Beat Food Inflation And Achieve More With DIY Home Gardening

An article reported in The Associated Press stated an important fact about food prices having registered a whopping rise, the largest in a month during the past 36 years. An ever-increasing group of people today are involved in home gardening and food production.

You can also adopt this method to reduce the burden of food costs in your home budget. Besides savings, the main driver of interest for people in home gardening is health consciousness, as people want the food growing process to be as natural as possible.

In modern day agriculture, chemical fertilizers are widely used but the unfortunate part of their use is, they contain only major minerals and are without significant trace elements, nutrients and organic matter unlike natural fertilizers. The absence of these important ingredients causes the plants to become weak and easily susceptible to attack from pests.

This requires the use of stronger and more quantity of pesticides to protect the plants and crops, but then overuse of pesticides increases the risk to human health and also keeps away, helpful worms and spiders that are actually required in your garden.

Home gardeners enjoy the rare blessing of eating absolutely farm fresh food, unlike the food bought from the supermarket, which takes some days to reach there from the original place of produce.

Furthermore, you indirectly contribute to maintaining the earth’s environment and resources by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels which are used in transportation of food over long distances before they reach your supermarket for sale.

The content of nutrition is the highest in food that has just been harvested. The moment the plant or crop is separated from the ground the process of deterioration begins, which causes loss of nutrition as the food becomes older during storage and transportation.

Even if the food is not spoilt and is still edible, but due to decrease in nutrition value with the passage of time, it does not provide the optimum health benefits to our body. Many a times, food that has to be transported over very long distances, is harvested before the right time and instead allowed to undergo the ripening process during transportation.

The result of this method is the loss of nutrition, taste, texture and color which otherwise would have been avoided if allowed to ripen completely before harvesting. Irradiation to delay the ripening process is also used to preserve the food until it reaches your grocery store.

On the other hand, treatment with ethylene gas is done to speed up the ripening process if it has not already reached, the ready to eat stage.

The produce by home gardeners can be stored in a surplus situation, which is possible even for those who are new to this activity. As the shelf life of food is short, you can share the surplus quantity with your friends and neighbours and the remaining quantity can be pickled, canned and stored in root cellars.

This way it would simply be wonderful to use your own produce later in the future. Home gardening is the way to a healthy future and great savings.