When it comes to growing my own food, I can’t handle much more than picking up a basil plant from Trader Joe’s, watering it whenever I remember, and then plucking a few leaves off to add to my salad or pasta. But for more ambitious and green-thumbed folk dealing with my supreme lack of growing space, urban gardening may have just gotten lots easier thanks to Dr. John’s Mini Gardens.

Just featured on Treehugger, the planter’s stacking trays let you grow your own herbs, berries, veggies, and/or flowers - even if you’ve only got a bit of balcony to spare. Each growing area is about 10 inches wide, which still provides enough room for each plant to “reach its maximum potential.” And, adds Treehugger, “the trays have a special drip feed that allows water to pass through to plants in lower trays, so it’s mostly self-watering.”

Produced “as organically as possible,” Dr. John’s available seedlings include broccoli, leeks, spinach, and cucumber, as well as combos like the “Health Pack” (with tomato, celery, and four varieties of lettuce) and the “Herb Pack” (with rosemary, thyme, sweet marjoram, parsley, basil, and oregano).

Eating an antioxidant-packed combo of tomato and broccoli can help fight prostate cancer more effectively than consuming either food on its own, according to a new study from the journal Cancer Research. Researchers fed lab rats the human equivalent of 2.5 cups of cherry tomatoes (or one cup of tomato sauce) and 1.5 cups of broccoli daily, finding that those amounts significantly slowed tumor growth.

To get your fill of those anticancer veggies, read up on the tomato- and broccoli-rich recipes included in cookbooks like The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen, which Sean considers “a must-have for the vegetarian home cook.” For Fanny The Fairy, it’s all about Leith’s Vegetarian Bible, since “vegetables are too good to be just an side dish.” And my favorite veggie cookbook is Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, a wonderfully thick recipe collection that Liz at Pocket Farm dubs “my bible.”

No, polishing up your apple with the use of your t-shirt doesn’t count as properly washing your fruits and veggies. And running them under the faucet for about half a second might not do much good either. To get rid of highly undesirable stuff like pesticides and wax and handling residue, thedelicious insists on using Fit Fruit and Vegetable Wash. Here, she gives us the lowdown on why clean fruits and veggies are “serious business”:

“I am no freaky weird girl-in-a-bubble germaphobe, but I use FIT fruit and vegetable wash on EVERY fruit and vegetable that comes into my house, even if it’s labeled as organic, even if I bought it from the farmers’ market from the hot son of the farmer from whom I’ve been buying fresh figs for five years. It not only dissolves those disgusting waxes and preservatives that the grocery store sprays on (which can trap bacteria and other weird stuff), but it washes away excess dirt and human germs that are everywhere, no matter your source.”

And don’t be skeeved out by the idea of spraying a cleaning product onto something you’re going to eat: Fit uses natural cleansers like purified water, vegetable-derived glycerol, baking soda, and grapefruit oil, all of which rinse away completely before reaching your lips.

Having consumed so much avocado over the last few days - how else to get through those Trader Joe’s four-packs before the stuff turns all brown and bad? - I’m psyched by low-carb blogger Carol Bardelli’s recent discovery that adding fat to veggies may make them more nutritious. According to a Wall Street Journal article highlighted in Carol’s post, the body requires the presence of fat in order to absorb some of the vitamins and anti-cancer compounds found in fruits and veggies. The article points to an Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center study finding that adding avocado to fat-free salsa - which boosted the fat content to about 37 percent of calories - resulted in test subjects absorbing an average of 4.4 times as much lycopene and 2.6 times as much beta carotene.

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as they say. That’s why we love the new V8 V.Fusion drinks. They fool you into thinking you’re drinking sweet, yummy fruit juice while sneaking a full serving of vegetables in as well. The Peach Mango version somehow conceals sweet potato, yellow tomato and squash under its fruity cloak. (Mind you, tomatoes and squash are, technically, fruit, but that’s splitting hairs.) A Knowledge for Thirst tipped us off to this tasty tippler — as well as hundreds of other juices, sodas and other soft drinks. We definitely appreciate their honest ratings and glib, off-the-cuff reviews of a wide variety of ready-made beverages. We’ll drink to that!

Snip. Share. Repeat. This simple three-step mandate has generated an amazing amount of activity among food bloggers. Each week, bloggers photograph and/or write about their favorite herb du jour. Perhaps someone’s sowing seeds of sage, or has just discovered the potent properties of peppermint. Got a recipe for oregano-arugula pesto? Send it in! Any herb, plant, veggie or flower is fair game for this hugely popular blogging event. Kudos to Kalyn for galvanizing the food community to share their efforts around such a universal concept. It’s that kind of passion that gets us out of bed in the morning.