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Growing your own produce is a simple solution to numerous health, environmental, and economic problems. Being able to provide for your family with healthy food options that comes directly from your backyard is a wonderful feeling! Whether you are growing a single tomato plant or have a large backyard garden, it is beneficial to your health, as well as the environments.

Here are a few reasons to grow your own food:
1. More Nutritious
When growing your own food, your diet is more diverse and healthy, packed with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Food in its rawest, freshest form is not only the tastiest way to enjoy it, but also the most nutritional.
2. Stay Active
Involvement in gardening helps to improve cardiac health and immune system response, decrease heart rate and stress, improve fine and gross motor skills, flexibility and body strength.
3. Get Vitamin D
Gardening is a great way to absorb vitamin D, known as the sunshine vitamin. Vitamin D is crucial in order to maintain healthy bones and teeth, and it can also protect against certain diseases.
4. Save Money
You can save a lot of money by growing your own vegetables and fruits. By spending a few Emalangeni on seeds, plants, and supplies in the spring, you will produce vegetables that will yield pounds of produce in summer.
5. Nurture the Environment and Manage Resources
One of the best reasons to grow your own food involves how you can positively impact the environment. When your food is right in your backyard or sitting on your windowsill, you’re helping the environment. Without transportation and fuel costs, you’re reducing the impact on the planet. Benefiting from Mother Nature while giving back? That’s a win-win.
6. Eliminate Pesticides
Another benefit of growing your own food is having complete control over any pesticides or chemicals used. In your own garden, you get to decide exactly what your plants will be exposed to. Typical pesticides can be harmful to birds and other animals, but there are other earth-friendly options you can try.
Take mulch, for instance. It pulls double duty, helping to cut back on weeding and keeping insects out of your garden. You can also sprinkle diatomaceous earth around your veggie patch as a natural form of pest control. Sometimes herbs and other plants can keep critters away too.
7. Grow Exactly What You Want
With a home garden, you get to grow what you want. Maybe there’s a particular variety of heirloom tomatoes you’d like to grow, or you’d love to have fruit trees with Meyer lemons. Don’t forget — if you decide to grow heirloom plants in your garden and find one you love, you can save the seeds for future seasons.
8. Take Advantage of New Learning Opportunities When you grow your own food, you open yourself up to a world of learning opportunities for you and your family. You can study plant life cycles, different types of seeds to grow, insects, composting, growing seasons, balancing and improving soil quality, the list goes on.
Being invested in successful vegetable gardening makes it much easier to enjoy learning, which can be especially true for kids. Helping them pick out a fruit or vegetable to grow can open the door to learning the difference between heirloom and hybrid seeds. Exploring natural pest control can unlock the wonderful world of insects and how they work together in a garden, from worms in the soil to hungry ladybugs and caterpillars.
9. Cut Back on Waste
When you are growing your own food, you are less likely to take fruits and vegetables for granted. You are also likely to preserve or use up your supply before it spoils. Building a vegetable garden is also a great way to teach your children about the importance of utilizing whatever bounty the earth has provided to its fullest and avoiding waste! To make your vegetable garden even more sustainable, you can build your own compost pile using kitchen scraps and organic garden debris. By building a compost pile, you can turn organic scraps into natural fertilizers for your garden.
10. Maximize Your Garden Space
Whether you have a lot of outdoor space, an empty windowsill, or something in between, you can keep a garden. Remember, you can maximize small spaces with vertical gardening (like a trellis) or set up a hydroponic system and grow your own food and herbs year-round.