Could your community, school, farm or backyard garden benefit from a Garden Kit to help you grow healthy, nutrient-dense food?
Why are we doing this?
The answer to that is one that may surprise you.
Founder of Next 7, Lisa Stokke with daughter, Lydia.
For the past three years, we’ve been partnered in a research project with the Bionutrient Institute to identify nutrient variation in the food supply, explore the causes, and provide insight or tools for people to grow and choose good food.
We all experienced a real eye-opener when the first report was released in 2019 with data from soil samples, carrots, and spinach. The variation in nutrients was not only detectable but massive. Minerals, antioxidants, and polyphenols varied from hundreds to thousands of percent!
Most carrots have very little nutritional value :(
Here’s a Jaw-dropper…
Variation in antioxidants in carrots was a whopping 9,000%!! That means you’d have to eat 90 carrots to equal just that “good one”, high in antioxidants. I don’t know about you, but we found this staggering.
SUPER CARROT!
After all…
Why Do We Eat Food?
For nutrition and enjoyment…and the more nutrient-dense a food is, the more flavorful it is. (Nutrition correlates with compounds known as secondary metabolites that communicate flavor and aroma.)
Even more alarming, the Bionutrient Institute lab found that most of the carrots sampled from around the US from small and large farms, garden plots and grocery stores with varying certifications and practices - including certified organic, were in the “low” end for nutrients.
This sparked an idea. We wanted to learn, so we could teach others to grow nutrient-dense food. This is a way for each of us to take back control of our health and our food supply, to not blindly trust labels that are missing key information due to reductionist practice and understanding.
Thus, the Next 7 Garden Project was born.
The first Next 7 Garden in Boulder, Colorado in 2020
At Next 7, we spent the 2020 growing season practicing biological methods in our garden, including remineralizing the soil and adding inoculants to introduce valuable microbes that together revitalize life. This practice, in its truest form, is termed “biological agriculture”.
Growing food in this way tells us that the more we plug into Nature and biological systems to grow our food, the more nutritious our food is. This may sound simple - and in many ways it is - but the elegance of Nature also dictates complexity.
Biological agriculture is putting the principles of Nature into practice that not only cycle carbon (like ‘regenerative’ agriculture), but also improve soil biology over time and produce healthier and more nutritious plants for food.
Now is our opportunity to be students of nature, plants and soil. There is much we can learn!
To grow a successful garden try our
Next 7 Garden Kit!
Seed and Soil Inoculant
Mineral Blend
Liquid feed
We want to help you and your community grow healthy, nutritious food while cycling carbon from the atmosphere and building healthy soil for future generations!
