Where does your food come from?
One of the best things about growing your own food is knowing from exactly where it comes. The next time you visit your local grocery store, be sure to read the little labels on fruits and vegetables; you'll be surprised by all the different locations.
For my wife and I, some of our produce will come from less than 25 feet from the front door. We don't have enough garden space to grow all our produce...yet. Besides knowing what went into growing the food, the financial savings should be incredible too. For example, while we didn't grow our tomato plants from seed, we got the three of them for a total of $12. We now have healthy plants which will produce Roma, Celebrity and Beefsteak tomatoes all season. Roma's are selling for several dollars per pound and our plant has about 20 flowers and 2 tomatoes on it. It'll pay for itself several times over before it's finished producing. All our other produce was grown from seed at a cost of about 10¢ per plant, except our radishes, for which we got the seeds really, really cheap, about 1¢ per radish.
There are some other benefits to growing your own food as well. Gardening is an excellent skill to have whether you live in the middle of a city or out in the boonies (woods). If our economy gets worse before it gets better, you may end up using this skill to feed your family if you currently rely on "the system" to provide all your food. With prices of everything going up, you may not be able to afford to buy all the food you need as well.
I hear a lot of talk about how gold and silver are something you need to stockpile for the impending economic collapse, but I think a shop keeper would much rather trade for food or fresh water than a silver coin. Knowing how to grow food could make you a very "rich" person in a really tough economy, I guess it all depends on what you consider "wealth". You can read other pages on this site for more of my views on those topics.
Finally, growing your own food can really reduce your total carbon footprint. I'm not a person who thinks that mankind is solely responsible for global climate change, but with our current levels of pollution production, we certainly aren't doing our grandchildren any favors! I live in Missouri, which is almost in the middle of the United States, and yet the plums in the local stores come from California or South America. That is a lot of traveling and storage for food to go through before it ever gets to me. During that time the food looses a lot of nutritional content as well. Picking green beans from our garden, washing them and eating them takes all of an hour at most, so imagine how much more of the good stuff we're getting in our green beans than the ones I could get from the store!
In future posts on gardening and food, I'm going to show you our gardens, how/what we're doing and how you can too. I'll also show you some ingenious ways to garden even if you live somewhere you think it's impossible, like an apartment.
