Is Growing Your Own Food Economical?
When you’re setting up your vegetable garden you may question whether growing your own food is an economical choice. From experience I can assure you it is, even if it doesn’t feel like it at first. The secret is to look at your vegetable garden as a long term investment. Keeping the Permaculture Principles in mind is always a great focus.
Lots of people tell me they wish that they could grow their own food, or that they will do it one day. I always say to them to start growing your favourite herbs. Even herbs in a pot is a great start to enjoying harvesting your own food. Most people who start growing herbs quickly progress to growing more food. You simply can’t beat the flavour and freshness of growing your own chemical free, organic food.
All Gardens Grow Food Differently
Things looked easy in my old vegetable garden, and that’s because they were. I’d been working that soil for 14 years. I had set up an ecosystem that naturally thrived. I rarely even had to think about succession planting, since I let many of my plants go to seed.
After two years in our new house and garden, I’m still struggling to get the vegetable garden to thrive. It is providing food for possums, birds, insects and unfortunately rats. The critters are proving to be very successful at getting through the exclusion bags that have worked in the past. The worse bit is that the tomatoes that I haven’t bagged have been left alone. It seems we have gourmet rats here.
I’m coming to terms with the fact that my garden doesn’t get enough hours of sunlight for a lot of the crops I grow. So to combat that I’m using pots that can be moved around to chase the sun throughout the day and the seasons. I’m also trying to manifest the budget to create a completely enclosed vegetable garden on our bottom lawn which gets the most sun out of the whole yard. It also get visited by lots of possums and a wallaby.
Key Takeaway
To come back to the original question “is growing your own food economical?”, well it’s my favourite therapy, and at the very least we get herbs out of it, and at the best times we were eating whole meals from our garden. Stick with me on my stubborn adventure to get growing food again.
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