Is Growing Vegetables Worth It?

With the rising cost of food and the threat of food insecurity, you’ve probably found yourself asking, is growing your own vegetables worth the effort?  

The truth is, it can be challenging in the short-term, but the long-term advantages of growing your own food far outweigh any disadvantages. Growing your own food means saving trips to the store and prevents you from having to go out of your way to just get some good healthy organic produce.

Here’s a quick comparison chart that shows the advantages and disadvantages of growing your own food:

Convenience

If you’re from Los Angeles or any major city for that matter, you might have experienced a similar struggle in finding that healthy food isn’t quite so grab-and-go.

It isn’t always conveniently located either.

And if it’s anything like our experience, you might even have to take a drive down to the “nicer” parts of town, just to find some of these healthier options.

You might even have a local spot near you but the quality just isn’t the same or the price is too high.

The struggle is real…..But it doesn’t have to be!

This is probably one of the main motivators for why people want to start a garden.

The Freshest Ingredients

Saving time going to the store is one benefit, but another advantage of growing your own food is being able to pick the fruit (or vegetable) when it is perfectly ripe.

After tasting produce that we have grown at home and comparing it to the taste of store-bought produce, if no wonder that most people, especially children, say they “hate vegetables”.

Can we really blame them? It makes sense when you consider that the produce sold in stores is bland and almost devoid of taste due to the fact that it was picked a lot sooner than it would be when harvesting your produce at home.

Unfortunately, if they picked the produce when it is at optimal ripeness, the produce would most likely rot in the transportation process.

Thus, we pay the price with low-quality and end up with bland tasting produce in our grocery stores.

No More Confusing or Misleading Labels

Speaking of grocery stores, when consumers are bombarded with all these labels such as: “Non-GMO”, “Certified Organic”, “All-Natural” – just to name a few – you can begin to see how all these different labels can be confusing or even intimidating for a consumer.

When most consumers grabs produce or a product labeled “Certified Organic”, they assume that they are consuming a product that wasn’t made with any chemicals at all. Some even believe that the label has an implication that the produce or product has been grown or made with all natural ingredients.

This isn’t exactly true.

In fact, there is a list of “natural” and even synthetic chemicals that are labeled as safe to use in organic agriculture and food production. So, do we really know what’s going into our food? Most of us have no idea.

By growing our own fruits and vegetables, we can have control over what goes into the food that we eat. If you want to know how your food was truly grown, growing your own is the best option.

The Health Benefits

Exercise

Cancel your expensive gym membership and trade your gym equipment for garden tools.

No, seriously.

Trust me, your garden tools will make you work up a sweat. But don’t even focus on that because it will come secondary as you work your soil, plant, harvest and move pots and other things around in your garden.

That’s part of the beauty of gardening, you’re working out, but you don’t realize you’re working out.

Stress Relief

A study conducted in the Netherlands shows that gardening actually promotes stress relief. The study gave participants the option of reading or gardening and although both activities decreased the amount of cortisol levels in the test subjects, the gardening groups showed much more significant decreases in the level of cortisol.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that gardening can actually help us to relieve stress, much more so than sitting down and reading a book.

Fresh Air and Sunlight

As if being a stress reliever isn’t cool enough already, gardening promotes being active and outdoors. Gardening gets you off the couch and puts you in an lively environment to take in the fresh outdoor air and soak up that much needed vitamin D from the sun.

Just make sure to use caution during the hot months of the summer and make sure not to be out during the hottest time of the day. The hottest time of the day can be anywhere from 12:30-3:30pm or even later in some regions.

Mental Health

The stress relief, in combination with the fresh air and sunlight, actually make gardening a perfect activity to help with one’s mental health.

Norway did a study which showed subjects that had been diagnosed with clinical depression have significant improvement in their symptoms after participating in a 12-week horticulture program.

A garden can bring a sense of calmness and tranquility that can be almost meditative, if you just sit there, breathe, and take it all in.

When building your garden space, consider incorporating a seating area or a place to lay down and meditate. Your garden can be the perfect place for outdoor meditation and provide you with healthy food too!

Nutritious Food

Having quick and easy access to nutrient dense food is a primary reason that most people who juice or are health conscious choose to start growing their own food at home.

What makes homegrown food more nutritious?

The food you grow yourself is more nutritious because it has time to properly ripen and build it’s nutrient content. Store bought food has been picked off early, usually rendering it tasteless.

Remember the reason we don’t have tasty tomatoes in our supermarkets?

Yep. That’s the same reason for the lack of nutrition in most of the store-bought food we eat.

When you grow your own food, you don’t have to worry about that because you can essentially pick your food as you need it. If you happen to have a lot of produce in the garden and you can’t eat it all so fast, then that’s a great problem to have in the garden. You can always donate it or share it with friends and family and maybe they’ll be encouraged to grow their own.

You Feel Accomplished

Remember that feeling when you first rode your bike without training wheels?

Okay, well growing your own food doesn’t exactly feel like that.

However, there is this great sense of accomplishment you get from growing your own food, even if your tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, etc. weren’t the biggest or the best ever.

You have the humbling experience of being a participant in every step of the process, from seed to table,  that it took to produce your food. You gain a greater appreciation for the hard work that it takes to produce the food that we eat every day and learn not to take it for granted.

In the end, the garden has a mystical way of changing us from the inside out.

So what are you waiting for? The journey begins with you, a bag of seeds and some dirt.

Good luck!