Lettuce Be Healthy: Week 11

Today’s maintenance was as you can guess, weeding. Our kale, collards, arugula, and yellow chard are growing quite beautifully while our strawberries continue to hang in there. As our project is coming to an end soon, Lettuce Be Healthy would like to inform everybody of some of the health-promoting properties of the vegetables we decided to grow this semester. We grew almost strictly leafy greens, so we apologize if some of the nutritional facts seem a bit redundant!

Collards are very low in calories and contain no cholesterol. They are also excellent sources of folates (which play a major role in DNA synthesis), vitamin-A, vitamin-K, and vitamin-K.

Yellow Chard is yet another leafy green and is rich in all the vitamins previously mentioned. In addition to these vitamins, yellow chard is a rich source of minerals like copper, calcium, sodium, and phosphorus.

Kale is rich in vitamin-A (which promotes healthy skin and vision), vitamin K (which promotes bone and brain health), and vitamin-C (which helps the body develop resistance against infectious agents).

Arugula is also a great source of folates and contains vitamin-C, vitamin-K, and vitamin-A. Also, it’s is rich in many minerals like potassium, manganese, iron, and calcium – all of which are necessary and beneficial elements of one’s diet!

Last but most definitely not least, strawberries are also rich in vitamin-A, vitamin-K, and vitamin-C. They also are good sources of fiber, folate, manganese, potassium, and magnesium. The benefits of eating strawberries include improved eye care, proper brain function, and relief from high blood pressure.

If you want to keep your health on track, just make a simple salad of some mixed leafy greens from our garden – with a few strawberries of course!