Gardening can feel intimidating when you’ve never broke ground… or when your soil is rock hard! But you can start without digging and you can do it even if you don’t have a yard! All you need is a deck or a very large window.

Growing in pots and containers is an easy way to get some experience growing veggies and herbs. It is easier on the body as you can set it up in a way that is more comfortable for you. Weeds are less of a pain to control and fertility is easier to manage, but it also requires more watering since plant roots only have a limited space to reach water.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Make sure there’s holes in the bottom of your containers. We can get a lot of water in a single rain storm and with nowhere else to go, the water will rot your plants roots!

• Make sure you put your pots in a sunny location. South facing always get more sun than North facing, and most plants do prefer more sun than less (even if you like the shade!).

• Feed your plant regularly as most potting soil do not contain much nutrition. You can add some compost while planting but it’s a good idea to add some liquid fertilizer throughout the growing season.

• Acclimate your plants: if you started growing indoors but it’s warm enough out, make sure you slowly put your plants outside over time: one hour the first day, 2 hours the next, etc… as they can get sun burnt or get too cold, depending on the difference of temperature and lighting between indoor and outside. Think about it as your first time in the sun in the Spring and you get sunburn.

• The more potting soil the better. I know these little pots look really cute, but bigger containers will need to be watered less often and plants will get much bigger roots if they get a chance (so they’re less likely to die!).

• Some plants will die. Not all plants enjoy living in pots, and some have very short life span. So part of the process of caring for plants is also getting rid of the non thriving plants, it’s part of life! There is not a gardener out there who has never killed a plant.

  Will you give container gardening a try this year?

When planning your vegetable garden, it can be a good idea to incorporate some flowers into the mix. If you’re like me, you don’t need any extra info to be convinced of the benefits of growing flowers, but for the tough guys out there, here is why:

• Flowers can attract and feed a lot of pollinators, which will help the rest of the garden (especially your tomato plants!). Some of the best plants are Milkweed, coneflower and yarrow… Make sure you plant them somewhere they won’t be in the way as they are perennial and will come back every year (Bonus point! You only have to plant them once)

• Some flowers are awesome companions for your veggies. Mostly Nasturtium and marigold can be planted around most everything and will chase away pests or attract pest eating bugs.

• Flowers also help biodiversity thrive. And when this happens, Nature takes it’s course so that you usually don’t have to intervene as much.

• Most flowers are edible! Now make sure you check before gobbling them up! Some of them are also toxic… A lot of plants also have very powerful medicinal properties. I personally use a lot of them like yarrow and catnip in teas and calendula to make cream. We also use some of them in our biodynamic preparations like Dandelion, Chamomille, Yarrow and Valerian.

• Flowers add a splash of color to your garden. It will make it more enjoyable to spend time in, as beauty is necessary to our well-being. Don’t hesitate to bring the flowers indoors too! The more you cut them, the more they will grow back.

So I hope you will include some flowers in this year’s garden if you haven’t already!

Happy Planting!

Hi there!

The last batch of pigs we raised were a mix of heritage breeds (Mangalitsa, Berkshire and Tamworth) and they put on a TON of FAT! So while I’m rendering all of that fat, allow me to introduce you to the idea that fat isn’t necessarily bad for you.

First of all, we’ve been told since the 1960 that a low-fat diet is better for your health. This assumption was based on ONE (yes, just one…) result from a study that clearly wanted to show that fat was bad for you. They deliberately chose places and people that would fit their idea of the results they wanted (which has been debunked), but the food industry hasn’t really caught up to this yet.

And just to confuse you a little, there’s different kinds of fat, and of course, some are good, and some are bad.

As you could guess, the more processed fats are, the worse it is for your health. Trans fat would be in this category, which is found in the processed oils, margarine and shortening. A lot of them are used in foods you can buy in a box, such as cookies, crackers, you name it…

Now for the more controversial part, which fats are healthy? If you follow mainstream media, they’ll tell you that saturated fat need to be replaced by mono- and poly-unsaturated fats - which means that olive oil is healthier than animal fat. What they won’t tell you, is that there isn’t enough evidence linking saturated fats with heart disease.

And for the most interesting part, I will mention Weston A. Price and his research. He made his mission to find out from the most primal of tribes around the globe, the reason why children had crooked teeth when they switched to a more western lifestyle and diet. He found out that the main difference in the diet was that the children didn’t have crooked teeth when their diet included more fat.

His foundation (www.westonaprice.org) is trying to help people get healthier, and I encourage you to check out the information on their website. To make it short, saturated animal fats carry the vital fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K2, which we need in large amounts to be healthy (and you can’t absorb them from plants). This fat also helps you to absorb some vitamins and minerals that otherwise you could be ingesting but excreting them just as fast - they’d go right through you and ended up in the toilet.

It’s important to notice that if the animals are not raised in the sunlight, Vitamin D will be largely missing from these foods, which is why we make sure our animals are raised outside (unlike the meat you can buy at the grocery store, which never sees the sunlight). And so yes, you should eat that extra fat on the pork chops I sell - and there’s a good amount guaranteed!

Human beings have been consuming saturated fats from animal products, milk products and tropical oils for thousand of years. It is mainly the advent of modern processed vegetable oil that has caused the epidemic of modern degenerative diseases - not the consumption of saturated fats.

On a side note, if your Dr tells you your cholesterol levels are too high, I would challenge that. I (Estelle) come from France, and my cholesterol is naturally high (measured before I started our farm). You need cholesterol to function properly. Did you know that over half the fat in your brain is saturated?

So next time I hear someone say there’s too much fat on the meat I sell, you should know that it’s packed with the very nutrients that you’re lacking.