What are the benefits of growing your own food?

The number one benefit of growing your own food is that you know where your food is coming from! When you grow your own vegetables you know where they are coming from. You know that it’s not sitting on a truck being transported hundreds if not thousands of miles before it reaches your kitchen

Food safety

• Growing your own food reduced the risk of food contamination

• Norovirus, E-coli, Salmonella, and Listeria are the most common foodborne pathogens in Canada. According to the Government of Canada website, 1 in 8 Canadians get sick from food borne illnesses each year.

• Recalls on vegetables such as lettuce and spinach are becoming more and more common. You end up paying good money for something you can’t eat

• When you grow your own vegetables you eliminate the risk of contracting one of these potentially deadly pathogens

No chemicals

• When you grow your own food, you have complete control over your growing environment

• You do not have to use chemicals and pesticides in your backyard garden

• There are many organic remedies that are safer for you, your family and the environment when it comes to dealing with pests or diseases in the garden

• Worst case you lose your crop, remove plants from the garden and plant something new

Have you ever heard of the “Dirty Dozen”? The “Dirty Dozen” is a list published and released each spring by The Environmental Working Group. It is a list of fruits and veggies that have been found to contain elevated levels of pesticides that have been used in commercial farming practices

• Although the level of chemicals found is within safe guidelines it is still causing for concern

• Strawberries, spinach, kale, tomatoes and potatoes all make the list

• Oddly enough all the above mentioned can easily be growing on a home garden, what better way to ensure that your food is free of chemicals

Food is more nutritious and tastes better

• There is no comparing the taste of store-bought tomatoes to that of fresh tomatoes. And when we say fresh, we mean fresh from the garden, not the sign in the grocery store proclaiming “fresh” tomatoes.

• Vegetables that are left in the garden to ripen, and consumed within a few days of harvesting are higher in nutritional value and taste better than their supermarket alternatives

• Most vegetables in a grocery store are harvested before they ripen so that they can be shipped to warehouses to then be distributed to stores where they may be placed on the shelf or kept in storage until needed. That's why that seemingly perfect produce you just purchased has already s