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Health & Fitness

Summer at last!

All right All right. We've made it. It's summer. Things are going swimmingly, both in the water and on land.

Customers yearning for a touch of green in their surroundings and the taste of local produce are flooding the garden stores. Charlie Cole, the General Manager of Cole Gardens in Concord says, "Anything in color is moving off the shelves. Our customers are buying flowers and vegetables faster than we can restock them . . Million bells and dahlias are hot right now. So too are tomatoes and basil." (Austin Cowan, NHPR, 05/30/14).

Ara Lynn of Amazing Flower farm in New Ipswich echoes Cole's words. "Anything in color is selling right now. The cold start to the month has people anxious to plant. Cucumbers, peppers, squash and tomatoes are huge right now."

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Not only are garden stores doing well, but so also are farmer's markets. One of particular interest is Breakwind Farms. Yes, you read that right - Breakwind Farms. This farm started out as a traditional market, but in 2011, it started developing, packaging, and selling four different varieties of baked beans, hence the name Breakwind Farms.

Stewart Wise,  author of Goosefat: A Somerville-Cambridge Cook's Repertoire,  wrote (08/09/13), "(beans) are inexpensive, versatile, delicious and nutritious . . . Beans are renowned, or should we say, notorious for their flatulence creating properties. . . . The online Urban Dictionary has over 40 synonyms for flatulence."

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I will spare you a George Carlin-like recitation of those 40 terms. However, the four varieties shoppers find at Breakwind Farms are: Outstanding Original (traditional New England style baked beans), Soothing Summer Breeze (reduced flatulence properties), Jumping Jalapeno (Mexican flavored baked beans), and Fiery Texas Tornado (Stand aside. I can only imagine.)

So. let's be happy that summer in all its glory is here. We can't take summer for granted, you know. The year 1816 is known as "the year without a summer." Janice Brown posts in Cow Hampshire (06/06/07), "In every month there was a severe frost, and the greater part of the crops were substantially destroyed. . . . July was accompanied with frost and ice. On the 5th ice was formed of the thickness of window glass in New York and all the New England states. In August ice formed half an inch thick."

What caused the Year without a Summer? According to Channel 7 New in Boston, "(the cold) was caused by the eruption of the Tamboro volcano east of Java in April 1815. It sent so much debris into the atmosphere that the temperature on Earth was temporarily lowered. Since it does take time for volcanic matter to get distributed throughout the atmosphere, it was the summer of 1816 that was affected."

The same sort of explanation is offered for the sudden disappearance of dinosaurs from this planet. According to this theory, a large meteorite impacting the Earth raised such a large cloud of dust and debris that the temperature was lowered to a point where the dinosaurs could not survive.

Should the same thing happen today and the Earth's atmosphere filled with dust, we could adopt a novel solution. Perhaps, through the mass ingestion of baked beans, humans could, shall we say, blow the problem away. It's worth considering. Or maybe not.

Would you like to learn more about the eccentric ways of Granite Staters? Read my book Outtastatahs: Newcomers' Adventures in New Hampshire. Outtastatahs (as in out-of-staters)  features the trials and tribulations of newcomers to this state. (Two out of three New Hampshire residents weren't born here.) Outtastatahs can be purchased at River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth; the Galley Hatch Restaurant gift shop in Hampton; The Water Street Bookstore in Exeter; Gibson's Bookstore in Concord and on-line at barnesandnoble.com. Both paper and Kindle versions can be obtained at amazon.com.

 

 

 

 

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