Food?
This book shows you how you can grow plenty of food for yourself and your family, in a low-cost, budget-beating way. You might be saying to yourself, Why would I bother, when I can get what I want from the discount supermarket anytime I want it and it’s not really that expensive? I can get tomatoes for $1 per kilogram in summer
. Or you might use time as an excuse – you are busy with your family, working, running a household, trying to keep your relationship on track with your partner. Won’t this just add one more thing to your to do
list? What about your health? Is that an excuse too? I can’t do it because I have a bad back or I have arthritis or a weak heart.
Perhaps your reason is that you don’t have space or can’t afford expensive soil additives.
This book will show you how you can grow some of your own food, no matter how much or how little space you have and you can do it without expensive soil additives or fertilisers. Growing your own food organically can provide you with healthy, nutritional food much more cheaply than shopping at the supermarket and will provide plenty of other benefits as well.
There are so many reasons why home grown food is superior to that found in a supermarket. Growing your own food can give you so many other things you just can’t get by going to the supermarket. Let’s look at some of the reasons I started to grow my own food and perhaps you will be able to identify with some of these.
Flavour
Firstly I wasn’t satisfied with the flavour of things I bought in the shop. A lot of fruit and vegetable varieties have been bred to be easily transported, to be stored for long periods of time and to look perfect on the supermarket shelves. But the trade-off for these conveniences (for the retailers, sellers and wholesalers) has often been flavour and freshness. When you grow your own, you will discover that food tastes so much better. Tomatoes will zing
in your mouth, lettuce will cleanse your pallet and add freshness to any salad, and cucumbers will be cooling and delicious when picked from your own garden. You will be amazed that the food you grow tastes like food you had as a child!
Quality
Organic food has been shown to contain more nutrients, minerals and vitamins than that grown using artificial chemicals and fertilisers. The quality of the food is retained if you grow your own because there is not much time from when you pick it to when you consume it – you can harvest it just when you know it is perfectly ready and enjoy it in its peak condition. You just can’t buy quality like that. At best, if you are visiting a Farmers’ Market the produce has probably been picked the day before and packed on the truck ready to come to market in the morning. I’m a great advocate of Farmers’ Markets, and this is about as fresh as you are going to get it without growing it yourself. For those things you use regularly that you love to eat, you just can’t beat the quality of growing your own. If you are concerned about making sure you eat a healthy diet, then growing your own vegetables can be part of your strategy to get the best nutrition you can.
Food Miles
A food mile
is the distance food travels from the farm where it is grown or produced to the shop where you buy it, and this impacts on the environment. Food miles are among the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Long distance transport requires enormous amounts of fossil fuel, which releases carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Keeping food cold and unbruised on that long journey requires even more fuel in the form of refrigeration and packaging for both food protection and presentation. Think of the impact of long-distance imports such as apples from New Zealand, tomatoes from Italy and Californian almonds. Distances that food has travelled have been increasing in recent decades as import tariffs have been relaxed in many western countries and as consumers demand more and more food be made available all year round, rather than seasonally – the global market has allowed consumers to access foods grown on the other side of the world with the push of a button and some help from Fed-Ex.
Freshness
All those food miles mean food is harvested many days, weeks or even months before you finally consume it. Apples in cold store may be sold as much as 8 months after being harvested. A certain food leaves a farm heading for the supermarket and it goes via the supermarket’s centralised warehouse, where it is weighed, packaged and labelled. It then goes back on the truck and heads off to your supermarket where it may sit for several days before
