It's springtime! Flowers are blooming, trees are getting their leaves back, and everything is growing again. This is about the time where people have planted or will plant their gardens for the year! Growing your own food has a lot of great perks. I have planted a garden the last few years, and gotten quite a few great fruits and vegetables out of it!
First off, growing your own food allows you to form a connection with where your food it coming from. Most days, we don't think about where our food comes from, what kinds of pesticides are used on it, or how far it had to travel. By growing food in your backyard, you can gain appreciation for the care that goes into the growing process and even learn about the environment you live in. It is also very therapeutic and can give you a chance to get outside every day.
Gardening also gives you access to fresh fruits and vegetables in a way that you don't get at a supermarket. At the supermarket, fresh food travels miles to get to the store, and often doesn't get picked off the vine right when it is ripe. Fruits and vegetables from local farmer's markets are more likely to be picked at the peak of growth. Growing them in your backyard means you can pick lettuce and tomatoes right from your yard and put them into a salad that very day. Vegetables right from the garden taste better because the plants release a whole bunch of sugars right before the vegetable is ripe enough to eat, while the vegetables get picked before that time at conventional farms so that they will ripen in transport. It's also just incredibly satisfying to eat something you spent time growing.
On a broader scale, eating food locally grown is better for the environment because it foregoes all the transportation and waste created when people in say Massachusetts buy food shipped from California. Buying locally grown food supports a food economy that is a lot more sustainable than the national one we eat from today. Growing your own is just one piece of that — and can actually be cheaper than buying food from grocery stores in the long run. Conventional farming is costly, and the more we can grow our own food or eat locally grown food, the less we are utilizing a system that is causing a lot of harm to ecosystems and biological cycles across the globe.
If you haven't grown a garden before, and don't know where to start, there are lots of great websites to help beginners decide what kind of garden to plant, how to care for it, and when to harvest food. From my experience, thinking about the kinds of food you like and the kind of space you have to grow the food is very important in deciding what to plant.
As far as everything I know about gardening goes, I live in Massachusetts so what can be grown well here is not necessarily true for other places in the United States. I've successfully grown strawberries in my yard for a few years. We started with two plants and barely any harvest, but now there are 20 or so plants and we got a good 40-50 strawberries last summer. I had to buy a net to cover the plants with so that fewer animals could get at them.
For my vegetable garden, I found that some plants don't grow well together, and need to be kept separately. Depending on what you want to grow, some plants grow better together than others. I have planted tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, peppers, zucchini, and cucumbers together successfully. It is important to make sure the plants get watered regularly and the soils around them get weeded regularly.
Starting the garden is the fun part. Take a trip to a local garden store and pick your plants--if they've already started them for you, that's half the battle! From there, you can decide how you want to plant them. For many backyards, the soil may not be suitable for planting, but making a raised bed or having a combination of pots is a good option for a lot of yards.
Gardening is great because it's fun, easy, and rewarding. It's just one way we can improve our relationship to the environment and take part in how we choose to eat and what we choose to eat.
