6 Reasons Why You Should Grow a Backyard Vegetable Garden at Home

I always prefer to have food at home, cooked thrice a day by my wife. Mostly I avoid eating outside and fast food, and my family too. It relieves the three-member family of stomach upsets. We are a vegan family, and we consume fish or meat only occasionally. Apart from carbohydrates, as vegetables constitute the majority of the diet, I was thinking for quite a while on how to save money on vegetables. So I thought of giving it a try by growing them in my backyard as the quantity required to be cultivated for a three-member family is very small. Most of us are of the notion that growing food is someone else’s job. We would like to have our food ready to eat, and we never worry about the back processes involved. However, the fact is that if you can spare a little time, you can benefit, enjoy, and learn a few things from the activity of growing your own vegetables! I have a small piece of land in the backyard where I do all my agricultural research, as well as it fulfills the needs of my family. I find it to be very useful and hence I am going to share here the 6 reasons why you should grow a backyard vegetable garden at home:

You Save Money on Vegetables

As I said, the prime objective of my agricultural research was to save money on the vegetable part of my household budget. So how much money do you save growing vegetables on your own in the backyard? Seed companies and experts say if you sow a buck, you can reap at least five bucks although some say 25 fold or even at times 74 fold return on your initial investment; not a bad business idea to try! In fact, if that is the truth, farmers should have been the richest of all! I haven’t yet done a step by step cost and savings analysis of my backyard vegetable garden but fellow frugals have done a year long project to work out how much does a backyard vegetable garden save and the results show that you should be able to at least double your investment in a year (without taking into account the cost of time spent). Still not a bad investment idea to try up on!

(I could hear you mumbling “time is money,” but money can’t do everything, especially the last reason that I have listed here.)

You Can Earn Money Too

If you are money motivated and want to make money out of your farming activities apart from your own consumption, you can cash out by growing more than your requirement and selling those surplus vegetables. People are crazy these days to buy organic vegetables and fruits. So it shouldn’t be a problem cashing out. I give out the excess vegetables to my neighbors for free and derive the pleasure of giving out. However, inadvertently, the deeds of love and kindness always boomerang!

You Save Money on Your Health

One of the key secrets to good health is more of fruits and vegetables, and less of carbohydrate, fat, sugar, and salt. Vegetables are full of fibers and prevent constipation. Even you can reduce your weight without exercising by carefully altering your diet, adding up more vegetables and reducing sugar, carbohydrate, and fat. Moreover, the more you depend on fruits and vegetables for your energy requirements, the more you are moving to a heart friendly regimen. Won’t it be tempting to have a salad from our own farm fresh vegetables than something else? Of course yes! That’s the advantage of our vegetable garden. We end up consuming more vegetables. Furthermore, if you are farming on a bigger piece of land, the farming activities should take care of your exercising needs. The more you are in good shape and health, the less money you need to spend on health. So you save money on your health too!

It is a Productive Hobby for You

Most of us either have expensive hobbies and spend heavily on entertainment to relieve stress and to keep ourselves occupied in the free time or no hobby at all. Whenever I am stressed or find free time, I end up in my little farm doing something. I find it as a wonderful activity to relieve my stress. Do you know how refreshing it is to see your hard work blossoming as vegetables and fruits? Furthermore, plowing, digging and all that manual labor keeps me busy and exercised in the evenings and weekends. Isn’t it an inexpensive, productive hobby but also a stress reliever? You need to try it to relish yourself!

Enjoy Organic, Farm Fresh Vegetables

These are the days when the public is scrambling for organic foods knowing the potential risks associated with pesticides and artificial fertilizers. By spending some time in your backyard, you can get farm fresh vegetables that are free of all those poisonous pesticides and artificial fertilizers, as well as you can contribute on your part to eco-friendly living by avoiding fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions involved in farming commercially on a large scale. Ideally your kitchen waste, garden waste and the other organic wastes of the household, if any, can be recycled along with the kitchen sewage to organically grow the vegetables. You know better about what goes into your vegetables. Had I been living on the country side, I would have even tried organic milk and dairy products, egg and chicken, but for now I am leaving that activities for my retirement age!

Teach Children the Value of Food

As I mentioned in the beginning, most of us still don’t know how food is grown or all the intermediary processes before it reaches our table. At least let that not be the case with our kids. Make them aware the value of food. Help them learn about the food trail. Having our children learn how to grow our own food teaches them a lot about the effort of creating food and how respectful farmers are. I involve my son and my wife in my farming activities. We grow greens, hyacinth bean, okra, eggplant, cilantro, tomato, shallot, peppers (jalapeno), horseradish, beans, papaya, plantain, broccoli, mint, onion, carrot, ginger, corn, lemon etc. Further just for the sake of showing my son, I intend to try gourds, potato, beet, wheat, lettuce, paddy, garlic etc., and may be some other fruits too which I haven’t done so far due to limitation of space. The benefit from all of these efforts is that children stop wasting food or they would at least sincerely try reducing food wastage on their part.

Bottomeline

I live in a tropical zone and farming round the year is possible. Depending on your geography, take a call. In fact, you don’t even need a backyard to grow your own vegetables but by applying some willful thoughts, you can utilize roof terrace, balcony, or even window sills. I’m sure most of you would have thought at least once about growing vegetables at home but are lazy to give it a try. Let this be the inflection point in trying it out. The entry barriers for you to try it yourself are lack of time, lack of willingness, and upfront start-up costs! Where there is a will, there is a way to find time and take care of the initial costs. Let the motivation factor be saving money. Before you start, keep looking to lower the start-up costs like fencing, tools, pots, seeds, soil preparation etc. All these are long term capital costs and can be kept low by properly applying your mind. If you have a garden or lawn at the front end, most of it might be already there in place! So what are you waiting for? Go, start your initiatives now itself to grow a backyard vegetable garden coming spring in the New Year.