I’m still experimenting with edible mushrooms, and I recently grew some chestnut mushrooms in my garden, which I was excited that they turned out. I took a photo of them developing over a few days to see how much they changed in 24 hours. It’s kind of fun seeing them develop.
I feel like chestnut mushrooms are a little known mushroom in a lot of circles. I wanted to grow them because I thought they looked cool and read that they taste quite good (which is true).
Like most mushrooms, they are a notable source of several essential nutrients, such as:
B vitamins: A rich source of riboflavin (B2) and niacin (B3), which are vital for energy production and a healthy nervous system.
Vitamin D: Like other mushrooms, they can produce vitamin D when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, which helps with bone health and immune function.
Selenium: A powerful antioxidant that protects cells and supports the immune system and has been shown to be anti-cancer.
Potassium: An important mineral for heart health and blood pressure regulation.
Copper: Essential for the formation of red blood cells and maintaining nerve function.
In addition to their basic nutritional content, chestnut mushrooms offer other potential health benefits. They contain beta-glucans, which have been shown to help boost immune function. Also, they contain antioxidants such as ergothioneine (yeah, I had to look that one up too, never heard of it, basically a naturally occurring fungus amino acid) which may protect against oxidative stress.
Anyhow, here is a little 10 second video of their growth.
I recently went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for a day trip. First we went to the Japanese tea garden, which is a place that I was excited to go. I really love Japanese maple trees, of which it turns out they didn’t have many, but the grounds and the buildings were really cool.
We had a bit of extra time afterward, and I wanted to walk over to the Conservatory of Flowers, to see if they had anything blooming outside. As we were walking up, I could see in the distance a bright field of color, so we beelined right for it. When we got there, it was an amazing field of dahlias. So many colors and shapes. I had no idea there were so many varieties of dahlias. So if you can’t make it there in person, here are some photos to see it virtually.
I spent a bit of time working on the soil in the garden this winter. I looked at the existing soil and could tell it needed some work. I like to see my soil alive with worms and bugs. Where life is happening, it’s usually a good thing. I added a ton of self made compost and manure (the manure wasn’t self made 😜). With those things, came a lot of worms and bugs.
Digging my bare hands into the earth of the garden bed and I could pull out a good handful of worms. When I could see that, I knew we were in good shape.
I started some kale, purple mizuna and purple kohlrabi in late winter. I planted them in the garden right before my transplant, hoping to have some good nutrition out of the garden afterwards when I got home.
Mizuna is high in many vitamins, especially vitamins A, K and C. It’s also a good source of calcium, iron, and antioxidants. Kohlrabi is an excellent source of vitamin C and a good source of fiber, vitamin B6 and potassium.
The kale had gotten mature enough to harvest about a month ago. I picked some today for lunch and holy cow, the leaves were enormous! It’s the biggest kale I’ve ever grown. Maybe some of the biggest ever grown for the variety?
The cutting board is 18×13 and I don’t have small handsThe next generation of kale is on the wayThe kohlrabi is starting to bulb up. The leaves are really tasty to eat as well, they kind of remind me a bit of taro leavesInspired by last years successful celery grown in the garden, we are starting a bunch indoors from celery ends and then planting them in the garden when they are big enough
I was doing my morning walk with Yukon this morning, and apparently Tuesday is yard day. There were numerous yard cleaning companies out cleaning up people’s yards.
I saw a guy up on the right, with his sprayer pack on, hosing round up on the 30 little weeds in the front of someone’s yard. It got me thinking, if people knew for sure, 100%, without any doubt that round up causes cancer, would he still do it?
It probably took 30 seconds to spray the weeds. It probably would have taken 3-5 minutes to pull them out. So he is gaining a few minutes to do something else with his day, at the expense of potentially giving himself cancer. Personally, I don’t think it’s a good trade. Is it worth the risk?
By reports published and court cases, I can say, that with high probability, that round up does cause cancer, particularly blood cancer. I unfortunately used it for years, and I believe it was a potential factor in developing myeloma.
Bayer, the maker of round up, decided in 2021 to stop selling the product to residential customers for non-professional gardeners because they kept on getting sued and losing to people with lymphoma.
What about all the people (or the dogs) walking through that person’s yard, getting the residue on their shoes and spreading it? I personally went as far as I could to the other side of the street, held my breath and hurried by.
If you knew, would you still do it?
I suppose, the answer would be, maybe? People know that smoking cigarettes gives you lung cancer, heart disease and other problems. They still do it. Mind you, they are addictive and round up isn’t.
If you knew that, that piece of plastic that surround the item you just bought was going to the landfill or float around in the ocean, would you have still bought it?
It sure made me pause and think. One would just assume that if it has a recycling symbol on it, it gets recycled. Apparently not. You feel lied to and betrayed.
That’s not even thinking about the health consequences of plastic. I don’t really want to get into that too much, otherwise I’ll be writing forever. I get why it’s so popular. It can be so customizable, cheap and useful. I personally hate plastic. The damn stuff is everywhere and in everything. It feels unavoidable at this point.
The New York Times wrote an article, The Types of Plastics Families Should Avoid. Basically types of plastics, phthalates and bisphenols, are bad news for you and your family. I feel like it’s only a matter of time, for it to come out that the replacement plastic for those types are also bad news for you.
For your health and the health of the planet, please vote with your wallet as much as possible! Buy metal, ceramic and wood when you can!
You can only do the best you can with life. A person has to wonder though, what would you change about your life, only if you knew…..
Have you ever seen the children’s movie: Chicken run? Made by Nick Park, the same guy who did Wallace and Gromit. I think the guy is pretty clever and witty, so I liked his shows a lot.
Anyhow the old guy, in Chicken run is being fooled by the chickens and he says “Gnomes”, thinking gnomes are causing the trouble. I still think of that when I hear “Gnomes!”.
Some gnome houses sprouted up overnight in the garden.
It’s amazing how fast mushrooms grow.
I feel if there ever was a universal cure for cancer, it would come from mushrooms!
I do eat mushrooms, almost daily. I wouldn’t eat these ones though, being mostly mushroom ignorant. I also take reishi daily for the potential anti myeloma effect.
If you ever wanted to watch an awesome show (I think so anyhow), watch Fantastic Fungi (Netflix has it). They have some amazing time lapse clips and interesting mushroom information.
I haven’t felt like posting for a little while. Mostly been uninspired. I guess I did start one post, that I’m actually really excited about: Death. (Excited about the post, not death 😜).
I’ve been really enjoying writing it and I really hope it is helpful and makes you go “hmm”. It’s been kicking around in my head for months and I’ve been itching to write it. It’s an really important one for me, so I don’t want to flub it.
It was infusion day for me today. They had me take 40mgs of Dex (steroid) on top of the chemo. Dex at this strength, makes my lower back ache like crazy. It’s going to be awesome, can’t sleep and a achy back 👍🏻😝. Really, “everything is awesome”, (woah, Lego movie, I guess I have shows pouring out of my head).
One of things that is a challenge for me with myeloma is that it is generally an older person cancer and most of the data out there is based on someone much older than I am. The median age for myeloma is 66-70. Only recently has it been showing up in younger people.
I’ll confess that I’m a bit of a data/numbers/stats person. How do I know if a certain set of data points are the way they are because it’s just myeloma or it’s because it’s off of someone who’s 70? The answer is, I don’t.
Most of the oncologists I’ve talked to like to say, “You’re young, you can take it”. Umm gee thanks, I get extra drug abuse because I’m young and can take it???? It’s a fine line between dying of myeloma and dying from drugs meant to kill myeloma. I like to keep that in mind.
The 5 year survival rate for myeloma is about 40%. Obviously, like most people, I want to be on the side of the 40% that is still alive. I want to be a myeloma person who is still alive in 10 years, 15 years, 25 years.
What’s my strategy to achieve that? A strategy that I believe can help a person who is any age.
By doing what is good for my body, down to the cellular level and bad for cancer. It’s funny how things that are really good for us are also good at getting rid of cancer cells (and other chronic illnesses, I might add).
The biggest foundational piece to health is diet. Without a healthy diet, as the first building block, it’s hard to have success with anything else. Everything builds off of food and drink. It’s easy for me to point to having a poor diet as part of the reason I’m in this mess to begin with.
Feed your body nutritional food that is GOOD for you and don’t feed yourself food that is good for cancer growth. It’s just common sense if you think about it.
NF-KB is the primary pathway for growth in Myeloma, regulating inflammation and immune responses. Doesn’t it just make good practical sense to eat an anti inflammatory diet as to not give myeloma what it needs to grow. We know sugar, dairy, highly processed foods, meat and alcohol are inflammatory for the body and feed cancer cells.
1. I choose an anti inflammatory diet that is plant based whole food which is anti cancer. Food that is full of life/prana/qi and not something that expires 6 months from now.
Some people call a whole food diet, full of vegetables and fruits, legumes, healthy grains and healthy fats extreme. If you stop and think about it, I eat the same way as my great grandparents did and every generation before them. Does that sound extreme? If you had a time machine and went back in time to the 1800’s and asked someone if they have an extreme diet, they would look at you like you were crazy. In fact, I eat better then my great grandparents, because I have access to so much more variety. Only ignorance holds people back.
2. Next, I make sure that I drink purified water. You only have to glance at the news to read about stories of toxic water in whole towns (Flint MI, South Shore KY etc.) that is undrinkable. The local governments come out and say “my bad”, leaving you to deal with the fallout. I use a RO water filter currently. We have pretty good water here in California, but when we change the filters, they are really disgusting. Filter your water!
3. There are basically two thoughts of dealing with cancer, killing it with chemotherapy, surgery or radiation or to block it metabolically (starve it). Metabolically makes the most sense to me, since cancer cells are just your cells gone wrong and I can’t kill my blood without killing myself effectively. Truthfully, I’ve been hammering away at this metabolically and I haven’t been able to get the results I want. The best I got the oncologist to say is “Your myeloma isn’t behaving as expected. You are a high risk patient who is behaving like a standard risk patient”.
I’m currently mixing both worlds of chemo and metabolic blocking. I do take supplements such as Curcumin, Reishi, D3/K2 among other things that inhibit myeloma growth (they inhibit other cancers as well).
4. “Sitting is the new smoking”, they say. Move your body! I stay active everyday, walking, hiking, gardening, bike riding and Qigong. Some say cancer is cause by stagnation of the body, in areas that lack oxygen. Exercise has lots of benefits such as increased oxygen, blood flow (looking at you revlimid non-blood clots), increased heart rate, plus it can get you out of your own head!
5. Speaking of heads, I’m pretty sure I suffered some sort of ptsd with the cancer diagnosis. I took me a couple of years working through stuff to overcome it. It was a big growth experience for me. Getting out raw emotions, breathing techniques and meditation is what worked for me. I still keep up with pranayama and meditation daily for upkeep.
I have had plenty of seemingly one sided conversations with God. One of the things that I’ve gotten back is, an overwhelming sense that I’m meant to go through this (for reasons that are still a mystery to me), so that is very reassuring for me.
6. Detoxing. I’ve spent a significant amount of time working on detoxing my body (and mind). I done detoxing methods from naturopath methods and I’ve gone to India twice for a major full body detox called Panchakarma, which is a month long process each time. I’ve definitely had some raunchy stuff come out of me. Of course we live in a toxic world and I’m continually having toxins come in no matter how much I avoid it. I use diet and infrared sauna to keep on moving things out that aren’t supposed to be there.
To sum up my strategy, I do what is good for me and bad for cancer. Using chemo when I need it (trying to stay away from it as much as possible). Keep moving and living. Hit the myeloma with certain supplements. Keep working on my head and remembering why I want to keep living.
Sometimes I like to change the way I think about food and ask myself if I want that to become part of me? That’s what you really are doing when you eat.
Here is today’s vegetables for juice. I can easily say that I want all of this to be part of me. I’ve been drinking fresh vegetable juice almost daily for 3+ years now.
Today was a special batch because it had some homegrown celery in it from my garden. Grown in composted food scraps and horse manure. Can you see the difference in green between the garden and store bought?
Ground all up, concentrated liquid nutrition. Sometimes you even get cool patterns in the juice.
Among the effects for me are blood building, especially the red blood cells, hemoglobin, platelets. Detoxing, anti constipating (from drugs).
Hmmm….. I used to eat things like this. I don’t think I want it to become part of me anymore. I’m sure it would be an instant stomach for me. The body is always talking and letting you know how you’re doing.
Well, where to start? My name is Jothi (pronounced Joe-T). I’m married for 20+ years at this point, and we have 4 children aged 12-19. I am a big nature person. I love spending time outdoors, gardening, hiking, going to the beach, exploring. I am also a huge gamer. Games of any type, board games, sports (both playing and watching) and occasional video games.
People who I would like to sit down and have a long conversation with are in no particular order: Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, Anita Moorjani, Neil McKinney, Shin Terayama, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Jordan, John Stewart, Helen Jane Long and Steve Kerr.
For my myeloma family out there, I have Lambda Light chain myeloma. Which means I have too many lambda light chains that make up my blood for everyone else. I have the 14;16 translocation in my myeloma genetics, which basically means my myeloma is smarter than standard myeloma and is good at side stepping drugs.
I had 2 lesions when I was diagnosed, one on my 7 rib on my right side and a bigger one on the right side of my sacrum. Sometimes, I think about tumor placement in the body, and while there are worse spots than the sacrum, the sacrum is a terrible spot to have a tumor! I don’t recommend it. That’s the spot where your spinal cord fans out in a fantastic web of nerves. To this day, it’s like a little bird sitting on my shoulder poking me, saying, cancer, cancer, cancer.
I have had radiation on my sacrum and I went through the VRD chemo protocol (Velcade, Dex and revlimid). I elected not to do the stem cell transplant at that time. My lambda light chains at the high point were 470 and my Kapp/Lamb Fr was .01. M-band was 1.4.
About a month ago I started on Dara sq, Pom and Dex. As of last blood draw, my Lambda light chains are 142.52 Kappa Light chains 5.70 and KAPP/LAMB FR is .04. My M-band is 1.4. These numbers are after being off of all Chemo for over 6 months after I had a go with covid and saw that the chemo wasn’t doing anything anyhow.
I’ve had 2 pet scans this year, with the most recent in July. Both have come back showing no cancer activity.
I have become very passionate of diet, nutrition and what actual food is along my brief journey. When I was struggling for a website name, my kids suggested: Eatyourvegetablesdotcom, but it was already taken. But it is definitely my motto.
That’s the gritty numbers post with the information download. I hope my future posts will be a bit more fun and entertaining.
Carrots Over Cancer 