Call them like karma, or maybe like the circle of life, either way, we are celebrating the beautiful raspberry plants we grew in our garden for many years. As we make our final preparations for heading for Vermont, one of our last tasks was to get some of the plants from our old garden. Fortunately, we had shared them with many neighbors, family and friends and were able to collect some lovely plants to bring with us.

During our last trip to Vermont, we planted some raspberry seeds from our garden. Given the challenges of germinating raspberry seeds, we don’t have high hopes of them growing. We are, therefore, thrilled to have some robust plants to take with us on the road trip. Our property there has a good number of free-range raspberry plants, so we are confident these will take off once they are in the ground.

We wish we could bring all of our family and friends with us on this adventure. Since we cannot, we can, at least, bring some of our favorite garden plants!

As we continue working on our Vermont Urban Farm project, we have found a small but lovely apartment to serve as our temporary home. As nice as it is, one thing became really clear: we missed growing food and sharing our home with other living things. Our solution was to convert a large west-facing window into a lovely window garden, where we are growing 30 seadling oak trees that we plan on bringing to Vermont to line our driveway. We are also growing some of our favorite spices, like rosemary, chives and basil, along with some different varieties of lettuce.

With seedlings coming up and plants growing, the extra life in our home brings warmth and beauty to the space, not to mention that we have already begin using some of the spice to enhance the flavor of our food, which helps up feel more connected to the earth. This little project has added some extra fun to our lives and helped us to appreciate more fully that everyone has the ability to grow some of their own food. It has also made it clear that doing so can add all kinds of value to peoples’ lives.

The fact of the matter is that almost everyone has at lease some window space where they could grow some food. It does not take as much space as you might think!

Somewhere in the range of 25 years ago or so I was in the middle of a horrible allergy attack. It hit me while I was on my way to my local coop. I had suffered from allergies most of my life and this was a bad attack. Lots of nasal discharge, watery eyes, sneezing, coughing… It hit hard and fast and I was a mess.

When I got to the coop, I headed right to the health section and asked a clerk for a bottle of whatever people were taking these days for allergies. She gave me a bottle of Quercetin. I popped 2 capsules and by the time I left the store, the symptoms were all gone and I had no side-effects from it whatsoever. It worked so well that I was curious about it and started reading about Quercetin, and how, even back then, mainstream medicine recommended it for a host of issues, like allergies, inflammation, prostatitis and other things. I have been taking it off and on ever since and have not had a severe allergy attack since.

I don’t take it very often any more, because now we grow a lot of our own Quercetin. It is a natural bioflavinoid in the Vitamin C family. It is a potent anti-inflammatory that does a lot of other great things in our bodies. For allergy-sufferers like me, it stabilizes the membranes of the mast cells in our bodies that carry histamine. Without Quercetin, my mast cells rupture too easily and needlessly release copious amounts of histamine, resulting in allergy attacks. With Quercetin in my body, my mast cells behave normally so that I have no allergy symptoms and no side-effects. Plus, I get all of the other benefits of this wonderful nutrient.

Plants like kale, tomatoes, blueberries and onions naturally contain a lot of Quercetin. So, our garden is packed full of it. When we began growing a lot of our own foods, my need to buy Quercetin as a dietary supplement was dramatically reduced. But, here is the thing: Quercetin is just one of more than 6,000 known bioflavinoids in fruits, vegetables and medicinal plants, most of which we know very little about. One thing we do know, however, is that commercial processing of them destroys them. Even the simple act of lightly sauteing onions in a pan can reduce the amount of Quercetin in them by as much as 30% - 40%. The high heats and pressures used in commercially processed foods destroys nearly all of it. In other words: commercially processed foods are not only bad for us because of the terrible things they put in them, they also are lacking in many of the nutrients our bodies need to function.

Said another way: my decades of allergy suffering were likely the result of the crappy commercial foods I was raised on.

Allergies, however, are only one health issue caused by heavily processed foods. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease and more are all linked to the consumption of heavily processed foods. We all know this. Mainstream medicine has been reporting on how Quercetin can alleviate allergy suffering for decades. The links between diet and heart disease, cancer and diabetes are well-established. Yet, most people do not take it to heart enough to actually change their diets.

I was thinking about this while reading a post on Reddit about the bad "allergy season” in Minnesota (my home state) this year. An allergy sufferer was bemoaning how bad it was and asking for advise. The comments became a stream of people recommending this, that, or the other over-the-counter anti-histamines, which have the least side-effects and which work better. Not a single person mentioned Quercetin or nutrition, or solving the body’s histamine issue in a more comprehensive way.

Maybe, instead of reaching for drugs, we should begin to think of our food as our medicine, and we would begin to make better choices that would solve a host of medical ailments.

Though our raspberry patch is relatively small, occupying only a portion of our relatively small garden, it is incredibly productive. On a good year, we can get nearly 100 half pint jars of raspberry jam from the little space they take up. At the same time, they provide food for a stunning array of pollinators, birds and mammals that not only eat the berries, but that find shelter in the protection of their canes. Yet, in spite of how many animals eat from our berry patch, there are still more berries left for us than we can possibly use.

From a nutritional perspective, raspberries are considered a “superfood” because they are so packed with nutrients while also being relatively low in calories. They are high in a variety of vitamins as well as fiber. They are also loaded with antioxidants and have been clinically shown to have anti-cancer properties. Add in the fact that most people find them delicious and it means there are a host of healthy and delicious things you can do with these delightful fruit and it seems clear that everyone interested in living sustainably should strongly consider having a large patch of these wonderful plants.

You can use the berries in jelly or jam. You can use the berries or preserves in desserts, smoothies and salads. You can add them to sauces and marinades. Really, the sky is the limit, because their sweet and tart flavor is delicious on its own, or it can enhance almost any other flavor.

In addition to all of those wonderful things about raspberries it should also be said that they are very hardy and robust plants that require little care or maintenance, to the point where many gardeners consider them fairly invasive. They are not picky about soil and will spread and fill in a wide range of situations.

The natural habitat of raspberries is the edge of forests, where they can get full sun, while also being protected from extreme heat. If you can give them a space like that, they will fill in and spread until some physical boundary stops them. Because they can be propagated from seeds or cuttings, it is easy to grow a lot of raspberries very quickly.

If you are looking for an easy, environmentally-friendly, healthy and delicious crop, you can’t go wrong by planting these wonderful fruit.

Our pets live really long lives. Really, really long. "Ripper," a sweet Grey Tabby, and "Chico," a Chihuahua rescued in Jefferson's Parish after Hurricane Katrina, are tied for longest-lived. They both made it to the ripe, old age of 21. Our current dog is "Kiki." She is a Husky mix who should have a live expectancy of around 13 years. She is currently 17 and still going strong.

Kiki lost her best friend, "Bella," a beautiful Wirehair Terrier mix, who left us earlier this year at the age of 16, which was particularly amazing given that Bella came to us as an adult dog with a very broken body. She was unable to digest or process food due to liver and pancreas issues cause by poorly managed diabetes, from which she had been suffering for years. By the time we got her she would eat large amounts of food but was - at the same time - starving to death. All of the food she ate would come out the back end largely undigested. She looked like a skeleton with a loose bag of skin hanging over it. We did not expect her to live long at all. Even with high doses of insulin, which we gave her 2 times per day, her blood sugar would spike in the danger zone, resulting in even more damage to her already compromised little organs. The small amount of her food she was absorbing was slowly killing her.

Fortunately for Bella, we had learned a bit about food from our first dog, "Schatzy," a Rat Terrier mix. Until she was about 8-years of age, Schatzy suffered from idiopathic epilepsy. She would periodically suffer from relatively mild seizures. They were not frequent or severe and were not in and of themselves very problematic, except that during a seizure, she would sometimes throw her back out of joint which would result in pain and mobility issues.

After a seizure, if Shatzy did not return to normal movement quickly, we would take her to the vet who would give her steroid injections to help with the pain and swelling and then she would slowly return to normal. That all changed one day.

The day Schatzy's life changed she had a seizure, threw her back out and her normal veterinarian was not available to see her. As a result, we made an appointment to see a new vet where we quickly learned that we were in for a very different kind of experience.

Rather than the quick in and out for a steroid shot we had gotten used to, this vet sat us down, showed us which vertebrae in her back was misaligned and showed us how to gently adjust it to get it back in place without drugs. Instead of the slow recovery we normally saw, she was back to herself immediately. It was an easy, safe and drug-free fix. Then, he set out to lecture us about the horrors of her food, which was kind of shocking to us, because we were buying what we thought was the "expensive," (aka "premium") Science Diet.

He explained to us that pet foods are made with left-over waste from industrialized human food manufacturing. He said that the foods being made for people were not even good for us and that the waste products used in pet foods are even worse for pets. That was why we saw so many ingredients in pet foods like "corn gluten meal" and "wheat middlings." He also said the foods were preserved with things like BHA, BHT, Ethoxyquin and other known neuro-disruptors and carcinogens. We later learned that things in the pet food industry are even worse than that. Many pet foods contain sodium pentobarbital, the drug used to euthanize dogs and cats at veterinarians and animal shelters, because those places send their animal carcasses to rendering plants where they are then processed into pet foods and listed on the pet food labels using generic-sounding ingredients like "animal byproduct meal," "animal fat," or "meat and bone meal." Watch the video below if you are having trouble believing that.

https://youtu.be/5guS41I-R8A

After speaking with Schatzy's new vet, we got rid of the Science Diet dog food and began making our own homemade pet food. Schatzy went on to live to the ripe old age of 16 and never had another seizure again.

Because of that history, when we first met Bella, we immediately looked at the ingredients list of the expensive "prescription diet" veterinarians were giving Bella to help manage her diabetes. We found that it was mostly made from sugary grains like corn and wheat parts. In other words, veterinarians were feeding a diabetic carnivore a food that was packed with sugar. Let that sink in for a minute. Humans are not carnivores. It is more natural for us to eat sugary plants, grains and fruits than it is for dogs to eat them. Yet, veterinarians were feeding a diabetic dog a food filled with ingredients a diabetic human should avoid.

We immediately took Bella off her the expensive prescription food and started making her food ourselves, using ingredients that we would eat. Her recovery was astonishing. We cut her insulin dose in about half and her blood sugar stabilized. She began gaining weight right away and she ended up living to the ripe old age of 16, even though we thought she might only live a matter of weeks when we first brought her home.

Now, Bella's best friend, Kiki is 17 and though still going strong, she has slowed down a bit. She needs a diet that is less rich so that her old organs don't have to work hard to digest it. But, the fact that she is still with us, in a long line of long-lived pets (more than we could reasonably mention in this one blog post) is a testament about the importance of good food and nutrition.

Fresh, organic and natural foods, not commercially processed, is key to living long and healthy lives for us and our pets.

We are always looking for new ways to expand our 'urban farm' with new plantings and new learning. This year, we were excited to find a small but lovely crop of purple grapes on our grapevine.

The grape vine has been a wonderful decorative addition to our southern fence line. The plant has occupied this space for a number of years, and while we have enjoyed watching it grow, pruning it annually, it has not yielded a crop of fully ripe fruit, other than small, somewhat undeveloped grapes. These grapes have been food source for local wildlife.

This year, perhaps, conditions were good for a more plentiful and robust crop to develop fully.

Last year, we were able to secure a very large supply of delicious grapes through a friend's garden. This allowed us to store up and enjoy a wonderful supply of grape jam.

This year, for the first time, we were able to store up 2 jars of grape jam. Not quite the kind of supply we enjoyed last year and not quite as flavorfully sweet, but a wonderful surprise for us in this incredibly bountiful urban farming season.

Grapes can easily into jam, but seedy varieties like ours require some prep work to remove seeds. The addition of lemon juice in the jam mixture while cooking raises the acidity level of the mix to a good jam-making measure.

Grapes are a great addition to any urban garden space and can also serve as a fast-growing privacy barrier. Varieties grow great in our northern climate. Grape vines do require tending and careful consideration of planting location. The University of Minnesota's Extension Service is a great source of information online to help you.....https://extension.umn.edu/fruit/growing-grapes-home-garden

Over the years, we have learned that nature is a very complex system and can offer unexpected results.

This year, we were surprised to find a "rouge" plant among the crops we planted this year. A beautiful pumpkin! A wonderful fall edition to our harvest has found its way into our garden and has grown into a beautiful orange delight. How did it get here? A wildlife resident? A dropped seed from a passerby?

This wonderful unexpected fruit should be perfect for a celebratory pumpkin pie.

If you know anything about us at Our Urban Farms, you know we worship garlic. It is the life force that makes our sauces and salsas the magic we crave. Blended into the wash we brush on our sourdough breads, it infuses the crust with heavenly goodness.

We have always loved garlic. When we started growing our own, however, is when we began to really appreciate the almighty power it has. No garlic you can buy comes close to the garlic you can grow at home. No harvest is as worthy of celebration as is the garlic harvest, in part, because you can take the whole crop out of the ground all at once and the smell of the drying garlic fills our whole house with divine garlic spirit - there is no risk of vampires coming near our place at garlic harvest!

Well, this year's harvest came early and is big and beautiful. We have nearly 100 heads of various hard neck varieties beginning to dry. We will clean them tomorrow and get them ready for curing.

A great garlic harvest is a sign of a bountiful canning season ahead, followed by another year of deliciousness. Praise to the garlic gods who gave us this bounty this year. Wow. They are spectacular!