Growing vegetables year round can be a challenge in most of the US. The winter months won’t support any type of outdoor gardening in most of the US, and in the southern states many types of vegetables won’t survive the summer heat and drought.

But Indoor Gardening can be a real challenge as well. Proper lighting is always an issue, as most vegetables want 8 hours or more of sunlight a day. Of course many vegetables such as corn or large vining plants like cantaloupe are just not practical even if you could create enough lighting to support them.

The four tastes humans are most familiar with are sweet, sour, salty and bitter. In 1908 a Japanese chemistry professor discovered a fifth - savory. Now a behavioral geneticist has discovered that mice have receptors that detect calcium. Because mice and humans have many genes in common, it’s likely calcium is a sixth taste. Supposedly calcium is what gives high-calcium vegetables - like kale and collard greens - their bitter flavor. The reason we don’t detect calcium when we eat dairy products is it binds with fats and proteins. Further research, however, will confirm if human tongues actually have these “miceroscopic” receptors.