Grow your own food!

I’ve been thinking recently about how much money could be saved if you grow your own food. Not to mention the benefits it would have to you and the planet. The cost of transporting/storing fresh fruit and veg can’t be good. Given a lot of it probably comes from the other side of the country or world and spends weeks or months in cold storage. (So much for fresh fruit/veg)

Im not suggesting we give up on our fruit and veg. I’m only suggesting that we try to grow some more of it ourselves. Buying locally grown is also good though that’s not the point of this post).

It can be quit rewarding to know that you grew your dinner yourself. Growing your own food is nothing new. I guess it’s gone a bit out of fashion in the last 30 years. Though it’s increasingly becoming fashionable again give the high cost of food and concern about climate change. Once upon a time everyone would have grown food as we moved into towns then cities and the coming of the industrial age this began to disappear. It’s reappeared in some countries since then for example growing of food was rather important in most European countries during World War 2. Today in modern Cuba there is a big program in place to get everyone to grow food in any spare soil around the city of Havana (it may happen in others I don’t know).

I’ve recently got into this a bit myself back in January I planted some old potatoes that had started to grow in the ground and despite forgetting about them during the worst of the drought. They amazingly have done quite well.

I also planted some garlic today for much the same reason, it’s started to grow. Hopefully it will be a similar success. Growing veggies is nothing new to me as I live on a farm though I must say our veggie garden has suffered some neglect. One bed is ruled by fennel and another is covered by a branch.

You don’t need a lot of space to grow veggies as this blog shows: http://www.eightsquaremetres.com/

And here is a rather clever idea to grow potato’s http://tipnut.com/grow-potatoes/ I’ve not tried it but I’m told it would work :).