Growing your own food is certainly more difficult than loading up your grocery store cart with perfectly ripe fruits and veggies. Although arduous, however, there are some major benefits to digging your hands in the soil and producing your very own produce.
If you’ve got a green thumb, or you’re interested in acquiring one, find motivation to grow your own fruits and veggies in this catalog of reasons why growing your own beats buying.
Empower The Community
While some make gardening a solo effort, for many it’s a community initiative. Planting and tending to a community garden is a wonderful way to bring members of a fractured community together.
As like-minded people toil in the communal garden each day they’ll bond over their shared devotion to the task. Were it not for this garden, many of the individuals probably wouldn’t have had a reason to venture away from their sofas, let alone socialize or cooperatively plan for a greater good.
Break Free From Corporations
Corporate America is not evil. Many of the luxuries you enjoy daily are made possible by the existence of this established system of trading. Depending entirely on companies for even the most basic necessities, however, can leave you with a lack of understanding of your place within the natural world.
By setting up and tending to your own garden you can empower yourself to meet the most basic of your needs – the need for food. This can leave you feeling decidedly more confident and capable.
Save Money
While fruits and vegetables don’t have to be expensive, seeds cost decidedly less than the final products that are polished and displayed at the local market.
Especially for people trying to eat healthily on a budget, which can be a tremendously challenging endeavor, gardening is a wonderful way to get the nutrient-rich foods you seek without spending a large chunk of your paycheck.
Get Exercise
Between tilling the soil, planting the seeds, weeding, maintaining and harvesting, garden is serious physical work. If you’re sick of doing seemingly meaningless reps at the gym trying to perfect your muscle definition, trade this exercise option for something more useful.
You actually burn just as many calories in 45 minutes of gardening as you do in 30 minutes of basic aerobic exercise. Wouldn’t you rather spend those extra 15 minutes per workout getting fit and have something super tasty to show for it at season’s end?
Provide Learning Experience For Youth
As society progresses, people get further and further away from the agrarian society that once typified America. Many children today know of gardening only through books. While this surface level knowledge may be technically sufficient, it’s hardly enriching.
Growing your own food provides you an uncommon opportunity to teach your children or the children in your community the power of gardening. If you’re a novice gardener, you may even have occasion to learn from the children who assist you in this endeavor, giving these young gardeners an enhanced sense of purpose as well as something of which to be proud.
Know Where Your Food Comes From
You know little about what happened to your fruits and vegetables before they ended up on the store shelves. If you want to spend extra and buy organic, you can be assured that they weren’t treated with the most harmful of pesticides, but how were they handled?
There is really no way to know when you buy already-grown products. Stop guessing as to the origin stories of your fruits and veg. Plant them yourself and you’ll know what happened from the moment the seeds went in the ground to the minute they rested on your tabletop.
Try Them All
When you buy fruits and vegetables in the store, your exploration of this produce is limited to the varieties they keep on hand. If you task yourself with growing your own, you open the door to an almost limitless variety of fruits and vegetables to try.
Do you love strawberries? Instead of just eating the ones that come in that plastic container at the grocery store, purchase an assortment of different types of strawberry plants and test them out in your garden.
This delicious science experience will allow you to explore the flavors, colors and heartiness of an assortment of varieties. At the end of your experiment, you’ll be able to say with certainty which type of sweet and juicy strawberry trumps the rest.
