Grow Your Own

Growing Your Own Vegetables

Okay that probably sounds a little funny. That ain’t what I meant and shame on you for thinkin’ it. Put the smoke down. As you can see by the pic – I’m standing next to our little fall/winter garden. I’m talking about growing your own vegetables.

If you’ve read some of my other posts about nutrition then you know that I think as long as it’s natural food it’s okay. Getting over caught up on calorie counting or one macronutrient style is just useless overkill. But it’s hard to underestimate the importance of real chemically untainted food and to appreciate how much better real, naturally homegrown food actually tastes.

Now I grew up doing some moderate scale farming and the whole farm-boy corn-fed thing applies. You really do build bigger, better, stronger, healthier bodies on your own home grown food. Plus realistically on a small scale it’s not that hard to do and saves you a few bucks. You just can’t get food like that many times even at a farmer’s market.

In the little garden here we’ve got broccoli, onions, mustard greens, potatoes and squash. In just this little one here we can grow hundreds of dollars worth of produce for significantly less than $50 total in seed and fertilizer. The big thing is the vitamin content of these vegetables is unbeatable and you just can’t buy that in a store. In fact I recently heard one of the TV doctors say that they considered mustard greens a “super food,” because of their antioxidant and fiber content. They’re the easiest thing in the world to grow.

When you grow it you know exactly what goes in it. Plus it’s good for the planet and it’s a mind expanding, survival enhancing skill. You have a much greater appreciation for what it takes to actually provide for people and what it took for our ancestors to provide for themselves. You can get a real sense of what the people of yesteryear went through. It makes you better.

Plus it can actually get fun. My wife is looking at me with an evil eye right now. Mostly because she’s been through a decade and a half of corn harvests with me and in the heat of summer in Florida that’s just not a lot of fun. But there’s something intensely satisfying and connecting to see the vegetables grow and the work you put in come to fruition.

It can be much the same experience as training. To see the knowledge and effort you put in actually translate to more muscle or less fat or bigger lifts or better endurance or better sports performance or greater health.