Growing Your Own Food
Until very recently in history, people have always grown their own food. The homestead movement and the ideas that follow are not new. In fact, industrial farming is the new kid on the block. Somehow, we have become removed from that lifestyle completely within just the span of a few generations. It’s incredible how fast it happened. Growing your own food had fallen out of style.
It’s time to get back to our roots and take charge of our own food supply. Here are my top five favorite things about growing your own food.
1. Save Money
There’s no denying that your grocery bill has been going up. Just when you think it might stop increasing, another food recall causes a shortage and prices go up again. It seems like a never-ending cycle of more, more, more.
When you grow your own food, you avoid all that! You’ll never have to pay more this year than you did last year for the fresh produce coming straight from your garden. Direct savings like that are easy to see, but what about the less direct costs? What about gas prices? With fewer trips to the store, you’ll be spending less on gas and wear and tear on your car. It might seem like a trivial amount, but it really adds up.
Do you like to shop organic? I do. And we are at the mercy of the people packaging and growing the food to be honest with us. It’s not practical for us to visit the organic farms and make sure they’re doing things in a healthy way. So really, we have to take their word for it. We must assume that the food we are paying a premium price for is actually organic and better for us. With your own garden, that’s not a issue at all and you can stop paying high prices for organic produce.
There will definitely be an initial investment to start your own garden, but after that, the costs are almost none .
2. Better Flavor
Home gown food just tastes better. I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten oranges from the store and they were absolutely flavorless. I cut into it thinking it will be the most flavorful orange, what with all the juice that’s flowing out and how brightly colored the peel is. The, I bite into it, looking forward to the refreshing sweetness, only to discover that it’s completely lacking any flavor at all.
Home grown food is the exact opposite of that. Fresh food from your garden is bursting with flavor, partly because you can pick it at the peak of ripeness. It makes sense that farmers would pick their food way before it’s ready. If they wait until it’s ripe, the produce will be moldy and rotten by the time it reaches the store shelves and that benefits no one at all. So the logical solution is to harvest early and sacrifice flavor to ensure a better product to sell.
Thankfully, when you grow your own food, you don’t have to worry about such things. At any time, you can head out to the garden and choose the ripest produce to eat right then and there. The taste is unbeatable.
3. Knowing Where Your Food Comes From
To be honest, I don’t know all the chemicals they spray on our food crops to keep the bugs off. I don’t know what was mixed in the water to help hydrate the growing plants. The next farm over might be a cattle ranch where all the waste flows into the water supply for the wheat fields next door. I don’t know, and that’s a problem.
Unsanitary farming practices are abundant and farmers are looking for ways to save money. I don’t blame them! They make very little money and they work HARD. But let’s face it, food recalls are happening sometimes every single day. Contaminated produce is making us all sick. It’s time to take control of your own food supply and leave big corporations out of it.
When you grow your own food, you’ll also be creating fewer carbon emissions. One person won’t make much of a difference in this area, but if a very small percentage of us buy less produce at the store, fewer trucks will be required for delivery. This will result in fewer carbon emissions from them and you.
4. Amazing Sense of Accomplishment
When I lived in tract housing, I had a very small garden on my 1/8 acre of land. Most of my garden was in pots and there wasn’t a lot of variety. It was the very beginning for me. I loved every bit of what I grew in those little pots! My kids were really little at the time and we would make a daily habit of going outside to snack on the day’s bounty. My daughter would look for blueberries and my son would see if there was a ripe cucumber we could split. There almost always was. Then, they would snack on all the fresh spinach they could shove in their little mouths. It was pure bliss.
Seeing the joy that my little garden brought my children gave me a huge sense of accomplishment. It made me feel like I had done things right. Not only were my kids eating healthy, but it made them happy in the process.
Jump forward a few years and I have started a new garden at our new house with just over an acre of land. The possibilities seem endless! I was thrilled to see how much more I could grow. In my new garden, I tilled the soil, planted my rows of crops, watered regularly and waited. To my disappointment, I was unable to grow a single cucumber or blueberry. Lettuce wouldn’t even grow.
Determined to grow my garden, I tried again the next year. Still nothing. The year after that yielded zero as well. For 9 straight years, I failed at growing a single vegetable in my garden. Then, I learned about testing your soil to see what it needs. I assumed that our soil was simply too acidic because of the oak trees that were everywhere on our property. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Our soil was almost the perfect PH level for almost any common garden vegetable. The problem was the nitrogen. There was almost none.
Three bags of blood meal later and I now have a flourishing garden that provides for my family year-round and I have the best sense of accomplishment. I thought I was the problem all along. It turns out, the lack of nitrogen was the only thing holding me back.
5. Better Health
When you grow your own food, this amazing thing happens, almost without you even noticing. Your health improves! There are a few factors that lead to better health through gardening, so let’s start with the lesser known reason.
The amount of nutrition you receive from a home grown vegetable is higher than the amount you get from that same vegetable grown with modern farming practices. Essentially, the tomato from your garden is more nutrient-rich than the tomato from the store. A plant can only give the equivalent of what it’s been given.
Modern farming practices have depleted the soil of so many beneficial nutrients that vegetable plants simply can’t find the nutrients to put into the vegetables. By growing your own food, you produce more nutrient dense food that will sustain your body for much longer and reduce your cravings for other things that might artificially contain the nutrients that your body is looking for.
On top of just the nutritional advantages of growing your own food, you also have the physical advantages. Gardening, overall, is not a physically demanding task. Yes, it will take time and you’ll need to moderately physically exert yourself from time to time, but it’s really not extremely taxing. Even the moderate movement of your body while gardening will add substantial benefits to your physical health.
The National Institutes of Health reports significant improvement in both physical and mental health by simply being outside! Add gardening tasks to this and you’ve got a winning combination for optimal overall health.
Conclusion
The evidence is clear and overwhelmingly in favor of growing your own food. Not only is it healthier from a nutrition standpoint, but a mental and emotional one as well. Getting out in nature benefits us tremendously and the confidence boosting accomplishments in the garden are worth more than can be measured.
It’s never too late to start a garden and you don’t have to start on a massive scale. You can easily start with a single potted strawberry plant or a green bean pole. I will caution you, however…gardening is addictive and you’re going to love it.
Enjoy the day and that beautiful sunshine!
