Health Benefits From Your Own Veggie Garden

Honestly, even if you have the space why would you go through all the bother of digging over the earth to grow something if you can get it all in the vegetable market or in most shops? This is a common question most people would ask: Why put in all this effort if you don't have to?

The ones thinking different would be a health conscious person, or having bad health experience in the past and looking for better options. Many of us also know that vegetables and fruits are not of the same quality they were many years ago.

The soil being depleted of essential vitamins and minerals thanks to modern intensive agricultural methods of farming.

More and more nutrients being stripped from the soil in which the food we eat is grown. Conventional grown vegetables and fruits been sprayed with pesticides to help protecting the plants from insects, mold and fungus. Plus, they're often loaded with toxic pesticides residue that will harm our health. Therefore, these plants contain fewer antioxidants that the ones you would grow in your own veggie patch.

What Makes the Difference?

Just the different taste of a tomato, home-grown from your own garden to the one from the market, this is only about the taste of it, we can't see the quality inside of the tomato. There are ongoing tests being done on fruits and vegetables. Such research revealed that as an example, a broccoli, grown in the sixties to late seventies, contained 50 percent more calcium than the ones grown today. An apple in the same time contained over 40 percent more vitamin A than what it does today. Comparable situation applies right across the vegetables and fruits grown today.

The fact is: When it comes to eating right, even the healthiest diets lack in nutrients and vitamins.

Make Your Own Veggie Garden

To make a garden, the first health benefit you will get is the exercise from creating your garden before the vegetables even grow. Excuses, there are plenty of great excuses for not doing things. Most of the excuses come down to several factors: Not enough time, not knowing what or how to do it, not enough believe that I can do it, I haven't got the strength, or my back hurts.

Just brush all of them aside and start making your own vegetable garden because the rewards from it outstrips everything else.

Composting is also a part of gardening by using different elements of nature. Adding matters and organic elements is to prepare some compost to enrich the soil. Start making compost using a compost bin designed for this purpose. Grass cuttings, kitchen matters and leaves etc. are excellent as a good start for this and later added it to the soil. The best way of testing the soil condition is seeing plenty of worms, the more worms the better. When it comes to gardening, worms are an important part to increase soil fertility. The growth and development of plants is deeply and extremely enhanced by these little worms and the success of gardening.

Growing in Pots

Growing tomatoes has been a passion for many people because the tomatoes are the kind of vegetables used and implemented in several dishes and recipes. You can make plenty of salads, grilled meats, grilled with cheese, even eat it as is by adding a little salt. Tomato-gardening is an interesting process overall and you can grow them in pots as well. Just like many other forms and sorts of gardening you can carry out for tomatoes. Using pots has its own advantages if space is otherwise not available. The same applies to herbs; as well as for tomatoes choose a sunny spot: Full sun.

Don't Throw Away the Goodness

Growing your own vegetables is one thing, preparing them to eat without losing any goodness is another. Boiling vegetables is like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Many people make the mistake of boiling the vegetables and throwing away the water with all the goodness in it. To benefit from all the goodness after growing your own vegetables they should only be slightly steamed and still crunchy when eating them. There are ways of preparing veggies without boiling them.

Did you know that when you add salt to water when cooking, it speeds up the leaching out of minerals such as calcium, potassium and sodium? Another fact is that broccoli and some of the other vegetables lose up to 90 percent of its nutrients when microwaved.

Much of nutrition has been lost in over-farmed and over-processed food since the beginning of our food industrialization. When visiting this huge potato farm, as far as an eye can see, nothing but potatoes; noticing this little patch of potatoes on the other side of a shed and asking the farmer: You got some growing here as well. The farmer replied: Yah, that's for my own use only. I wonder why!

To Stay Healthy

Therefore, it has become nearly impossible to get all the nutrients from the normal food alone. For our body to stay healthy it needs a daily intake of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other phytonutrients to keep in good health and wellbeing. Growing those few vegetables in your own garden is the right way to go. This may not mean much to many, but the benefits are by far greater than most people realize.