Looking to downsize your trips and money to the grocery store? start planting in your own garden
Harvesting your own food at home may seem very difficult, but in fact, is cheaper and better when it comes to your nutrition and health. According to a five-year United States, gardening trends study by the National Gardening Association (NGA), more than 1 in 3 Americans currently grows their own food. Over the five years of the study, NGA found a 17% increase in food gardening — the highest in decades.
Perhaps you're reading this and saying this won't work out for you since you don't live in a house with a backyard or you don't have a garden but turns out that you don’t have to dig a plot in the ground to grow your own fruits and vegetables. Whether you’d rather not plant in-ground or you have no yard at all, container gardening has several benefits over in-ground gardening:
- Since you use potting soil, you don’t have to worry about preparing your soil before starting.
- Container gardens have far fewer issues with weeds (if they have any at all), which means gardening takes up less of your time.
- It’s easier to protect container plants from threats like animals or frost damage.
- You can move containers around to take advantage of the best available sunlight, which can increase your yield.
- You can start a container garden almost anywhere: on your patio, deck, rooftop, or even kitchen counter.
You'll be surprised by the number of vegetables you can grow in containers, including herbs, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, carrots, cucumbers, peas, strawberries, and even pumpkins and watermelon.
Also gardening and growing food at home benefits your family life and your children's nutrition. School garden research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2017 shows that kids are more apt to try a variety of fruits and vegetables when they helped grow them. And according to Cornell University, gardening can benefit children by improving environmental and nutritional awareness and promoting healthy eating.