand the latest drug or treatment that I have read or heard about’. In parallel, public and private medical professionals are increasingly rewarded in relation to the number of specific tests, treatments and prescriptions they provide, prescribe and refer to specialists. Will anyone ever dare suggest that the most successful doctors are those with a practice that has a rapidly-reducing need for their services?

As WDDTY and this website often remind us: ‘There are no free lunches to good health’, and it’s interesting that the following notice is included on vitamin bottle labels:
• These are no substitute for a balanced diet.
• Don’t exceed the recommended consumption.
• Discuss their use with your medical practitioner.

Yet there is no label on commercial non-ecological fruit and vegetables that says: ‘It is recommended that you wash and peel before consumption’, and few medical professionals have comprehensive training in nutrition, which surely has to be a fundamental basis of our wellbeing.
Last November we attended a session at the Slow Food Terra Madre conference in Turin on the topic of ‘What medications do we have to combat poor diets?’ presented by a panel of six Italian doctors. Replies to two questions from the audience were enlightening. They were along the following lines:
Q1. ‘Why has the panel not focussed on what we should eat to prevent the need for the new high-tech medications’?
R1. ‘None of us had any education on nutrition and good eating during our medical training and, like most, we have probably eaten badly during our careers. Fortunately a few hours of education are now provided to doctors in training but it is insufficient and squeezed into an overfull curriculum’.

Q2. ‘Why is a holistic health specialist not included in the panel’?
R2. ‘The organiser cannot be seen to be openly supporting alternative medicine’.

But luckily most of the conference was focussed on expanding the production and consumption of healthy foodstuffs by traditional ecological methods, and for local consumption and with the producers getting a fair reward. Unfortunately it is a struggle in many countries; in Spain, farmers are abandoning the land because the price they are paid is less than the production costs. Virtually no produce is sold locally, but instead is transported to warehouses and packing stations where they are treated in order to improve their appearance and to preserve them while they are shipped to retail outlets, often in packs labelled ‘Fresh – eat by the end of the week’.

At least if you grow your own, you have the chance to eat truly fresh food – ‘picked at their best just before consumption’.

© Clodagh and *** Handscombe Authors of ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ and ‘ Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’. Read their October article ‘ Living Very Well from our Spanish Garden’ on their website ‘www.gardeninginspain.com.
October 2009.

Sweet and sour

2009-08-24T13:41:00Z

Recently a Michelin-starred restaurant, that uses some of our ecological vegetables, presented us with a copy of a recipe book called ‘Menus for Cardiovascular Health’. It was published jointly by the Californian Walnut Association and Spanish Heart Foundation to promote the use of walnuts in leading Spanish restaurants.

We were surprised, however, that more than half the recipes used sugar or corn syrup, and not stevia. When we raised this with one of the contributing chefs, he said that ‘clients respond well to sweet-tasting dishes. and the use of sugar is not that unhealthy’. We were surprised by his reply for two reasons. In the past few years he has lost over fifty kilos in weight, and he has a supply of stevia. But he is right about one thing: we have always been given sugared things as a treat from an early age and often prefer them to things that are spicy or tart.

This prompted a look at the shelf of British products in a local store stocked to attract expatriate customers, which included a popular brand of horse radish sauce.
Horse radish is easy to grow in Spain and we regularly grate a root to mix and dilute it with nothing other than extra virgin olive oil if we are to eat it with meat, and cider vinegar or fresh lemon juice to accompany a fish dish.

But back to the bottle on the shelf. Its contents read ‘Horse radish 30%, water, spirit vinegar, vegetable oil, turnip, glucose syrup, sugar, pasteurised egg yolk powder, salt, stabiliser gum, mustard flour, flavouring, sodium meta-bisulphite as a preservative’.

If you have a terrace, patio or garden, why replace the natural healthy benefits of an easy-to-grow inexpensive healthy plant for a product that contains flavourings, sweeteners and other ‘enhancers’? The plant has a unique flavour of its own, and it contains useful levels of vitamin C, potassium calcium and sulphur; it has anti-inflammatory, and diuretic, properties, and it also helps our metabolic rate.

© By Clodagh and Richard Handscombe, holistic gardeners living in Spain. Their website is www.gardeninginspain.com and their latest books relevant to all Mediterranean climate situations are ‘Your Garden in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthby Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’. August 2009.

New healthy plants for our garden – and perhaps yours!

2009-07-24T13:47:00Z

Although our garden is packed with plants, we can always find room for special things that look attractive and have benefits for our health.

Friends in the Leida Aragon branch of Terra Madre in Spain had set up an association called Dulce Revolucion – ‘Sweet revolution’. It was created to make people aware of plants that members had found beneficial, and to make them available in return for a small donation to the Association.

Inspired by this, we arranged a rural tour to collect some plants for ourselves or friends and others. Two weeks later we have the following three types of plants being trialled under different microclimatic conditions as the plants are not native to Spain

Stevia: The variety Stevia rebaudiana has the balance of Rubiocicide and Steviocide of the original plant from Paraquay and has not had the sweetener content increased by genetic breeding as has apparently happened in countries such as Japan.

We can now use fresh or dried leaves instead of honey in infusions and cooking. They may be able to help reduce the amount of medications that diabetic type 1 and 11 sufferers need to take, and help reduce fat build up, blood pressure and anxiety.

It’s usually consumed as an infusion.

Perilla: Perilla frutescens is an attractive purple-leaved plant that has useful culinary and health benefits.

It is used in the preparation of Japanese Shiso dishes. Healthwise, it is used in Asia for relieving allergic, respiratory and food poisoning conditions etc. It’s generally consumed as an infusion or leaf but it can also be included in salads.

Kalanchoe: The exotic-looking succulent plants we have are planted in a dedicated raised bed. The varieties are pinnata, dalgremontianum and gastionis-bonnieri. The benefits claimed include helping reduce cell damage and cancerous conditions, rheumatism, psychological crisis and hypertension. Like the other two, it’s taken as infusions or in salads.

Although we’re healthy (or believe we are), we are using a different leaf each day in our health-sustaining diet.

© Clodagh and *** Handscombe July 2009. Their website is www.gardeninginspain.com and their best-selling books are Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain, Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain and Your garden in Spain .

Beating cancer naturally

2009-06-08T16:55:00Z

In 1991, I visited my GP to ask for advice about a large lump on top of my neck. I was told that everyone in their fifties starts to get lumps like these, and there was nothing to worry about. I was then 54.

Two year later, I asked the same GP to check out the lump as it was throbbing, and my mouth was full of blood each morning. At first told I was told I had gum problems, and I should see my dentist. I insisted that this was not so, and an appointment to have an ultrasound examination at the local NHS hospital was arranged. When I got there, the operator could not work the machine properly, and only a vague shadow about 4 by 2 centimetres showed up. He suggested that I come back the following month when he would obtain a special dye that, if injected into blood stream, would improve the quality of the image.

Not happy with that experience, I demanded that the GP refer me to a head and throat specialist at the local private hospital as I had medical insurance for 20 years, and which I’d never used. I saw a specialist within a week, who said that I should have visited him two years before. I was operated on within two weeks and a salivary gland, with a large tumour within, and some lymph glands were removed.

The tumour was diagnosed as being slow growing and was resistant to radio- and chemotherapy, and as I had been swallowing blood, it was likely to spread to the lungs rather than reoccur in the upper neck. The doctor suggested that it would be better if I had a second operation two weeks later to remove another lymph gland and flesh around the gland - and then retire early to my Spanish holiday home full time for a less stressful, Mediterranean diet and physically active lifestyle - but to come back for annual check-ups.

So, in 1994, I did as the doctor ordered and moved full time and solo to Spain and did four things: I researched what the real Mediterranean diet had been in our then self-sufficient valley and started to follow it; I started to mountain walk; I worked on the Executive Overseas project at high altitude in Bolivia for a month and then walked in Peru to build up strength in my lungs; and I developed a mountainside garden that included areas for healthy ecological herbs and vegetables, and which involved collecting tons of rocks in a wheelbarrow, and eating ecological local meats and I caught my own fish in sea.

In 1996 I met Clodagh, now my wife, on top of mountain. Clodagh then was known as ‘the Green Witch’ for her amateur knowledge of beneficial uses of herbs. She had stopped drinking coffee and tea and was instead drinking infusions of mint, rosemary, lemon verbena, lemons, ginger, rue etc.

In 1998, and by then 61, I walked across Spain via the Pyrenees from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean in 52 days – that’s 950 kilometres and up and down 33,000 metres - with Clodagh, and with heavy rucksacks and tent. As a result of seeing small communities still self sufficient in organic/ecological vegetables, and as traditional agriculture in our valley was being abandoned at a fast rate and was changing from natural to chemical methods, we took on an allotment to have the space to become self sufficient in ecologically grown vegetables, herbs, edible flowers and soft fruits. Although I’ve grown a hundred different vegetables, we focussed especially on those with high antibiotic, vitamin and mineral content.

I expanded the number of beneficial herbs in the garden, and I made both the garden and house chemical-free. I stopped going for check-ups as regular x-rays are a risk in themselves ( I suspect that dental x-rays were one of the possible causes of the cancer, and I refused the dentist’s money spinning x-rays since 1993).
In 1999, we started to write our six books on gardening in Spain, giving radio talks and talks to gardening and dinner groups plus writing articles for many newspapers and magazines..

In 2001 we walked around Cuba to see the food growing revolution for ourselves. This helped us improve some of our practices, and we started to breed chickens and quail for eggs and meat, and rabbits for a healthy meat for an AB blood group.

Last year we took over the stewardship and regeneration of an abandoned olive grove – and we started the ‘Living well from your garden’ blog for WDDTY.

This year I’m 72, and still enjoying mountain walking, physical work in the garden allotment and olive grove. I talk every week about ‘Living well from your garden’ to local gardening and embryo allotment groups which are new to Spain.

We continue to eat well, and we are looking forward to our own first cold pressings of hand-picked extra virgin olive oil in 2011.

Interestingly, the surgeon has never enquired if his advice worked or if I am still in good health!

Luckily the increase in the popularity of our latest trilogy of books ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Your Garden in Spain’ funds our purchase of eco wines cheeses and lamb, which we don’t home produce.

Herbs for health

2009-04-08T16:34:00Z

Herb plants have many benefits in the garden. Many are perennials that flower for long periods, they add perfume to the garden, are reasonably drought-resistant, and they expand over the years to usefully cover an area of not so good soil. They also add flavour to salads, cooked dishes and refreshing drinks, and, most importantly, are an aid to better holistic health.

This morning our garden - after an early morning shower and with the heat of the rising sun - was as relaxing as an aromatherapy parlour. Wandering round it to see what spring flowers would be out for Easter, we harvested rosemary for an energy-stimulating infusion before going out for a four-hour mountain walk to celebrate Richard’s 72nd birthday and 16 years of surviving cancer by following a Mediterranean diet and avoiding radio- and chemo- therapies.

Along the way we collected horse radish to grate into olive oil to have with lamb chops at dinner and to boost our metabolic rates, garlic to mash with tomatoes frozen from last year’s crops to spread on home-made bread at lunch time – a popular tasty and natural antibiotic and antioxidant snack along the Med - jasmine and thyme flowers to flavour some of the latest batch of Kombucha, and parsley and basil to add to our breakfast salads.

Tomorrow and the day after we may make other choices for we have set out to have as many edible herbs, flowers, vegetables, and fruits as possible growing in the garden - and all are grown ecologically. Month by month others are using our trilogy of books ‘Your Garden in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ to do the same.

To us it seems the natural thing to do and we feel good for our age because of it. The only surprise is that the surgeon who suggested that Richard risk a follow-up to his two operations has never contacted us to find out if he is still alive!

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical holistic gardeners living in Spain who wrote their books to share their ideas and experiences with others. For more information visit their website www.gardeninginspain.com.

Salad for breakfast

2009-03-09T16:27:00Z

For us there’s nothing more gastronomic, healthier and economic for breakfast than a home-grown vitamin- and antioxidant-rich salad and an egg boiled, fried or as an omelette.

Recently we gave a talk entitled ‘Living well from your garden’ to a Costa Blanca U3A (University of the Third Age) conference. Most speakers focused on achieving better health by gentle exercise, meditation, massage, skin care, and they were followed by a medical doctor who emphasised that there are now pills to not only overcome vitamin and mineral deficiencies, but also to extend life expectancy. He himself took over 100 pills a day, half that of his US mentor, and it was suggested that if 35-year-olds started a course they could reasonably expect to live to a 100 or longer.

Most participants seemed to prefer the idea of eating vitamin-rich vegetables and fruit from their gardens and thought that they would find it very difficult to swallow over 100 pills a day, even if they were drinking three litres of water a day!

During our talk we mentioned the best vegetables to eat, and for breakfast that we included a salad (as do those Spaniards still following any remnants of a Mediterranean diet) and a freshly-laid egg.
There was an immediate audience reaction - ‘Salad for breakfast, ugh!’ and ‘aren’t eggs dangerous?’ We pointed out that the English newspapers had recently reported that the British Nutrition Foundation now admitted that it had been wrong in suggesting for many years that eggs were dangerous and that its views since 2005 were that ‘Going to work – or gardening - on an egg’ was a great idea, except for the small number of people with familial hypercholesterolaemia .

We explained that our salad was not of the lettuce leaf variety, but that it included nasturtium, parsley, rocket, marjoram, red lettuce and young spinach leaves, chopped young garlic stalks and root, sliced spring onions, sprouted radish and broccoli seeds with extra virgin olive oil as a dressing to give us a good dose of vitamins, minerals and, most importantly, natural antioxidants and antibiotics. Home-grown tomatoes, carrots and shitake mushrooms are added when in season.

Anyone can grow this breakfast in a small-raised bed or even in containers on apartment terraces as well as in the open garden. Our book ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ demonstrates how easy it is.

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical holistic and self-sufficient Irish and English gardeners living in Spain, who have written several books to share their ideas and experience.
For more information visit their website www.gardeninginspain.com.

Fruits all year round

2009-02-03T11:36:00Z

One of the joys of gardening in Spain is that delicious fruits full of undiluted antioxidants, vitamins and minerals are at hand throughout the year for eating, harvesting for later in the year, drying for snacks or storing at the end of the season.

Unfortunately our fresh raspberry harvests finished in November – having started in May! - but by then we had vitamin/antioxidant-rich late grapes, fresh pomegranates, various varieties of seasonal mandarins and oranges, and, of course, lemons on our perpetual flowering/fruiting lunar lemon tree. From autumn harvests, almonds, pecan nuts and walnuts are stored in their shells without exposure to air until they are cracked for eating.

Having been grown ecologically, the mandarin and orange peel is safe to dry and eat or include in cooked dishes. Since we rarely water the fruit trees in order to maximise flavours rather than artificially maximising the size and weight of fruit, one is constantly tempted to eat more than the minimum recommended five to nine portions of fruit and vegetables a day. At Christmas the pudding and mincemeat was made from home grown and dried fruits and nuts.

Why not plan now to do the same!

Clodagh and *** Handscombe are practical holistic and self-sufficient Irish and English gardeners living in Spain, who have written several books, including ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’, and many articles to share their ideas and experiences.
For more information, visit their website: www.gardeninginspain.com.

Midges and mosquitoes

2008-12-18T11:57:00Z

When we first came to Spain we were delighted that there were not all the midges that prevented us from dining outside in our previous garden in Windsor, but there were the occasional mosquitoes hovering around.

We resisted the overkill of installing mosquito screens on all the windows and the use of plug in chemical vaporisers. Rather we planted lantana plants in beds against the house, having been advised on a walking holiday in Mauritius to rub lantana leaves on our skins against mosquitoes – and it worked – and caught a couple of geckoes ( lizards with suction pads on their feet that enable them to walk across ceilings) that kept village houses free of flying insects and built a pond soon inhabited by insect eating frogs and toads.

However we could not take fresh lantana leaves frogs and geckoes in our luggage on a recent visit to the jungles of Costa Rica so we looked up the back numbers of WDDTY, and found just what we wanted - an ecological mix of essential oils that could be added to olive oil which we used already as the basis for daily body and a sun protection oils. The mix we made up was 100ml olive oil from olives we had picked, 12 drops of lemon grass oil, 8 drops of thyme oil, 8 drops of lavender oil and 8 drops of oil of peppermint. The latter two oils having been distilled previously from herbs in the garden for other purposes. It worked, providing a good body lotion as well as protection from mosquito bites. Chatting to other travellers, some had been well bitten even though they were using proprietary sprays.

© Clodagh and *** Handscombe December 2008.
Holistic and self-sufficient gardening authors living in Spain.
http://www.gardeninginspain.com/

Their books include Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain, Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain and Your Garden in Spain.

Grandparents play a key role

2008-11-06T16:30:00Z

On the basis of our fruit and vegetable books, we were invited to join 8000 other participants from 150 countries at the third Slow Food international Terra Madre conference in Turin.

For four days a diverse mix of food communities, small scale farmers and fishermen, chefs, traditional medicine growers and practitioners, university educators, consumers - including over a thousand young people - considered how good traditional vegetable, fruit, herb, fish and meat produce and products could be preserved and expanded by self-sustaining methods.

Fortunately the original focus on food’s taste and texture was widened to include health, not surprisingly when you consider the background of GM-led industrial agriculture having a detrimental effect on rural life and health in many developing nations.

It was sad that many of the young people who were studying agriculture had opted out of the organic/ecological modules because bigger salaries lay elsewhere but, to offset this, the concept of school gardens is being resurrected on a major scale in many countries, and growing your own, as we do, was seen as a essential contribution to good health by most of the more elderly participants like us.

In several sessions a big plea was made for the world’s grandparents, who can remember the days of heirloom seeds and breeds and gardening without chemical products, to share this knowledge together with healthier recipes with their mobile/fast food-focused grandchildren. If they don’t succeed, much valuable local knowledge will be lost for ever.

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical gardeners, authors and broadcasters living healthily from their holistic garden and slow life in Spain. Books include the bestsellers 'Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain' and 'Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain'.

© Clodagh and Richard Handscombe www.gardeninginspain.com November 2008
( Apologies that the website was wrong on our two previous contributions).

Start with a kitchen garden

2008-10-20T14:13:00Z

Growing fresh healthy crops full of vitamins and minerals does not require a large vegetable plot. Indeed even with a large vegetable plot we still grow things in the kitchen in areas of less than one or two sheets of A4 paper to demonstrate what is possible for apartment dwellers, the infirm and children.

Our automatic starter is often producing a diversity of sprouting seeds – eighteen possibilities are listed in our vegetable book. A cardboard box of spore impregnated compost produces shitake mushrooms over a period of several months each autumn. On the outside or onside windowsill a trough or row of pots can yield a diversity of herbs and miniature vegetables. On a worktop a deep earthenware container grows three or four litres of the healthy Kombucha drink a week (the active ingredient of Kombucha is a floating fungi/lichen type plant).

Instructions for such mini vegetable gardens are given in Part Two of our vegetable book. Why not have a go? Surely less than five minutes a day is a productive investment in one’s own health!

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Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical gardeners and authors living healthily from their holistic garden in Spain. Books include Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain and Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain.

Grow your own

2008-10-06T10:58:00Z

Labels on bottles of vitamin pills frequently include the note 'Not intended as a substitute for a balanced diet'. Heath authorities worldwide now recommend that we eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day for their vitamin and mineral contents, others emphasise that these are best if fresh and grown ecologically/organically without the use of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides. The Slow Food movement recommends that we should try and eat local produce to sustain the local economy.

Such produce is not always easy to buy or is expensive due to today’s oil-based, long-distance distribution systems by air or road transport, and packaging materials. So why not grow your own in containers on apartment terraces, in raised beds in small gardens, in the garden or if convenient an allotment? The great advantages are that you can focus on growing those fruits and vegetables with the greatest beneficial vitamin and mineral contents and harvest each day just what is required for each meal or day.

The WDDTY chart 'Guide to the healthiest foods' is a useful indicator of this.
Following the traditional Mediterranean Diet, we include a selection of fresh home-grown antioxidant/vitamin/mineral-rich foods such as dark green spinach and dandelion leaves, sprouting broccoli, tomatoes, nasturtium flowers and leaves, garlic, onions, tomatoes, carrots in all meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner - and, when walking the mountains or playing tennis, we enjoy our own home dried unadulterated fruit, vegetables and nuts.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Clodagh and *** Handscombe are practical gardeners and authors living healthily from their holistic garden in Spain. Their books include 'Growing healthy fruit in Spain' and 'Growing healthy vegetables in Spain' (Santana Books). Many of the practical ideas are applicable worldwide.