Antidepressant Microbes In Soil: How Dirt Makes You Happy

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Author: Bonnie L. Grant

Prozac may not be the only way to get rid of your serious blues. Soil microbes have been found to have similar effects on the brain and are without side effects and chemical dependency potential. Learn how to harness the natural antidepressant in soil and make yourself happier and healthier. Read on to see how dirt makes you happy.

Natural remedies have been around for untold centuries. These natural remedies included cures for almost any physical ailment as well as mental and emotional afflictions. Ancient healers may not have known why something worked but simply that it did. Modern scientists have unraveled the why of many medicinal plants and practices but only recently are they finding remedies that were previously unknown and yet, still a part of the natural life cycle. Soil microbes and human health now have a positive link which has been studied and found to be verifiable.

Soil Microbes and Human Health

Did you know that there’s a natural antidepressant in soil? It’s true. Mycobacterium vaccae is the substance under study and has indeed been found to mirror the effect on neurons that drugs like Prozac provide. The bacterium is found in soil and may stimulate serotonin production, which makes you relaxed and happier. Studies were conducted on cancer patients and they reported a better quality of life and less stress.

Lack of serotonin has been linked to depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar problems. The bacterium appears to be a natural antidepressant in soil and has no adverse health effects. These antidepressant microbes in soil may be as easy to use as just playing in the dirt.

KEEP READING ON GARDENING KNOW HOW

20 Perennial Vegetables to Plant Once and Enjoy Forever!

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Perennial vegetables—crops that you plant just once and harvest year after year—are relatively rare in North American gardens.

With the exception of asparagus, rhubarb and artichokes, most gardeners are probably unaware of the tasty, extremely low-maintenance bounty that can be harvested when many annual crops aren’t available.

A Brief History of Perennial Crops

According to Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier, most North American gardening and farming traditions come from Europe, where there are very few perennial crops except fruits and nuts.

Cold and temperate Eurasian agriculture centered around livestock, annual grains and legumes, and early European settlers to North America simply brought their seeds and their cultivation methods with them, including draft animals for plowing up the soil every year.

However, in more temperate and tropical areas of the world, including much of North America, perennial root, starch and fruit crops were actively bred, selected and cultivated. These perennial crops were favored perhaps because they require less work to grow, and lacking large domesticated draft animals, only hand tools were available for farming.

Whatever the origin of our neglect of these amazing plants, we shouldn’t ignore these useful and productive foods any longer. Perennial vegetables should be much more widely available, especially because, compared to annual crops, they tend to be more nutritious, easier to grow, more ecologically beneficial, and less dependent on water and other inputs.

Benefits of Perennial Vegetables

Perennial Vegetables are Low Maintenance

Imagine growing vegetables that require just about the same amount of care as perennial flowers and shrubs—no annual tilling and planting. They thrive and produce abundant and nutritious crops throughout the season. Once established in the proper site and climate, perennial vegetables planted can be virtually indestructible despite neglect. Established perennials are often more resistant to pests, diseases, drought and weeds, too.

Perennial Vegetables Extend the Harvest

Perennial vegetables often have different seasons of availability from annuals, which provides more food throughout the year. While you are transplanting tiny annual seedlings into your vegetable garden or waiting out the mid-summer heat, many perennials are already growing strong or ready to harvest.

Perennial Vegetables Can Perform Multiple Garden Functions

Many perennial vegetables are also beautiful, ornamental plants that can enhance your landscape. Others can function as hedges, groundcovers or erosion control for slopes. Other perennial veggies provide fertilizer to themselves and their neighboring plants by fixing nitrogen in the soil. Some can provide habitat for beneficial insects and pollinators, while others can climb trellises and provide shade for other crops.

Perennial Vegetables Help Build Soil

Perennial crops are simply amazing for the soil. Because they don’t need to be tilled, perennials help foster a healthy and intact soil food web, including providing habitat for a huge number of animals, fungi and other important soil life.

When well mulched, perennials improve the soil’s structure, organic matter, porosity and water-holding capacity.

Perennial vegetable gardens build soil the way nature intended by allowing the plants to naturally add more and more organic matter to the soil through the slow and stead decomposition of their leaves and roots. As they mature, they also help build topsoil and sequester atmospheric carbon.

KEEP READING ON SMALL FOOTPRINT FAMILY

Rebecca Burgess: A pioneer in local and regenerative fiber systems

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Rebecca Burgess is a pioneer in local and regenerative fiber systems. I (Lizzy Kahn, Social Media Manager of Kiss The Ground) was thrilled to connect with her and learn more about why she went on this path, why textiles? Lizzy knew the fashion industry is one of the most wasteful in the world. I also knew that most of the clothes in my nearby shopping mall were made oversees in probably not-so-great conditions. My big question was why and how was Rebecca going to transform our way of thinking about and making clothes?

***

RB: I had been traveling and in Southeast Asia in 2005. The factories I visited at that time were producing for western consumption. I saw color of dye in the nearby water ways, women and children working in harsh conditions all serving western markets. I knew this wasn’t right and I knew from that experience it had to change.

I got that the more we consume, the more you stress the people and all the ecosystems that are impacted by the supply chain. If we bring our production home and take responsibility for its impacts, we begin to get up close and personal with the costs of garment creation. I’ve experienced how proximity breeds a new ethic of appreciation, through an enhanced understanding and sensitivity for agriculture and manufacturing. Bringing production into our own auspices also takes the pressure off places in the world that do not have significant labor and environmental protections to ensure fair wages, clean water and air.We have infiltrated these lands and their communities with western ways. We’ve disrupted their culture, land, and tradition.

LK: How do we begin to change this system?

RB: We are encouraging a shift in perspective that there is beauty in reducing consumption and moving towards purchasing regeneratively farmed, naturally dyed, locally labored & constructed goods. This outreach work is part of our organization’s educational mission.  Also known as the“The Zen Wardrobe” we admonish efforts for people to focus on what they really need. The idea is to just bring total mindfulness around clothing.

There is not much within the current global system of production that can truly sustain over the long haul given the water and climate implications of the current means of production. Some aspects are there but more accurately we need to focus on all of our systems becoming ”regenerative”. We want to create and support regenerative systems that bring life back and leave the environment better off than it was when we started.

LK: How is Fibershed working to improve this?

RB: We’ve been promoting a couple of things, particularly partnering with for-profits and non-profits that are working on developing the policy and infrastructure changes and shifts needed to bring a regional and regenerative ‘Soil-to-Soil’ clothing system into being. We need to support strategic changes in agricultural practices as well as the manufacturing systems that add value to the material. We encourage relationship building between farmers, ranchers and endusers, as these relationships tend to develop into new local production based businesses.

LK: Lastly, a recent documentary called “The True Cost” came out this past summer and focused on the fast fashion’s impact on the environment and social well being – what do you think about fast fashion?

RB: I don’t know why anyone would wear it. It is a health risk exposing yourself to a store full of a toxic dyes and fabrics that have been treated with endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins. Think about it, if you don’t want to eat it [chemicals], you don’t want to wear it.

Wearers must demand a new paradigm.

VISIT FIBERSHED’S WEBSITE
ORIGINAL ARTICLE ON KISS THE GROUND

The Healthiest Food Comes from Healthy Soils

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Author: Dr. Mercola

Dr. Maya Shetreat-Klein, a pediatric neurologist in New York and an instructor at New York Medical College, had a frightening experience that is becoming all too common among parents today. After her son turned 1 year old, he began experiencing wheezing, rashes and signs of delayed cognitive development.

After visiting multiple doctors she found an allergist who uncovered her son’s severe allergy to soy. Returning her son to health meant removing soy foods from their diet, so she eliminated processed foods and set out to reconnect with nature.[1]

The journey led her to write the book “The Dirt Cure: Growing Healthy Kids With Food Straight from Soil.” In it, she explores the intricate links between food and children’s health as well as why so many children are facing allergies.

Her research brought her back to healthy soil, and the dirt cure involves three strategies she believes may improve the health of today’s kids (and their parents):

1. Eating nutrient-dense food from healthy soil
2. Being exposed to certain microbes
3. Spending time outdoors in nature

The Healthiest Food Comes From Healthy Soil

There’s no question your health and that of your children is directly related to the quality of the food you eat. The quality of the food, in turn, is dependent on the health of the soil in which it is grown. Shetreat-Klein told The New York Times.[2]

“The organisms in soil have an impact on the health of our food. Part of what makes fruits and vegetables good for us is the phytonutrients in them — the things that make cranberries red or coffee bitter.

Phytonutrients are part of the plant’s immune systems. Organisms in the soil that we might think of as pests actually stimulate plants to make more phytonutrients.”

Many American diets are based on foods grown in mineral-depleted, unhealthy soils. This is certainly the case with genetically engineered (GE) processed foods and meat and dairy products from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

One of the more insidious aspects of the industrial food system is that, as soil becomes sicker and less able to perform its functions, farmers become increasingly dependent on the chemical technology industry — they become trapped.

The use of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide) begins a downward spiral, making it necessary for farmers to use more and more herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that kill soil microbes — especially if they’re using GE seeds.

Weeds and pests become resistant to glyphosate, so farmers must use more weed and insect killers. Crops become nutrient-deprived, so they’re forced to increase their use of synthetic fertilizers.

Weeds and bugs become superweeds and superbugs, and all the while the food becomes less and less nutritious. It’s a vicious cycle.

In her quest for healthier food, Shetreat-Klein began growing her own, frequenting farmer’s markets and even raising her own chickens, an impressive feat considering she lives in the Bronx, New York, but one she said wasn’t as difficult as she’d thought it would be.

Keep Reading on Mercola Health

Growing our way out of climate change by building with hemp and wood fibre

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Author: Mike Lawrence

How can buildings help with climate change? It’s all about renewables and “sequestered carbon”.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ 2010 report on Low Carbon Construction concluded that construction was responsible for around 300m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, which is almost 47% of the UK’s total. Of this, around 50m tonnes is embedded in the fabric of buildings.

Making one tonne of steel emits 1.46 tonnes of CO2 and 198kg of CO2 is emitted make one tonne of reinforced concrete. One square meter of timber framed, hemp-lime wall (weighing 120kg), after allowing for the energy cost of transporting and assembling the materials actually stores 35.5kg of CO2.

If we can convert plants into building materials, we are in a win-win situation. Plants use the energy of the sun to convert atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons – the material from which plants are made.

The plant acts as a carbon store, sequestering (absorbing) atmospheric CO2 for as long as the plant continues to exist. This CO2 is only re-released when the material is composted or burnt, and the great thing is that through replanting it you can re-absorb this CO2 annually, in the case of straw or hemp, or every decade or so in the case of timber, rather than the 300m years that it takes to recycle coal or oil.

Keep Reading in The Guardian

Michael Pollan: What You Should Eat to Be Healthy

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Author: Cole Mellino

A new documentary from Kikim Media based on Michael Pollan’s bestselling book, In Defense of Food, helps consumers navigate a food system complicated by globalization and industrialization.

“I’ve been writing about the food system for a very long time,” Pollan said in the trailer for the new film. “But what I kept hearing from readers was ‘yeah yeah yeah, you told me where the food comes from and how the animals live and everything, but what I want to know is what should I eat.’”

In the film, Pollan attempts to answer that very question: What should I eat to be healthy? He addresses what he has called the “American paradox: the more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.”

We’re consuming “edible food-like substances” rather than actual food, Pollan said. By actual food, he means the food people ate for thousands of years before we became dependent on processed foods.

“You don’t have to be a scientist to know how to eat,” said Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University. “Just go around the outside of the supermarket and pick up fruits, vegetables and meat, and stay out of the processed foods, because they’re fun to eat once in a while, but they shouldn’t be daily fare.”

Keep Reading on Alternet

You Know Slow Food? Check Out Slow Fashion

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Author: Gabrielle Saulsbery

In the 26 years since professional gourmet Carlo Petrini coined the term slow food and ten since food activist Jessica Prentice coined the term locavore, access to locally-sourced food has increased for many who previously may not have thought about their meal’s geographic origin.

So why not slow clothing? That’s what then-33-year-old weaving teacher Rebecca Burgess thought in 2011 when she challenged herself to wear garments sourced within 150 miles of her California home. It wasn’t as simple as only buying from local stores: She had to wear clothing with fibers, dyes, and labor exclusively from her region.

“What started as a personal project spiraled into a community of people who helped create this one-year wardrobe: artists, designers, ecologists from UC Berkley who were getting their PhDs in environmental science,” Burgess says. “They felt passionate about the reduction in the toxic load, and of the prospect of making clothes from organic natural fibers.”

The toxic load Burgess speaks of are chemicals and heavy metals generated from producing and dyeing textiles, according to the EPA. In addition, Burgess says the textile industry in California alone produces a tremendous amount of material waste. “After my one-year wardrobe challenge, [Fibershed] did an analysis and found over 3.1 million pounds of wool in the state,” she says. “Over a million pounds are thrown out every year.”

Keep Reading in Modern Farmer

Waste Not, Want Not, Eat Up?

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Author: Hannah Goldfield

The other night, as I ate a salad at Blue Hill, in the West Village, a server approached my table with an iPad. “Have you seen this?” she asked. “Chef wanted you to see this.” By “Chef,” she meant Dan Barber, the man behind Blue Hill and Blue Hill Stone Barns, a sister restaurant and farm upstate. By “this,” she meant a photograph of a dumpster, into which a chute was depositing an enormous quantity of multi-colored scraps of fruit and vegetables—the runoff from a commercial food processor. The experience felt something similar to being shown a picture of what would happen to a sad-eyed old horse if you didn’t save it from the glue factory. Sitting in a small, enamel casserole dish in front of me were fruit and vegetable scraps that Barber had rescued, just like the ones in the photo. Arranged in an artful tangle, bits of carrot, apple, and pear were dressed with a creamy green emulsion, studded with pistachios, and garnished with a foamy pouf that turned out to be the liquid from canned chickpeas, whipped into haute cuisine.

A parsnip head in a shallow dish of water, its tall greens splayed elegantly, served as a strangely beautiful centerpiece for the table. Beside it, a candle flickered in a small glass pitcher, labelled with a piece of masking tape on which someone had written “beef”: instead of wax, the melted liquid was beef tallow, or rendered fat, to be poured onto a plate just as several slices of a dark, musky bread, made with grain left over from beer-brewing, arrived to dip in it.

This was the opening night of Barber’s first-ever pop-up, which will close out its two-week run on Tuesday. Until then, Blue Hill’s understatedly elegant dining room will remain nearly unrecognizable, dressed up—or down, really—as a new restaurant called wastED. Formless Finder, an architecture firm that specializes in recycled materials, has covered the walls in an industrial-looking fabric known as “row cover,” which is used on farms to protect crops from cold, wind, and pests. The normal tabletops have been replaced by slabs of mycelium, the all-natural and biodegradable plastics substitute that Ian Frazier wrote about for this magazine in 2013. On that first evening, even the playlist was reused: over the course of the meal, I heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” three times.

Keep Reading in The New Yorker

Backyard Carbon Sequestration: What Does Synthetic Fertilizer Have to Do with It?

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Author: Adrian Ayres Fisher

Part two of a series exploring how regenerative gardening techniques can enhance carbon storage while improving soil health. In part one I discussed some of the principles behind the factors involved in soil health and how plants and the soil biological community work together to store carbon and build appropriate fertility. “Why Not Start Today: Backyard Carbon Sequestration Is Something Nearly Everyone Can Do” can be found here.

A brief digression about the term “regenerative gardening”

So what is regenerative gardening, anyway? Regenerative gardening is an umbrella term that embraces many styles and traditions of organic cultivation and adds explicit intentionality regarding carbon sequestration. The recent Rodale white paper, “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” says that, “regenerative organic agriculture refers to working with nature to utilize photosynthesis and healthy soil microbiology to draw down greenhouse gases.” The same goes for gardening. Like regenerative farming and ranching, regenerative gardening aims for land cultivation and management that builds soil health and helps improve the health of the ecosystem within which that garden is located, while growing plants and harvesting crops useful to humans, whether food, medicine, fiber or wood—and along the way, creating beauty. And, doing all this while, importantly, helping mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil and reducing nitrous oxide emissions. So what’s so special about that? Isn’t that what all farming and gardening aims for, or should? I can imagine many readers asking this, especially those already practicing some form of ecosystem-based gardening.

The short answer is, not always or historically. The more than ten thousand year history of agriculture is full of one form of land despoliation or another, which in some cases has brought great civilizations to ruin. Societies in all epochs, on all parts of the earth, from the ancient Romans to the Mississippian-culture city of Cahokia in Illinois, have farmed in ways that have depleted the soil, particularly as population pressures led to more marginal lands being put to use—with logical, disastrous results. Since the European invasion and colonization of the US, modern Americans have continued the ancient tradition of using up a piece of land and then moving somewhere else to begin the process over again. It’s been, in some ways, worse than what ancient cultures did, because, as also in 19th century Australia, the immigrant farmers were trying to replicate what they had known in the vastly different ecosystems of their home countries. Most had little real ecosystem knowledge of the land in which they found themselves and thus no real concept of how to farm it sustainably.

However, even in the 19th century, strong voices were crying out against the despoliation of our grand, beautiful North American continent. While much has been saved, big farmers in the US—and around the world—have continued, and with the use of fossil fuels and agri-chemicals, doubled down, on this civilization-wrecking path: farm fencerow-to-fencerow, expand into marginal lands, deplete the soil and use the available chemicals to attempt to raise fertility…to the logical, disastrous results now in play.

The problem these days, though, is there’s nowhere else to go, for Americans or anyone else. The world is full—overfull—of people and wrecked ecosystems alike. Conquering other countries for their (used up) land or moving to Mars are both equally untenable. (Though you’d never know it from the wars currently in progress and recent propaganda from the pro-space colonization department.) And, meanwhile, the nightmarish specter of climate disruption casts its pall over the earth like the shadow emanating from Mordor.

Alongside this rather dismal history of agriculture, some societies, through trial and error and expert ecosystem knowledge, were able to farm sustainably for centuries, if not always actively improving soil and ecosystem health, at least maintaining it. In large part, these were societies that stayed put—some for thousands of years—and maintained ecologically sustainable populations, either voluntarily, as with birth control and out-migration or involuntarily, as with disease, war, and occasional famine—or some combination. Although some sources show that GHG’s did indeed start slowly increasing at about the time humans invented and began practicing agriculture, they were not a concern, neither known about nor their reduction and sequestration necessary. Unfortunately, as modernization and “conventional” agriculture expanded and became the norm, the traditional ways of land management—crop rotations, milpas and forest gardens, relying on hedgerows and native plant areas to harbor the beneficial insects that helped with pests, and so on, came increasingly under pressure.

Keep Reading in Resilience

Why Not Start Today? Backyard Carbon Sequestration Is Something Nearly Everyone Can Do

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Author: Adrian Ayres Fisher

Part one of a series about using regenerative gardening techniques to enhance carbon storage while improving soil health.

To make it simple as a crayon sketch, there are two ways to mitigate climate change that, in tandem, could work. One is to lower emissions. To decarbonize, if you will—and de-nitrous oxide-ize, de-methane-ize, and de-soot-ize as well. It is true that to keep the earth’s average temperature from warming more than 2° C (3.6° F), emissions will have to fall. Drastically. Which means lifestyles, in fact whole cultures and economies, will have to change, and everyone, especially the well off, will have to share in the sacrifices and changes to be made. This necessity is the real inconvenient truth implied by the inconvenient truth of climate change and one mostly being ignored or rationalized away by pretty much everyone, except a small percentage of realists. Part of the problem, I think, might not be so much willful ignorance as a failure of imagination. Quite a few people I speak with about climate change—well educated, thoughtful, caring individuals for the most part—simply cannot imagine what it would be like to live even a slightly less oil dependent version of the life they currently live, though they grasp the facts and urgently agree that something must be done.

As for the second, carbon sequestration, or pulling carbon out of the air and storing it deep in the ground, as noted environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert points out in a recent article, no one knows how to do this.

However, this is not precisely true, though in a modern technological sense of course it is. Anyone who owns or rents a little land on which plants grow can, him or herself, sequester carbon, and may even be doing so at this very moment without even realizing it. It’s not hard. Healthy soil does this naturally. All we have to do is help nature along. And as we do so, we can help improve ecosystems, improve soil fertility, and even help endangered species survive. Regenerative farmers and ranchers are doing this in a big way all over the world, though the ones I’m most familiar with are working in the US, in places like North Dakota, Illinois and Minnesota. Even though farming and gardening practice has usually, seemingly inevitably, depleted the soil, scientists such as R. Lal, Christine Jones, Michelle Wander, Michel Cavigelli and others, as well as entities such as the Rodale Institute, have shown that regenerative techniques actually rejuvenate the soil and sequester carbon. And, not only is their, and others’, long-term research showing how and why this works, but scientists are also teaming up with farmers to demonstrate and study practical techniques—and even conducting classes to teach farmers soil conservation methods. This is vitally important work, since agriculture and other domestic land management is responsible for something like 30% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

But what about the rest of us?

My yard is much smaller than the typical ¼ acre suburban plot; my garden encompasses about 2,000 square feet, smaller than many houses. Most people in the US and elsewhere live in similar urbanized areas. Large-scale carbon sequestration on vast acreage, as potentially could be practiced by farmers (some two percent of the US population) is beyond reach. We regular folks are left with yet another situation where direct-action participation in solutions to the climate disruption problem might seem impossible. Most of us aren’t off-grid homesteaders; we rely on the local utilities and pubic services; non-existent public transit might force us to drive even if we’d rather not; and other realities of our everyday lives might prevent us from doing as much as we’d like. Even if we can imagine what is necessary to be done, and are prepared to help decarbonize our society, we might feel powerless, possibly unable to take positive, rewarding action to help remedy the situation.

Keep Reading in the Ecological Gardener