5 Reasons How to Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables

Having your own vegetable patch or fruit garden was once commonplace, but fell from favor as the food industry became more commercial sites began to take over. In recent years, more and more people have begun to explore expanding their own again. Here are 5 reasons why you might want to start your own kitchen garden.

- Freshness

Fruits and vegetables taste better and are healthier if they eat as much as possible after picking. Most fruit you buy from supermarkets and others are picked well before it is properly ripe, to extend shelf life, and it usually affects the taste. Growing your own allows you to try the best possible products, it is meant to taste.

- Quality

Commercial crops are often selected for their high yields, uniform appearance and long shelf life, not quality and taste. When you develop your own, you can concentrate on quality instead of economy.

- Price

Many supermarket fresh produce is highly overvalued, despite their advertising claims. Growing your own from seed is so cheap as you can get increased and even small plants you buy are likely to provide you with better food at lower cost. With many plants you can use the seeds from one growing season to provide facilities for the next one - a self-sustaining cycle that will only cost you time and effort to keep going.

- Origin

More and more people have concerns about how our food is produced with chemical pesticides and GM foods, a worry. With its own vegetable patch, you know exactly where your food is and how it was grown.

- Variety

There are literally thousands of different varieties of fruits and vegetables, supermarkets, but tend to focus only on the most profitable and easily sold. This means that our choice is often limited to a few select varieties of apples, for instance, rather than hundreds of traditional species that exist. Growing your own allows you to select the varieties you like most and experiment to find new ones will rarely see a sale.

Of course, one drawback to all this - it takes time and effort. In these increasingly busy times, we might not think there's time to lose, but starting with a few small herb plants on your window, or even the odd tomato plant will enable you to try growing your own and may even be enough to hook you up there for a lifetime!