Grow Yourself Healthy : Crops and Projects to Transform Your Gut Health

This book gives gardeners all they need to know to improve their own and their family's microbiomes, to increase their health and happiness, through exposure to the soil, through growing a diverse and specific range of crops, through designing a gut-health garden, through harvesting, storing and fermenting their crops and preparing recipes for their preservation as far as the gut.

There is currently a huge upsurge in interest into recent scientific research highlighting the importance gardening for health. This focuses on the activity of gardening for mental and physical health, as well as the way that if you garden for your gut you can improve your digestion too. The microbiome is the plethora of microbes that humans host in their gut, and other cells, and which are fundamental to well-being. Recent studies link digestive health and the human microbiome to a range of health conditions such as depression and anxiety, obesity, cancer, diabetes and autism. Interest in the topic has led to an array of related popular science publications, diet and recipe books. There is currently however very little literature on how to grow produce which has high nutritional value, and which optimizes the microbial life within our digestive systems. What types of vegetable, fruit, and herbs should we being growing to encourage beneficial internal microbes? How do we design and plan a productive garden that supports gut health? Grow Yourself Healthy will introduce relevant recent science in an accessible way, provide practical guidance on how to grow, produce and design a productive garden to optimize your health, and provide information on how to grow and store vegetables for fermentation, including select recipes for gut health. Includes 10 bespoke projects for all size of garden, from windowboxes and containers to square metre and 4m x 4m plots.