Growing your food doesn’t just get you fresh produce at your fingertips – there are plenty of added bonuses. Find out how food gardening is good for your health, the environment and your bank balance.
If it’s your first time planning and planting a vegetable patch, you might feel like you’re at one with nature and you’re already loving getting your hands dirty.
But you also might be daunted by the task ahead.
When to start? What to grow? How to plant? And then there’s all that waiting, excitedly (and sometimes impatiently!) for your crops to grow.
If you’re wondering why seasoned food gardeners keep going back for more, maybe it’s because they know the bigger benefits it brings.
Maybe you could do with a reminder – to motivate you to keep going on your food gardening journey.
Food gardening isn’t just about the joy of grounding yourself in the soil, or enjoying the fruits of your labour. And it’s more than being able to be self-sufficient and sharing your produce with your loved ones, as much as those are fantastic reasons to have a veggie patch.
Growing your own food has some pretty hefty – and often hidden – benefits. Here are the big 3:
1. It's great for your health
After a cold winter, there’s nothing that compares to that feeling of sunshine on your skin and the smell of spring in the air.
Being in nature can be soothing, and gardening in particular is a great way to practice mindfulness.
When you tend to your food garden, not only do you get a chance to soak up some vitamin D but you can also be really present – focusing on the task in front of you and distancing yourself from the busyness of life.
And it’s not just your mental health that benefits. All that bending, digging and harvesting is a great incidental way to be active and get the heart pumping.
Growing organically makes for healthier meals with fewer harmful chemicals, and having fresh produce on hand in your own backyard means you might feel more inclined to reach for a healthy snack than something of the processed variety.
But one of the best wellbeing boosts from food gardening? That sense of pride you get when your beans first start to sprout or your first cherry tomato in its perfect rosy glory is ready to be picked from the vine. Now that’s happiness! Plus there’s the extra hit of joy you get when you then share your produce with your family, friends, neighbours or your local community.
2. It’s great for the environment
You know how we said eating produce that you’ve grown organically is good for your body? Well think how good organic growing is for your garden bed too. By reducing the use of harmful chemicals – the pesticides and herbicides often used in conventional growing – our soils provide a healthy foundation for so many essential ecosystem functions.
Healthy soils provide a home to earthworms, fungi and millions of micro-organisms that help plants take up nutrients and water more easily. This is great news for your food crops. Healthy balanced soils help grow healthy plants – to feed not just humans, but all the other animals we share our backyards with.
Food crops and healthy soils also help increase biodiversity, and can create habitat for birds, reptiles, and insects. Now you might think that vegetable crops and insects aren’t something we want mixing – but that’s not really the case.
Yes, some insects can be problematic, but others – knowns as beneficial insects – can help our plants. For instance, bees pollinate our food crops and insects like ladybirds and lacewings eat the bad bugs in our gardens.
You can attract beneficial insects by leaving some of your crops to go to seed, like carrots and coriander, and deliberately planting flowers so these good guys have a source of nectar year-round. You might like to try growing calendula, Queen Ann’s lace and marigolds.
These flowers will eventually go to seed and will self-sow next season when the time is right, so you’ll have perpetual feast for your good bug friends.
If you want something to help you for your first growing season though, most seed sellers do a ‘good bug mix’ that can be sprinkled into your garden beds between veggies.
Then there’s the environmental benefits of reducing waste. By growing your own food, you generally only plant and grow what you need – and no one wants to see food go to waste, particularly when it’s produce that you’ve nurtured with your own bare hands.
Unlike those wonky carrots and quirky cucumbers that often get overlooked in the shops, you’ll feel a sense of pride in your misshapen veggies and eat them anyway.
Your next project could even be setting up a compost pile – that way, any waste you do have can be used to enrich your soils for an even better crop next season.
And the bigger picture? Growing food from the comfort of your backyard also means you’re reducing your reliance on travelling to get your fresh produce, and it means your produce hasn’t had to travel to get to you either! That’s a big win for your carbon footprint.
3. It’s great for your savings account
Now back on that point of food waste. Yes, it’s great for the environment if we reduce waste, but also think about the savings you’ll make if you only grow what you need and you use everything that you grow.
When we know the effort that’s gone into something, like planting a veggie patch, we’re more likely to want to maximise our investment. So every dollar you put into setting up your food garden will be worth it, because you won’t want any of your hard-earned produce to go to waste.
You might have done the maths already, but in case you haven’t, it’s cheaper to buy a packet of seeds and grow your own goods that it is to buy many of your favourite vegetables.
Things like lettuce, baby spinach, carrots, potatoes, radishes, tomatoes and cucumbers are great options – check out our story for some other ideas too: 9 vegetables best grown from seed.
Now the first season of setting up your garden might feel like you’re splashing a bit of cash, but it doesn’t have to be.
Check out our story: 5 tips for an economical veggie patch, which covers everything from repurposing household items as garden beds, to what free soil-enrichers you can add to boost your crops.
You’ll find that after a season or two, when your garden is set up, your input costs reduce drastically because all you need to be buying is additional compost, organic fertilisers, seeds and seedlings.
So what are you waiting for? Do your health, the environment and your bank account a favour and spring into food gardening. We’ve got everything you need to get started – check out our Food gardening hub for more. Or, for the latest tips delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter.
(Main image: Zbynek Pospisil)