Grow your own Food

Benefits

Environmental Benefit: ★★★★★
By growing your own food, you 1) Reduce packaging, distribution and sales energy costs for the food you eat. Also, you reduce the impact of producing that food by using your own energy to plant, cultivate, and harvest it and by ensuring that environmentally sound practices such as composting and natural pest control measures are used.

Money Saved: ★★★☆☆
Seeds and gardening equipment can be expensive. The key is to track everything you spend, and try to make due with what you have. Take care of your equipment, use heirloom plants so you can harvest their seeds to use next year. Use rainwater harvesting to water where possible. Keep track of your harvest so that you know how much you've produced, and work to improve your cost/harvest ratio. It is quite possible to grow your food for less than what it costs at the store - and it will be better and fresher.

Lifestyle Benefit: ★★★★☆
Although gardening can be a lot of work and take a lot of your time (depending on how you approach it), most people find that there is a lot of benefit. Aside from getting out and moving your body (you know - that word "exercise") there is great satisfaction in watching things grow and carring for them, then harvesting and eating what you've grown yourself. And you know where it came from - you don't have to worry about the latest e. coli spinach recall, heavy metal contamination from use of sludge fertilizers, etc.

What We’re Doing
Shannon has been developing our garden for 10 years now. When we first bought our house, the backyard was all grass. The first year about a third of the turf was dug up for garden. It's slowly grown until it takes up at least half of the yard now (and several trees have been sacrificed because they shaded the garden too much). Shannon weighs everything she harvests from it and tracks all of the money spent on it so that she can measure how efficient her production is. And we have fresh salads most of the year (in Texas we have three growing seasons), with occasional fresh fruit.

A Little Humor
When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.

"If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life." — Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes"