Former First Lady Michelle Obama, among other things, made the White House’s garden famous. In her book about the White House kitchen garden, the former first lady looked at the joys and challenges of being married to the president and the impact of community and school gardens on the health of Americans, young and old alike. The truth is, vegetable gardening may well be the future of the world. And not just vegetable gardening, but simple backyard vegetable garden. It’s the kind you can even do using old cans and plastic containers.
How to Start Your Own Garden
The first thing you need to understand about a vegetable garden is it’s not going to be easy. Sure, you still have to do it, and it’s not impossible, but it’s not a walk in the park either. Planting in a stable environment is required if you want to grow healthy crops.
This means that the location should be somewhere that gets as much as six hours of sun a day because vegetables love sunlight. It should also have the right kind of soil. For watery soil, you can add sand. For sandy soil, you can add organic matter such as manure, compost, and mulch. You have to prepare your garden to accommodate the seeds you want to grow.
Why Should You Grow Your Own Garden
You need to look at this from two perspectives. One, growing your own vegetables will make healthier food choices more accessible for your family. And two, it will reduce the environmental impact of transporting and storing food. Any of these two are good reasons for you to want to grow your own vegetable garden.
It is a well-known fact that organic food, though healthier, is more expensive. Families cannot afford to buy organic food because it is almost double the cost of conventionally-grown food. But if you start to grow your own garden in your house, you have the unique opportunity to grow vegetables and fruits organically. You and your family will have access to healthy and organic vegetables that you couldn’t have afforded otherwise.
If you are to grow your own vegetables and fruits, you will also reduce the environmental cost of transporting and storing them. The reason why environmentalists are pushing communities to buy local is to reduce the impact of transporting food on the environment. With less reliance on cross-border sales, the food you eat doesn’t have to travel hundreds of miles to get to your table. That has a significant impact on maintaining the planet’s sustainability and protecting its limited resources.
Backyard Gardening Is a Glimpse of the Future
One would think that when it comes to thinking about the future, everything would be convenient and digital. Where have you been for the past several months? The world is forever changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. And if there’s one tiny hope that you can glean from the pandemic, it’s that people are more aware than ever of the impact their actions have on the environment and the world at large.
In a truly globalized world, everything you do echoes throughout the country and the globe. The environment doesn’t recognize borders, languages, and citizenship. When one country doesn’t care for the environment, the rest of the world suffers.
It’s the same thing with how you consume food. If you consume food irresponsibly, the rest of the world will feel that, too. The pandemic made a lot of people realize that they should look after the food they eat. And then, there’s also the matter of how many people lost their jobs because of the pandemic. This means people have less money to spend on expensive organic food.
The next best thing for them to do is to start their own garden. With direct access to healthy food, people will have better options to take care of their bodies. Is it here to stay? Do you expect backyard gardening to be a passing trend? Not likely. People will begin to realize how much money and effort they can save by gardening in their backyards. Not to mention, at a time like this, gardening might actually save your sanity.
Before, people weren’t even interested in how their gardens looked. Gardening wasn’t a cool or Instagram-worthy activity. It wasn’t something that you talk about much on social media because it wouldn’t go viral. And yet, after months in quarantine and social isolation, the world begins to see the importance of simple backyard gardening to the future.