• Stock up food, canned goods and instant foods in your shelves. Before a storm hits, make sure you’ve stocked up enough food in your shelves and fridge. Most of the stores and other establishments tend to close when a mega-storm like Sandy hits.
• Keep your foods on the shelves and not on the ground. Make sure that you put your foods on the shelves or in the fridge. In case of flooding, your foods wouldn’t be contaminated by dirty flood water.
• Keep perishable foods cold. A fridge can hold up cold for your food for as long as 4 hours (as long as the door is closed) while a full freezer can hold up for 48 hours.
• Use an ice box to store your food in case of power outage. In case you don’t have a full freezer an ice box or any clean large containers that can seal cold with ice will keep your food cold.
• Have a appliance thermometer. This is to ensure that you know how cold your appliances like your fridge or freezer is when there is a power outage.
• Buy or make ice. This is to make sure that you have enough tools to make your food as cold as it can be until the power returns. Make sure that your ice box has its own ice.
• Wash your hands before and after you touch food. This is to ensure we eliminate any possibilities of cross-contamination and prevent foodborne-illnesses to spread.
• Before preparing food, make sure that all utensils and surroundings is clean. Make sure that everything is clean before using it when cutting or placing food. Kitchen counters, utensils, chopping board and others should be clean before placing any food in it.
• Clean the food if necessary. Wash fruits and vegetables but don’t wash meat, poultry and eggs says the FDA. This is to prevent the spread of foodborne viruses.
• Cook the food properly. Make sure that you properly cook the food with the FDA’s recommended temperature and minutes of cooking. You can also check the FDA website to know when to throw away your food.

Though it possesses an engaging history that spans over 5000 years, Chinese culinary history only began to be documented during the 5th Century B.C. and evolved across several dynastic periods including the Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. Imperial oversight played an important role in the development of culinary trends. A cook’s work was set to strict culinary rules determined by the emperor and senior officials. China’s varied regional, climatic and cultural influences saw the development of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes with exclusions that followed the availability or religious significance of certain ingredients. Over the last 2000 years, Chinese cooking saw the development of strong culinary differences across the banks of the Yangtze River. European travellers brought with them dairy products, a class of products rarely found in historical culinary records. The blurring of cultural and geographic lines led to the development of regional cuisines and the ‘Four Schools’ and ‘Eight Schools’ of this cuisine as well as several dietary trends. Today, we know these as ‘cleansing’ or ‘balanced’ diets. Ancient Chinese cookbooks list nearly 200 distinct vegetables and over 100 types of meat that featured on imperial and common menus throughout the country. Through all these cultural, religious and imperial upheavals, the core philosophy of this cuisine has been moderation, balance and harmony.

Chinese food has always enjoyed immense popularity in the West. Today, there are nearly 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, a tribute to the popularity of a culinary style that feeds over a billion people every day. Some of the most popular Chinese dishes that find their place on tables around the world include:

Chow Mein: This delicious marriage of hand-drawn noodles, meat and select vegetables such as Bok Choy and bamboo shoot. Chow Mein, served crispy or soft is popular comfort food in the West and may be served with a hot sauce or with a choice of milder, aromatic sauces.

Duck: Roast duck is easily the most popular gourmet delicacy served up in Chinese restaurants. The modern Peking duck is a challenging interpretation of an imperial recipe that serves up a beautifully glazed roast duck with aromatic herb sauces and tender meat. Some gastronomes have gone as far as to name it ‘China’s National Dish’

Xiaolongbao: These soup dumplings form excellent finger food and accompany other dishes. These steamed buns are served with soups and several gravies including a garlic vinegar sauce or a Schezwan dip. A culinary cousin, the sweet Lai Wong Bao is the perfect end to a Chinese meal.

Kung Pao Chicken: One of the most popular savory dishes from southwest China, Kung Pao chicken is one of the best examples of a recipe that has survived since the imperial aristocracy of the Qing dynasty. This delicately flavored chicken is typically cooked in peanut oil.

The diversity of China’s varied cuisine places hundreds of ingredients at a cook’s disposal. Some of the most ingredients unique to Chinese modern cuisine include Shaoxing rice wine, Nanjing Chinkiang vinegar, sesame and groundnut (peanut) oils, Hoisin sauce, spring onions, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, red chili, mushroom and shiitakes or dried mushroom. These ingredients are combined to create the legendary flavors of Chinese cuisine and combined with a palate of over a dozen spices. Five spice powder—a combination of Cinnamon, Cloves, Fennel seeds, Schezwan peppers and star anise — rounds off the list of essential ingredients of the Chinese kitchen.

The Chinese people attribute their long lifespan and excellent quality of life to the philosophy and style of culinary arts. Centuries of refining the harmony of food groups offer several significant dietary benefits. One of the key benefits of Chinese dishes come from the use of steamed ingredients and well-balanced food groups. Most vegetables and some meats are steamed and have a much lower lipid composition. Very few Chinese dishes are deep-fried and are far healthier than most other South Asian cuisines. The use of rice and wheat in noodles is a perfect combination of carbohydrate energy and the wheat aids to slow down digestion for sustained energy release. The use of soy as a primary vegetable protein is considered one of the healthiest culinary features of this cuisine.

Over time, the term ‘Chinese food’ has, quite inaccurately, expanded to include South-East Asian cuisines such as Thai, Malay and Singaporean cuisines. Every country has its own interpretations (and often, distortions) of Chinese dishes. American-Chinese and Indo-Chinese cuisines have emerged from the shadows of being dubious imitations to culinary art forms that pay respect to both cuisines. As the world appreciates the curative benefits and flavor of healthy Chinese food more chefs are beginning to study and experience the magic of this beautiful, balanced style of food.

In more recent years, however, it has become clear that hydroponic growers are mastering their craft and producing fruits and vegetables that have surpassed the taste and quality of some of their soil-grown competitors. I now confess to choosing a particular type of tomato, basil, and salad green over all others at the grocery store, and (with great surprise!) they are all grown hydroponically. That got me to thinking. If these growers can produce such outstanding tomatoes, basil, and lettuce, couldn’t I produce an outstanding hydroponic wheatgrass?

While I am a strong proponent of soil-grown, it has caused me a fair number of infrastructure problems in my growing operation throughout the years. Soil definitely has its place, outdoors and in greenhouses, but for an indoor growing operation–in my case, a 300 square foot year-round, climate-controlled growing room akin to a laboratory setting–it wreaks havoc and has caused me innumerable problems in the way of soilborne pathogens, dust, odors, storage limitations, and physical injury. Even when one works as cleanly as possible, soil has a way of taxing indoor air cleaning systems, which can turn into hundreds and even thousands of dollars in maintenance costs when the system unexpectedly and prematurely fails because of fine dust buildup.

During the years when I was growing primarily in soil, I was also experimenting with soilless media for my floral wheatgrass crops. Call me crazy, but I just didn’t like the idea of putting soil on a fancy dinner table for the above-mentioned reasons: pathogens, dust, odors. Also, soil wasn’t the easiest thing for florists to work with when they needed to cut pieces to fit their decorating needs. So I began growing in coco coir (ground coconut husks), which turned out to be an exceptional growing medium. The simple fact that it is not soil is what makes it a hydroponic growing medium, and thus began my journey as a hydroponic grower. Coco coir looked and acted just like soil, only it was pathogen-free, retained water longer and more evenly, didn’t cast odors, and didn’t present the mold problems that soil seemed to present at times. Because it was packaged in dry compressed bricks, it was lighter than soil, took up less storage space, and eliminated the issue of frozen soil in winter. My only problem with coco coir was its nutritional value. Sure, it produced a nice looking short grass for floral use, but could it possibly provide the same nutritional benefits as soil for my juicing clients? If not, what did I need to do to bring this growing medium to a place where I could feel good about selling what I was growing to customers who valued product nutrition above all else?

First of all, let’s look at the nutritional needs of the wheat berry as it sprouts, produces shoots, and becomes the grass that is eventually harvested. Seeds generally do not require any nutritional amendments when they are just sprouting. That is true of wheat berries as much as it is true of any other seed. The nutrition a seed requires to sprout into a baby green essentially comes from the seed itself. It’s when a plant’s second set of leaves begin to emerge that it depends on its growing medium as a lifeline. At that point, all conscientious growers, whether they grow in soil, coco coir, water, or anything else, take measures to ensure that their growing medium is equipped to support the nutritional requirements of the plant.

After a great deal of experimentation, I have found that wheatgrass does fine in coco coir up until it is time to harvest and pretty much not a moment more. Sure, the entire tray doesn’t yellow all at once because not every single wheat berry sprouts at exactly the same time, but the moment each little shoot begins to require more nutrition for its next level of maturity (when the grass begins to form another blade), it no longer has what it needs to thrive in coco coir alone and begins to yellow, much more dramatically than when the grass is grown in soil. This predictable yellowing tells me that I am working with some sort of nutritional deficiency in the growing medium and that nutritional supplementation is required.

So, let us look at what types of nutrients coco coir has to offer, what types of nutrients wheat requires, and what our options are in terms of healthy organic supplementation to help get us to where we need to be on a nutritional level and feel good about our hydroponically-grown grass in a way that we have come to feel good about our soil-grown grass.

• pH. First and foremost, let’s look at pH. Exceedingly important to keep that right. Without the proper soil/water pH, everything else goes out the window. Wheat grows best at a pH between 6.0 and 7.0, which is slightly acid. I have personally found that it grows best somewhere around 6.5. As mentioned in one of my previous articles, the slight soil acidity enables the plant to process all of the required micro and macronutrients most efficiently. I realize that is tough concept to swallow for some folks who are looking to alkalize their bodies using wheatgrass, but trust me on this one: soil alkalinity does not equal body alkalinity. At least not here. So if you are growing in soil, this means testing your soil supply periodically with a soil testing kit, and also testing your water with the proper metering device to make sure that you are not flooding your wheatgrass everyday with something that is either too acid or alkaline for your grass.

Coco coir itself does not need to be measured with a soil tester. Its pH is pretty stable at the correct level, between 6.0 and 6.5 straight out of the bag. It’s when you add that 7:1 ratio of water to your coco coir that everything has the potential to change, so having a meter that measures water pH is extremely important for hydroponic growers as well. I cannot stress that enough. My water tends to be very alkaline, close to 8.0, so I add a little bit of citric acid to my water bath before soaking the coco coir. It only takes a tiny bit to dramatically change the water pH. Citric acid is naturally derived from citrus fruits and provides a short-term correction to an alkaline growing medium. For a short-term crop like wheatgrass, citric acid works perfectly.

• Macronutrients. Next, let’s look at the macronutrients. All plants need Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K) to survive, each in varying quantities depending on the plant. For wheat, higher levels of Potassium are desired by farmers for higher protein content in the grain, but that potassium uptake is not even a factor until the heading stage, and it is irrelevant for the purposes of harvesting wheatgrass. Because wheatgrass is harvested as a baby green, technically halfway through its first stage of growth, it does not require heavy fertilization. Suffice it to say, unless your soil is entirely deficient in one of the three macronutrients, your wheatgrass should be just fine, but the only way to know exactly what you are working with is with a soil testing kit. A simple soil testing kit to tell you if your NPK ranges are high, medium or low is all you really need as a home grower or small business owner. A low reading on any of the three macronutrients calls for some sort of soil amendment to bring things into balance.

Coco coir, on the other hand, is a given. It is naturally high in Potassium, with lower levels of Nitrogen and Phosphorous, which means that the type of natural amendment we are looking for is one that provides Nitrogen (to help give a plant its proper green) and Phosphorous (for strong young root growth) but not as much Potassium (which, in excess, can actually inhibit nitrogen levels). What I have found to work best for my needs is the addition of spent coffee grounds to my coco coir mix, which gives a nice Nitrogen boost (solving the problem of yellow grass) and helps increase Phosphorous for strong root growth without also increasing Potassium too much. With the coco coir, I like to keep my amendments plant-based as this presents more immediately bioavailable nutrition for the roots of my short-term crop. Coffee grounds do not seem to present composting issues that can damage a baby crop, and contrary to popular belief, spent coffee grounds are not high in acid. The pH of spent coffee grounds measures with some variability in the 6.0 range, which is exactly where we want to be with wheatgrass. If you choose to use spent coffee grounds, be sure to refrigerate them until use.

• Micronutrients. Coco coir, while not a micronutrient powerhouse, actually does carry with it an array of low-level micronutrients, including iron, magnesium, copper, and boron. It is not enough to really make a substantial difference in a maturing crop, however, so it is probably a good idea to supplement coco coir with a nice liquid organic fertilizer packed with micronutrients, like liquid kelp, which is immediately bioavailable to the roots of our short-term wheatgrass crop and can easily be added to the coir’s initial water bath. Remember that wheatgrass does not require a whole lot though, so pour judiciously. Remember, you just need enough to carry you through those last couple of days before harvest. Liquid kelp, while lacking in macronutrients, provides an ample supply of micronutrients, trace minerals, amino acids, and natural plant hormones to help stimulate growth and produce a nutritious baby green. Even folks who prefer to grow in soil find liquid kelp to be a wonderful soil amendment.