Excerpt from Gardening My Way! 

The Big Picture – Why it’s important to start gardening

We need to create a local food system and part of that is people planting home gardens and reducing their carbon footprint. During World War 2 they had victory gardens to help in the war effort. We are in dire need of people to fight our current war, climate change. Climate change is a war we must win. It is important for each of us to create more environmentally friendly and sustainable yards with vegetables and native plants to battle the environmental disaster we are going through. 

We need to get rid of grass lawns. They do nothing for us but waste time, money, resources, pollute our rivers, streams, ground water and air. We must change our ideas on landscaping. It is up to each one of us to make the move to sustainable landscapes and tell others about it.  We may not be able to solve all the problems, but by modifying our thinking we can at least help. Today’s landscapes do nothing for us. They are mainly simple and unimaginative consisting of a foundation of shrubs with annual flowers beneath.  

The use of native landscape plants and no-till gardens is our future. Think about this. If you plant a successful native pollinator garden with a no -till vegetable garden its benefits are present but limited to a small area. Your neighbor sees it, likes it, and then decides to do the same. The benefits are doubled.  Then you will speak with other neighbors and they will see the beauty and also understand the purpose of it. They begin to add native plants and no-till vegetable gardens. The result is we have created a small ecosystem. Then the vegetables that your neighborhood produce can be shared between neighbors

or donated to those in need. That ecosystem is the foundation for bringing back what we have lost through our own ignorance.

When discussing today’s commercial vegetable production there are innumerable issues. The current methods of growing today’s fruits and vegetables have reduced the nutritional value of them. Most commercial farms use seeds that were developed for beauty, storage quality, and maximum fruit production. With the development of the perfect look, they bred out flavor and nutrition. There are far worse impacts of our food system besides the genetic aspects.

People don’t realize that there are hidden costs of getting fresh inexpensive fruit and vegetables. According to Iowa States Leopold Center Statistics your vegetables and fruit are shipped from over 1,500 miles away. The USDA has determined that 300 miles is considered local. That doesn’t seem local to me. Transportation alone creates greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Over 94 percent of transportation uses fossil fuels. 28 percent of Americas C02 emissions comes from transportation and a large part is from trucking. And most of our food is trucked, contributing to the problem. 

Fruit and vegetables from commercial farms are usually picked when they aren’t ripe and forced to ripen on the journey to their destination using gases such as Carbon Dioxide and Ethylene. They are also irradiated or sprayed with chemicals that make them more stable for transport. This is not how it is supposed to be. Since they are picked before the nutrients or sugars have fully developed the flavors are not there either. There is a reason that your fresh in season tomato has flavor and store bought does not. You and your family will taste the difference and be more likely to eat the food you produce. When you grow your own you know where it comes from, you can choose your variety, and choose your growing method. With a little time and patience, you can preserve your harvest by canning or dehydrating it. 

The soils that our vegetables are grown in are depleted of the natural biota that help add to the overall nutrient level of the vegetables. The soil is a factor in everything we do. Long-term studies have been done that point to the fact that our grandparents were eating more nutritious food than we are.  A great article by Stacey Colino in National Geographic is well written and points to the fact that we need to use regenerative agriculture to build back the natural soils to increase the nutritional value of foods.

We need to treat the soil with reverence. That is why we will concentrate on methods to help your soil and grow nutritious vegetables and help save the planet. It’s the soil that is the foundation of our health. We need to grow awareness of this need and spread the word. We can be the agent of change one garden at a time.

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