Top 10 Reasons To Grow Your Own Veggies

Photo – © Rémy MASSEGLIA – Fotolia.com (under license)

Growing your own veggies is a quintessential “off-grid strategy”, a survival skill, a rewarding path to health and a marvelous way to carve out some independence with your own bare hands. Here are our top 10 reasons (well, we actually ended up with 11) why it’s a good idea:

1) You can save lots of money! Someone said (I forget who) “Growing your own produce is like printing your own money”. It’s a well-known fact that you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year in grocery bills with a productive garden – and you may even make some money, too, if you can sell some of your surplus.

2) You get some exercise. Gardening is a great way to stay
active…. a wonderful form of gentle exercise (or even vigorous exercise, depending how hard you go at it). You’ll also get some fresh air – and many will agree that there is a therapeutic, calming quality to caring for plants that feels very beneficial to overall health.

3) No packaging. No packaging means less garbage in the landfill, less energy use and greater sustainability. Every piece of “evil plastic”, even if recycled, is still plastic and it will all ultimately end up in the food chain. Think about it. You also get to recycle the compost from the kitchen and participate in the “natural cycle”.

4) Absolute control over what goes in the soil. Have you ever bought organic produce and wondered to yourself “How do I know if it really is organic?” Now I’m sure that most of it is legit, but there have been serious reports of imported “organic” goods from China being found to be adulterated. And, given that organic crops fetch a higher price, how are we to know that on occasion something gets labeled as organic but isn’t really? If you grow your own, you get full knowledge of “where it has been”.

5) Super fresh to the plate. My Dad (bless him) always used to play a game when we were kids. He would try to get the veggies from soil to plate in the shortest time possible. Now my Dad is not the “cosmic” type. If you were to talk to him about plant auras and Kirlian photography, he would say something like “What have you been smoking, son?” But he was a champion organic gardener and instinctively understood that the freshest, most “alive” produce has to be the best for you. He would literally cut the veg, bring them straight into the kitchen, prepare them and serve them in minutes, not hours….

6) Better taste. ….and the taste? Absolutely phenomenal. The best. My Dad’s home grown veg ALWAYS tasted better than anything in the store. He would confidently take the “Pepsi challenge” against store-bought produce and win on taste every time. Even if you do something simply like just grow your own tomatoes, you will know that this is a fact: Home grown veg tastes better. End of story.

7) Local production rocks. Local production = less resources used, less pollution, less energy consumption, less corporatism. You’re also more independent. This ought to make perfect sense to you by now.

8) Better nutrition. There has been a certain amount of hype recently about how organic produce “might not be any better than non-organic” – but as far as I am concerned, such talk is utter nonsense and can doubtless be traced to special interests. One of the simple reasons why home-grown organic produce may be better for you, is that your garden soil will not have been depleted by over-use – and in a small-scale organic operation, you really can bring the soil to maximum fruitfulness. The mineral content of the soil is important – and another thing to bear in mind (this is not often talked about) is that pesticides kill the lichens which chelate the minerals from the rock and make them bioavailable. The reason organic produce is typically darker in color and richer in flavor? It is because it is richer in these minerals. Nature is not broken and does not need fixing!

9) Avoid pesticides. Grow your own veg, and you can rest assured that you are avoiding pesticides. If you were to study pesticides, and I mean really study them as I have done, you would perhaps come to view them as one of the true atrocities of the modern age. These nasty, horrible chemicals end up in the drinking water, in our rivers, in the soil and in our bodies. They are absolutely unnecessary in a small-scale garden, and it could be argued that their “necessity” has only been brought about by the flawed methods of large scale monoculture. Please see our post on companion planting for a further elaboration of these ideas.

10) Avoid GMO. You can buy heirloom seeds and keep GMOs out of your diet! In the USA, GMO foods currently do not require labeling, and you have to be an absolute sleuth, and a militant, to make sure that you are avoiding all GMO when buying packaged foods from the store. It is a total pain and an injustice that we should not have to endure. Solution – buy the right seeds and grow your own food.

11) It’s Rewarding. There’s something you get from being “connected to nature” that is hard to put into words. To plant seeds and watch them grow into big, healthy plants that yield delicious produce, is to witness the miracle of life unfolding before your eyes. To be a successful gardener means to be attuned to the elements – wind, sun, rain and earth… and it could even be argued that the garden is a miniature paradise: Why waste the chance to fashion your own private Garden of Eden….
Convinced? I hope so… now get out there and garden for victory! 🙂