Growing Your Own Vegetables is a Good Idea

In order for you to understand why growing your own vegetables is a good idea, let me explain how the many changes to the farming methods came about. It used to be that when growing your own vegetables, you would plant seeds in organically enriched soil, rotate your vegetables so that the soil would not become depleted of specific nutrients, and store some for the winter. However as farming methods changed so did people's habits change from growing your own vegetables to buying their vegetables from big stores, fully trusting that these vegetables were like the vegetables they would eat when they were kids.

However, this is not the case.

After World War 11, new conventional farming techniques spearheaded by large companies were to drastically change the way farmers grow their crop. As a result, today's vegetables that we buy off the shelf (unless certified organic) are not as nutrient-filled as they should be and, more than not, are laced with insecticide or pesticides.

Let me explain what happened to farming methods during these last 50+ years, why these new farming method do not provide the same quality of vegetable as we had when we were growing up back before the 60's.

1: Growing your own vegetables by using the mixed farming/crop rotation method was replaced by growing only one type of vegetable over and over again in the same soil.

Farmers had bought into the idea that instead of following the idea of growing your own vegetables, it would be more profitable to plant huge fields of one crop and use more synthetic fertilizers which companies and government claimed were just as good as compost . . . that in the end the cost of the fertilizer would be offset by selling more produce.

2. Organic Compost was replaced by "special" synthetic chemical-based granular fertilizers.

However, when the farmers began abandoning mixed farming and growing your own vegetables in favor of growing huge crops of only one, maybe two, types of vegetable, the soil was slowly being depleted of much needed nutrients. The soil was not receiving supplemental nutrients since fertilizing with organic compost/good old fashion manure and crop rotation had been eliminated.

To make matters worse, the new synthetic fertilizers did not replenish the soil with all necessary micronutrients and