Sunny Glen Wellness

Sunny Glen Wellness Creating the foundation for a healthy, vibrant, and joyful life!

Enjoy tasty, easy, healthy food recipes, home made self-care products with ingredients mainly from the garden. When what we eat becomes our flesh and blood, let's make our bodies come alive so we can be at our best! Eating from the garden can be fun and easy, so here are ideas to make great tasting food and home made products that your body will love and thrive on that is easy on the budget and makes best use of your time. Sunny Glen Wellness has a food garden and certified wildlife habitat in the North Linden community of Columbus, Ohio. Dianne and Stephen are working towards a self-sustainable and self-sufficient veggie and fruit food production in their urban backYarden instead of growing grass, using natural methods that require minimal care, produce a lot of food, and contribute to health and wellbeing of people, creatures, and the planet.

šŸŒˆ Nothing like eating a celebratory Colors of the Rainbow Meal with todayā€™s rain, after this long-standing summer drough...
10/19/2025

šŸŒˆ Nothing like eating a celebratory Colors of the Rainbow Meal with todayā€™s rain, after this long-standing summer drought! This variety of colors was produced from the Sustainable Research and Education grant research beds:

šŸŒ¶ļø The sweet yellow and red C***o di Toro peppers
šŸ„” Adirondack blue potatoes with their powerful antioxidants from the anthocyanins that turn them this beautiful deep purple color and are very supportive and protect cells from damage, reduce inflammation, and support heart and brain health! Great for slowing down the breakdown of carbohydrates into glucose so it can prevent sharp spikes and drops in blood sugar for those with diabetes.
šŸ„¬ green kale leaves from the magnificent Farm Church weekly CSA that is still producing a wonderful amount of food for our community!
šŸ„•orange carrots and herbs from the Sunny Glen Garden
All lightly steamed under a lid with a little olive oil and a little salt and freshly ground pepper, over some millet noodles. YUM-YUM!

I wonder if this is what Peter Piper picking a peck of pickled peppers, feels like, lol! - a little pepper-upper, haha. ...
10/15/2025

I wonder if this is what Peter Piper picking a peck of pickled peppers, feels like, lol! - a little pepper-upper, haha. Spent the last couple of days doing some PEPPER-ation: chopping, slicing, dicing, dehydrating (for spice blends), and freezing. It will make for some sweet C***o di Toro, or lightly spicy Caperino hot peppers for tomorrow, adding some PEP in the pantry over the winter so I can PEPPER life with these colorful beauties and instant flavor later šŸŒ¶ šŸŒ¶ šŸŒ¶ What do you do to preserve your excess pepper production?

Growing these peppers are part of our USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) 3-year grant to compare To Dig (conventional tilling methods) with No Dig (compost methods) to compare the cost of resources - inputs (water), labor (weeding), production, and most importantly, soil health, as we look for agricultural practices that can improve soil health, and not deplete it of soil nutrients and soil life, like our conventional methods do.

is the small urban residential site; The Urban Farm Church is the medium-size urban site, and Southside Family Farms is the larger site.

***odiToro

YUM! Another fast, easy, dish to using the garden VIP's from my local CSA this week: daikon radish, carrots, and collard...
07/21/2025

YUM! Another fast, easy, dish to using the garden VIP's from my local CSA this week: daikon radish, carrots, and collard greens in a miso noodle soup! I used a coconut water base and the vegetables were steamed in a little bamboo steamer that my friend, Alcira, gave to me. Bamboo steaming is like a spa day for vegetablesā€”colors stay bright, I can preserve more of the crunchy texture if I like, more nutrients stick around, and I can enjoy more of the actual vegetable flavors!

I make almost all of my meals from scratch as Iā€™ve been enjoying so much of what comes fresh out of the garden or my weekly local CSA, but when it gets busy with plant sales at festivals and events, I may not feel like cooking a big meal when I get hOMe, so itā€™s nice to have some processed food from companies that also support the same visions and missions that I do.

Lotus Foods products use rice farming practices that simultaneously
mitigate climate change, preserve rice biodiversity, support farmersā€™ resilience, and empower women, and I get to enjoy these gluten-free millet and brown rice ramen noodles!


Foods Sunny Glen Garden The Urban Farm Church

Anyone else have some daikon radish recipes? I've been getting a lot of daikon radish in my weekly CSA from the Urban Fa...
07/18/2025

Anyone else have some daikon radish recipes? I've been getting a lot of daikon radish in my weekly CSA from the Urban Farm Church the past couple of weeks so I am trying out different dishes with them. Daikon has a spicy peppery kick to it and is crunchy when eaten raw - I julienned it with my hand grater, slicer, shredder, that I've had for years, with some grated carrots.

Marinated it all in some tamari, coconut palm sugar, a little homemade kombucha (live culture vinegar), finely grated fresh ginger, and sprinkled some roasted black sesame seeds on top.

My tummy doesn't do so well with dairy products like milk, so I'm trying this homemade coconut milk based creamsicle. I ...
07/04/2025

My tummy doesn't do so well with dairy products like milk, so I'm trying this homemade coconut milk based creamsicle. I added a little silver maple syrup that I tapped and cooked down from Mama Maple in the front yard to sweeten it so there's no refined processed sugars or corn syrup products, and I can avoid gut destroying emulsifiers like carrageenan and cellulose gums. All organic with colors from the garden for this summer time coconut creamsicle...

- greens / chlorella for the color of plants & trees
- yellow turmeric & lemon-honey for the sun
- and blueberries for the "blue" sky and water...

Happy 4th!

Fresh and tangy beverage that incorporates the spinach in my weekly CSA from the The Urban Farm Church. I often buy in b...
06/30/2025

Fresh and tangy beverage that incorporates the spinach in my weekly CSA from the The Urban Farm Church. I often buy in bulk, so this was a great way to use up a couple of small organic grapefruit. Sliced them into wedges and peeled them from their skin, to put into the green smoothie, as I can only eat so many! Also added the juice of a lemon from when I purchased them in bulk and juiced and froze them into icecube trays so they can be easily used for things like this! CHEERS!

It's a green day inspired by my urban food forest!

Eggcellent! Did you know one egg shell can have as many as 17,000 pores?!!! The porous texture allows gases like carbon...
04/22/2025

Eggcellent! Did you know one egg shell can have as many as 17,000 pores?!!! The porous texture allows gases like carbon dioxide and oxygen, as well as moisture, and dyes to pass through, so I want my egg dyes to be safe to eat. I tried these natural dyes made from food I had in the fridge - red cabbage for blue colors, turmeric for yellow, beets for red/pink! The colors would show up more distinctly on white eggs but I had brown ones on hand so thought it might have more earthy tones...

In this way, I can avoid the chemicals in conventional egg dyes like Blue #1, Red #3, Yellow #5, Yellow #6, and Red #40 that have health implications. See more info here: https://tinyurl.com/4xfmxb58

The designs came from flowers and leaves growing organically in the Sunny Glen Gardenā€¦

Happy Easter!

These ALMOND-DATE ENERGY BITES are hard for me not to bite off more than I can chew, lol! Maybe they just taste better '...
04/22/2025

These ALMOND-DATE ENERGY BITES are hard for me not to bite off more than I can chew, lol! Maybe they just taste better 'cause I hand-processed most most of the ingredients myself. Except for the dates, these magical little energy balls are made from the leftover almond pulp after making my homemade almond milk, a little of the silver maple syrup I cooked down earlier this year from tapping the sap from the silver maple in the front yard, homemade vanilla extract from infusing vodka with the vanilla beans for 6 months and is now ready to use, and raw cacao powder that I just finished making after getting the live cacao pod, taking out the seeds to ferment for a few days, roasting, peeling off the outer seed coat, and then grinding, grinding, grinding the cacao beans to powder! YUMMY!!! You don't need to process each of the ingredients yourself, but it is super fun for me to see how to do this. Recipe in the comments...

Soy-fisticated burger patties, lol! This was my first time making soy milk, after soaking the soybeans, pureeing, cookin...
02/03/2025

Soy-fisticated burger patties, lol! This was my first time making soy milk, after soaking the soybeans, pureeing, cooking, and squeezing the nut bag to separate the soybeans from the soy milk. Instead of throwing out the leftover soybean pulp (okara) into the compost, I tried my hand at these soybean veggie "burger" patties by adding in some brown rice, grated carrots or beets, flax "eggs", some nuts, and a bunch of dried garden herbs. Soy-prisingly tasty and delicious!

I don't eat store bought veggie burgers as they tend to have stuff I don't want to put in my body - GMO soybeans, wheat gluten, corn oil (GMO), onions & garlic, caramel colors and natural flavors which can contain more than 100 chemicals, including solvents, emulsifiers, flavor enhancers, and preservatives).

Cabbage Patch Stir-Fry Extravaganza with tofu I made from scratch...it makes great sizzling noises while cooking! ...
01/20/2025

Cabbage Patch Stir-Fry Extravaganza with tofu I made from scratch...it makes great sizzling noises while cooking!

I thought this was such a cool of a design that evolved in the pot for my snack! Any guesses?
12/05/2024

I thought this was such a cool of a design that evolved in the pot for my snack! Any guesses?

Kombucha Soda AlternativeOn long, hot, summer days when Iā€™m out and about selling native plants at festivals and events ...
08/19/2024

Kombucha Soda Alternative

On long, hot, summer days when Iā€™m out and about selling native plants at festivals and events on weekends, itā€™s nice to have a flavored drink instead of water once in awhile to cool down and replenish electrolytes lost in the heat, but so many of the store-bought drinks have additives that I want to avoid putting in my body: preservatives like potassium sorbate that gives me rashes, or artificial sweeteners like erythritol that give me headaches. I want to avoid synthetic ingredients like propylene glycol, or glutamate products that act like MSG but can be hidden hidden under the ā€œnatural flavorsā€ label. Or they are pasteurized which kills off the good bacteria with the bad.

So I prefer making my own flavored drinks with filtered water and adding slices of organic lemons, limes, oranges, and cucumbers, for example, or where I know the ingredients are organically grown so I can support organic farmers and earth-friendly practices.

Lately, though, Iā€™ve been experimenting with making my own flavored fizzy kombucha drinks. Store-bought kombucha is expensive, and is often pasteurized which may kill off unwanted bacteria but also kills off the nutrients I want. I can preserve more of the pre- and pro-biotic enzymes as well as K2 (rare in most diets) and B vitamins for the health of my gut when I make my own. Supposedly, most of the organic sugar and caffeine from the green and black sweet tea I use, is ā€œeatenā€ up by the SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) during fermentation, and I can customize the flavors to my delight! I can also make them in my own recycled glass bottles so I donā€™t have to buy more products that I need to recycle.

I have an extra SCOBY mother and 1 cup of SCOBY liquid for someone who would like to try this. Itā€™s free, but if youā€™d like to make a contribution, it will go towards CCC for PPP projects in Linden (Connecting Community Corridor for People Pollinators and the Planet)

To take the SCOBY home from my place:
* Bring a very clean quart size glass jar with a plastic lid (no metal)

At home, you will need:
* Stainless steel pot to make the sweet tea:
* Filtered Water is best
* Loose leaf black/green tea*
* Organic sugar
* Paper coffee filter or clean cloth to cover the jar
* Elastic band to hold the filter tight

*I can let you know the tea mix and the tea/sugar/kombucha recipe I use.

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Columbus, OH
43224

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+14046036284

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Creating the Foundation for a Healthy, Joyful, and Vibrant Life!

When what we eat becomes our flesh and blood, let's make our bodies come alive so we can be at our best! Eating from the garden can be fun and easy, so here are ideas to make great tasting food and home made products that your body will love and thrive on that is easy on the budget and makes best use of your time. Sunny Glen Wellness has an organic permaculture based food garden, certified wildlife habitat and Monarch Way Station, in the North Linden community of Columbus, Ohio. Dianne is taking active steps towards a self-sustainable and self-sufficient vegetable, fruit, herb, and flower urban farm in the backYarden instead of growing grass, using natural methods that require minimal care, produce a lot of food, and contribute to health and wellbeing of people, creatures, and the planet.