If you’re serious about going green, learn how to grow vegetables at home. Not only is homegrown food healthier for you, it’s also an energy saving way to help the planet and conserve our valuable resources.
There are lots of ways that growing your own vegetables can be beneficial to the environment. Here are a few for you to think about.
Grow Your Own Vegetables for Fewer Chemicals
Conventional farmers use hazardous chemicals to keep pests away from their vegetable crops. Pesticides, herbicides and other chemically-created fertilizing agents are sprayed on crops apparently to improve the harvest. However when those same crops are washed for use, those chemicals are being flushed away down into the water system.
When you grow vegetables at home, you have a choice about how to fertilize your plants and the methods you will use to keep pests away. There are plenty of all-natural pesticides and fertilizers you can create from items that are good for the environment and for your vegetables. By not releasing chemicals into the air and not consuming them when you eat your plants, you will aid not only your own health but that of the people and animals around you.
Growing Vegetables Means Lower Emissions
The vegetables you buy in the supermarket have to be trucked in. Many of them travel quite a few miles before they reach the store. Each of those trucks runs on gasoline and is responsible for releasing harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
Producing your own vegetables means that you are responsible for helping to lower the emissions involved in transporting your family’s vegetables to zero. When you pick a tomato out of your own garden, it doesn’t have to travel by truck to get to your table. This makes the home vegetable garden an important energy saving enterprise.
Healthy Compost
Vegetables store a lot of valuable nutrients even in the parts we don’t eat. Scraps, peelings and other vegetable waste all make great additions to any compost heap. When you compost vegetable waste, the nutrients slowly break down and become part of a rich fertilizer that can’t be duplicated, no matter what brand you buy at the store.
That compost, in turn, helps make the next round of vegetables even healthier and stronger. When you grow vegetables at home and don’t throw anything away, you create a pattern that could repeat itself forever without producing any garbage.
Growing Vegetables at Home Means Smaller Landfills
When you’re not producing as much trash, your garbage won’t take up as much space in the landfill. If everyone did this, the landfill areas themselves wouldn’t need to take up so much space.
In addition, when your vegetables come straight from your garden, you avoid using any of the packaging that comes with them when you buy them at the store. You not only cut down on your plant waste, but you use less of the plastic and paper that stores encourage you to use to transport and protect your produce.
Green Vegetables
As it turns out, vegetables are green in more ways than one! When you grow vegetables at home you will use fewer chemicals, participate in lowering emissions, have the ability to create healthy compost and help us move toward smaller landfills. Who knew that edible plants could do all of that?
Want to learn more about growing vegetables?
Vegetable Gardening Ideas takes you through all the steps of growing your own vegetables at home. Don’t miss the 21 Easy Vegetables and How You Can Grow Them page, or the growing instructions for the Top 10 Most Popular Vegetables page.
This year I’m growing tomatoes, basil and squash.
What are you planting in your garden this spring?
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