Healthy eating at root of healthy living

PORTALES — To eat healthy, you've got to get to the root.

That was the theme of two presentations on gardening's role in healthy living at the Portales Ag Expo.

Eastern New Mexico University Agriculture Professor Lesley Judd reported her department's contributions to gardening and food production in eastern New Mexico at a presentation Friday afternoon in the McAlister Room on the Roosevelt County Fairgrounds.

ENMU's agriculture and culinary arts programs work together to create a "relationship between food production and use," according to Judd.

Agriculture students grow a variety of produce in an on-campus greenhouse, including peppers, spinach, lettuce and tomatoes, before taking it across campus.

"They take it over to the culinary building, where the culinary students design new menus, new dishes, and then they create the food that we actually feed to children at the Child Development Center that's on campus," she said.

The program measures how much children like the dishes made from the agriculture program's produce using surveys, and students create dishes that conceal the vegetables for the children who do not like them, according to Judd.

She noted that the menu includes items such as spinach meatballs, carrot soufflé, and beet smoothies, which she found had a favorable reaction from the children.

"A bunch of kids were asking when they were going to get those pink-red smoothies again," Judd said. "I found out they were beets, and the kids did not know they were beet smoothies, but they loved them anyway, mainly for their color."

In a Saturday afternoon presentation in the McAlister Room, Garden Source Nursery and Landscaping owner Curt Jaynes showed attendees how to plant organic food from kitchen scraps.

"The days of (settling for) what we got (when it) was full of pesticides are long gone," Jaynes said. "You can buy your organic vegetables and all that, but boy, you pay a lot more for it. You can grow your own."

Jaynes brought with him several "mobile gardens" where he was growing lettuce, garlic, turnips and other vegetables from each vegetable's scraps.

He had placed the tops of onions, radishes and celery in the soil, where they had already begun to sprout and would soon yield.

"Not everybody has time to do things like that, but I'll tell you what: It's a good way to repurpose and reuse instead of running out and buying more onion sets or whatever," he said. "There's nothing better than fresh vegetables from your yard, because they're not picked green and then gassed to turn red and all that in the store, and they always have better flavor."

Jaynes also introduced the concept of "cool weather crops" that can be grown during winter months.

"I will plant spinach about September, and it will come up. You can harvest it probably all the way up to about Christmas. January and February are probably our coldest months. It will kind of just sit there, you won't be able to harvest it, but come about February, when we start getting those warm days, here it comes again," he said. "Lettuce, you can do the same thing, but it more than likely will die out during our February freezes. You'll have lettuce all the way up to about Christmas, if not Thanksgiving; that way you're eating that vitamin-rich food."