For a Healthier Lifestyle - Grow Your Own Vegetables

There is nothing better on a Sunday morning than to pick up basket or box, make your way down the garden to pick a few fresh vegetable for lunch, vegetables that you have lovingly grown. Growing your own vegetables will save you money on your food bills and more important you will be healthier for it.

You may live in the city or town where your garden is small, but it is still worthwhile cultivating your favourite vegetables. Growing your own gives you a tremendous sense of achievement plus they taste much better when you eat them within a few minutes of being freshly picked.

Just think, eating Sunday Lunch that includes freshly picked vegetables from your garden, surely that's better than one that has vegetables from the supermarket that you don't know how long they have been stored, how long they have travelled and what the grower has used on his land to cultivate the crop. It is a known fact that vegetables when eaten within a short time of picking are healthier for you because they retain their nutrition and flavour than those that have been picked and stored or transported over a number of days
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Having grown your own vegetables means that you know what "feeds" or methods have been used to cultivate them from seeds or plants to the table.

Don't try to grow everything, because you could find that you may not be able to harvest the entire crop which then would be a total waste. This would ruin your confidence, choose your crops carefully, choose the ones that taste best when picked and eaten straight from the garden
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If space is limited, it is still possible to have a vegetable garden by creating RAISED BEDS. These are usually constructed out of bricks, dry-stone walls or timber and filled with soil. Constructing a raised bed brings the garden up to an easy working level and also means that you don't have to walk on the garden to attend to the plants therefore the soil never gets compressed because you work from the paths either side. The ideal raised bed is usually 1.2 meters wide so that you can work without stepping on the soil, and 3 meters long and no less than 40cm deep. The easiest construction would be made out of timber, secured at each corner with screws and pegged at intervals around the side. This would secure the structure and stop any movement.

Before filling the raised bed with topsoil, it is a good idea to loosen the ground within the area so that the water can drain away. Failure to do this could result in the water soaking through the top soil and collecting on the lower surface. The roots of the plants could rot if the water is retained for any length of time.

Once the raised bed is filled with topsoil, add a generous helping of organic matter. Well-rotted manure or peat is a good dressing. If the soil is of a clay texture, it will benefit from adding organic matter and a measure of horticultural sand, about a bucket full per square meter. To check if the soil is good, take a handful, form it into a ball if it crumbles when pressed with the fingers, then you know that it is near perfect. Whatever the soil type you have to work with, it will always benefit from a good generous dressing of organic matter, whether it is rotted manure, garden compost or peat, they all add nutrients to the soil which your vegetables will thrive on.

When growing vegetables it is best to rotate your crop each year, divide your garden into different areas to achieve this. This means that the crops are not grown in the same area two years running. There are benefits to this, each crop will benefit from the nutrients left in the ground from the previous crop and also there will be less risk of plants picking up root diseases from a previous crop. Dividing your vegetable garden into different sections, these could be Root Vegetables in one area, Brassica types in another and your Salad types in another, means that you will have created a vegetable garden that will give you produce all the year from winter vegetables to summer salads.

Plant the traditional vegetables e.g Onions, Leeks, Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Beetroot, Potatoes etc. In the Salad section plant Spring Onions, Carrots, Peas, Radish and Lettuce, this way you can provide vegetables for the table at little to no cost.

Growing your own vegetables gives you a tremendous feeling of achievement and satisfaction, it provides you and your family with a healthy diet, it saves you money on supermarket bills and it provides you with a relaxing hobby that can ease the stress of our everyday living.