Five Reasons to Grow your Own

With an abundance of perfect-looking fruits and vegetables for sale in supermarkets, why is growing your own becoming so popular?  Food gardening is becoming popular for at least five reasons:

1. Home grown food often tastes better
2. No pesticides, if you don't use any
3. It's a great hobby
4. No food miles
5. It's a great skill to have

Let's have a look at these five reasons in more detail.

Gordon builds a compost heap

1. Home-grown food often tastes better

Food gardeners may say this, but why would this be?  Is it a fact, or is it a fable?

Mankind has created new varieties of food plants from plants in the wild for thousands of years, with sometimes great success.  Varieties developed by farmers until the 1950s are now known as 'heirloom varieties'.  Farmers developed them because they might be better suited to their local climate, or because they tasted better, or because they produced more plentiful produce or were more pest-resistant.

With agricultural technology improving, in the early 1950s most plant breeders began to focus on new varieties that are 'hybrids'. Reason is that there is much more money in it for them.  A hybrid plant can not be reproduced by the buyer.  You have to keep buying the seeds or plants from the plant breeder who developed the variety, so plant breeders get good rewards for all their hard work. Fair enough.

However, focus in the development of new varieties is now often things like improved ability to harvest mechanically, improved ability to put in cool stores, improved customer appeal in terms of colour, shape and size, ability to cope with certain herbicides and so on.

Most fruit and vegetables for sale in supermarkets today are hybrids and they are not there because of their superior taste or nutritional value.

The word 'heirloom' is now used a lot by nurseries and seed companies that sell to home gardeners.

If you grow your own, you can choose to grow varieties of broccoli, carrots and so on that very rarely if ever are for sale in supermarkets.  You can choose to grow varieties that do not suit commercial growers, but that taste much better than varieties bred for use by farmers!

Add to this the fact that you in your food garden can make individual plants much happier (soil, mulch, fertilisers etc.) than broad-acre farmers can, and you have a set of circumstances that often lead to better tasting home-grown produce with higher nutritional value.

For more info on this subject see for instance Heirlooms and Hybrids on this blog.

Max K prunes a fruit tree

2. No pesticides, if you don't use any

Smell the smells when you are in the pesticide isle at your local hardware store or nursery.  If I have to go there at all, I leave as soon as possible, because I find the smell of most chemical pesticides and herbicides literally sickening.  Growing fruit and vegetables without pesticides can be a bit harder, but in the long term your health and your family's health will benefit.

Supermarket fruit and vegetables may look perfect, but they often contain residues of pesticides and herbicides that are best avoided.

The term 'organic' is relevant here and we could have a big discussion about what is organic and what is not, but at the end of the day things are simple: if you don't use in your food-garden substances that you would not want to breath in or have in your body, then you have made a major step towards a healthier life for you and yours.

How can you avoid using herbicides and pesticides when you know very little about food gardening?  Join a local food garden group and learn from others.  Search for answers on the internet or in gardening books and do not buy that tempting chemical spray that promises to get rid of your pest-problem instantly.

There will be more info about organic pest control on this blog soon.

Annie checks her mushrooms

3. It's a great hobby

Harvest time is the moment for me when growing your own is really the most satisfying.  To take your crop from the garden into the kitchen, taste it, love the taste and say 'I grew this' is the best bit of food gardening.

Of course there are other rewards, such as becoming more in touch with our environment, spending healthy time outside, relaxation, getting gentle physical exercise and learning really worthwhile skills.

I have seen many examples of friends and family members becoming instant converts to food gardening when they tasted some of the produce.

It is very rewarding to take children into your food garden.  Many of today's food gardening enthusiasts picked up the love for food gardening from their parents.

Kylie checks her pigs

4. No food miles

In our household we like kiwis and to date I have not grown any myself, so we buy them.  They usually come from mainland Australia, sometimes New Zealand.  Shock, horror, last time we bought them the label on them said 'Product of Italy'.

If we all went more with the seasons, if we all ate more what our gardens and local farmers produced, that would mean so much less carbon in the atmosphere, because transport would be zero or very limited.

By buying our food as locally as possible, directly from farmers, via markets or food stores that deal with local producers, we also support our local farmers.  

Jo makes a compost heap

5. It's a great skill to have

Why should we know how to grow food, if supermarkets provide us with a never ending supply?

We are fortunate to live in a wealthy country where supermarkets provide at low cost whatever customers demand.  That is not the case everywhere around the world and it would be wrong to assume that it will always be the case in Australia in the future.  

There could come a time when international trade and trade between parts of Australia is not as cheap and normal as it is today.

One day our ability to grow our own food may be as important as our ability to read or write.  Learning how to grow food is important so we have the skills if there is ever the need to be self-sufficient.

Growing our own food also teaches us that we are part of, not masters of, our environment and that we need to treat the environment with respect, so it can give us the food we need.

It is a valuable skill that, I believe, should be a standard part of the curriculum of all primary and high schools.

Serena checks her straw-bale hothouse

Is growing your own also cheaper?

It would be great if I could say that the sixth reason for growing your own is that it is cheaper than buying food.

  

Our unpredictable climate makes farming a very risky business that deserves better rewards than farmers currently get.  In my opinion, food in Australia is too cheap.  If we would pay a fair price for the fruit and vegetables we buy, growing our own would be cheaper than buying it.  

Growing your own can still be cheaper than buying if you are lucky to live in an area with naturally-fertile soil and good consistent rain fall.  

For most of us, however, the cost of fertilisers, mulches, irrigation systems and manures, to name a few items, makes food-gardening dearer than buying fruit and vegetables.

Most food-gardeners consider great tasting produce, superior nutritional content and the absence of pesticides so important that the money spent on their food-gardens is completely worth it.

Happy food-gardening!