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Why would you want to grow your own food?

In this series of posts we're focusing on reducing our reliance on supermarkets and industrial food for lots of reasons. Some of the main ones are to reduce our costs, to improve our nutrition, and to tread more lightly on the earth.

In case you missed the previous posts in the series, they are:

3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better

Strategy #4 – to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket

Strategy #5 – What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?

Strategy #6 – Wise Use of Whole Foods

This post - Strategy #7 - is about replacing some of your supermarket needs (in small steps) by making a start on growing your own food.

If you’ve never grown anything before, or if you live in an urban environment without access to garden areas, take heart. There are easy, small ways to start -- including if you are short on time, space, or confidence.

I've listed the following suggestions roughly in order from easy towards more challenging. We'll begin with what must be the simplest, cheapest, quickest way there is to get started growing a little bit of fresh food in your own home. 

Start sprouts in a jar on your kitchen bench

Sprouting seeds, grains, and legumes is a simple process that takes no more space than a kitchen draining board. It's a way that you can use indirect sunlight and moisture to increase the volume, digestibility, and nutrition levels of seeds, grains, and legumes.

All you need is a clean jar, a piece of loose weave fabric or netting, a large rubber band or some string, water, some indirect sunlight, and some edible seeds grains/legumes. (Preferably organic and definitely not treated in any way that would stop them from sprouting.)

At its most basic, sprouting goes like this: Put a small amount of seed or grain in the bottom of your jar, cover with water, and leave for up to 12 hours (less for smaller seeds).

Cover the mouth of the jar with a fabric or net that will hold the seeds and release the water; drain. After that, rinse and drain your seeds at least every 12 hours, keeping them moist but not wet. Watch for them to start to sprout, which should happen within a day or so. Keep rinsing and draining till the sprouts are the size you want, and viola: homegrown food!

You can use your sprouts in lots of ways: toss them into a stir fry, add to salads, add to sandwiches, blend them up in smoothies... 

Food that grows in soil is always my preference, but sprouting is hard to beat if you're short on space or time or you just need a not-too-daunting way to get started growing something.

A how-to resource and a word of caution

There are a different soaking and sprouting times for different sizes and types of seed, and its good to be sure you're not letting your sprouts get slimy or moldy - for details, this post is a comprehensive  guide covering pretty much everything you could want to know.

The only thing I would add to it is a word of caution about soy, which I suggest you avoid entirely, and other legumes, which I suggest you cook after sprouting.

(See this article by environmental journalist Tara Lohan about soy effects on human and environmental health and how soy got so big, this one about soy farming as a deforestation driver, and this one about soy in processed foods, if you're keen to know more about why I suggest avoiding soy.)

All other legume sprouts, in my opinion, should be cooked before you eat them. All legumes are hefty to digest and some more so than others -- cooking them after sprouting gives you double insurance that you'll get their health benefits without an upset tummy.

Kidney beans are particularly tricky according to some sources, so give those a miss unless you've done your own research and you're confident you know what you're doing. 

Other than the legume family, if you can sprout it you can probably eat it! Have fun experimenting, compost your failures learning experiences, and enjoy your successes

Grow edible things in containers

(Or your could grow drinkable things in containers -- see the section below for ideas on that.)

The great advantage of growing food plants in containers is that, well, they're contained. So they're more manageable than even a small garden plot. Small and manageable is good, because we need strategies we can maintain.

If you're doing this for the first time and you can afford to buy seedlings and potting mix, do.

Or you can get off to a slower but much less expensive start by starting your own seeds and making your own compost and potting mix, which is beyond the scope of this post but isn't as hard as it might sound. You can also get creative with finding free containers, such as unwanted polystyrene boxes, instead of buying pots.

Whichever way you go about it, start small and then build slowly, so you don't get overwhelmed. 

Greens and herbs of many kinds are super easy to grow in pots, and so long as you feed them, keep them moist, and can put them where they receive enough sunlight, the more you harvest the better they grow.

Learning about ways to feed your potted plants can be a whole other adventure, just as composting can -- there's so much to learn and explore.

But for now, just start. If its really daunting, limit yourself to starting with ONE pot. The first time you snip some chives to add to a bowl of soup -- even if the chives came already potted from Bunnings and the soup from a can -- you'll have started growing your own food. Anything's possible from there. 

Grow low-maintenance perennial herbs and make chilled teas

Growing something you can drink counts too.

Do you buy soft drinks, carbonated water, cordials, or fruit juices? Consider replacing them with teas made from things that grow in containers (see above) or in your garden. (Actually, its only called "tea" if it includes leaves from the tea plant Camellia sinensis; otherwise its proper name in herbal lore is a "tisane." But we'll stick with "tea" to keep things simple.)

Any herb you collect fresh from your containers or your garden to make tea with will be way healthier for you than herbs grown in mono-cultures, packaged, and transported. And don't even get me started on the sugar content and other non-food ingredients in bottled beverages. And, on top of all that, there's the cost savings.

Chilled herbal tea examples

If you live in a more temperate region with proper winters, here's a list of 18 herbs for you.

Let's start with ginger tea. (I wrote a detailed post about growing ginger here.)

Grate fresh ginger rhizome into a heat proof jug or jar (scrub it clean first, but no need to peel) and pour boiling water on it. Let it steep for as long as you like. Overnight is fine (it will be stronger, so you can dilute it more and it will go further) and ten minutes is fine too.

Add honey (its easier to dissolve if you add it when the tea is still a bit warm, but I don't add while its hot because I use live, raw honey, and I don't want to destroy its goodness with heat).

Then chill, dilute to preference (I put a bit in the bottom of a cup and add water; my husband drinks it straight), and enjoy as a refreshing, healthy, thirst quenching drink. 

Another plant you can use to make a refreshing chilled tea is Mexican tarragon, which I wrote about here.

Another is lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus), a low-maintenance tropical perennial which also does ok in a large container if you need to bring it in to protect from frost. It has a slew of health benefits you might not have known about (I didn't).

Yet another is hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) -- yes, hibiscus flowers that we grew up thinking were just for decoration can be made into a healthy tea.

There are many more, but that should get you started. Now you can skip the bottled beverages section next time you're down that aisle.

Next, another kind of drink. 

Make kombucha 

Kombucha is regular sweet black tea that has been converted to a fermented beverage . It's cheap to make and is a delicious and healthy replacement for sweetened drinks.

What transforms the sweetened tea into a sugar-free probiotic (and puts this in the "homegrown" category) is something that grows on top of the tea, called a Scoby. Scoby stands for "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts." Fear not - they're all friendly varieties that build healthy gut flora in humans.

It takes a bit more to learn kombucha making than it does for herbal tea, so rather than try and condense it here I'll share a basic resource to get you started.

By drinking kombucha regularly (especially if you also eat un-pasturised sauerkraut and/or un-pasturized yogurt/kefir) you can scratch probiotic powders and pills off your shopping list too.

Grow tough, easy fruit/vegetable climbers in narrow spaces

This is really an extension on the container growing section above, except that now instead of talking "balcony or porch," we're talking about narrow places where there's not much space but what there is goes all the way up.

Plants like cherry tomatoes, regular climbing tomatoes, peppers and capsicums, egg plants, pepinos, cucumbers, peas and green beans, and probably more that aren't coming to mind, can all be grown in containers and trained up trellises to make use of vertical spaces.

Other, more rambling vines that we think of as space hogs can be used cleverly, too, for example by allowing them to grow up a trellis and then over a pergola or car port. Chokos, pumpkins, and passion fruit come to mind.

Sweet potato vines can be grown in a large pot to give space for tubers, or a smaller one if you plan to just eat the vine tips as a nutritious green vegetable. 

Chokos are less nutritious, but so easy once you get them going. I wrote about 7 Ways to Use the Humble Choko Vine, here.

Even pumpkins can grow on trellises. I always fear that the vine won't hold that heavy fruit up in the air, but it does. And pumpkins can also be harvested before they're large, and be cooked and eaten like you would a zucchini. In my experience small unripe pumpkins are interchange-able with zucchini in the kitchen, and a LOT easier to grow.

Grow mushrooms

Full disclosure: mushrooms in my experience haven't been the easiest things to grow. I can't (yet) count them among my successes. But so far I've only made a few attempts, and I'm not giving up because mushrooms are SUPER nutritious and many types are also safely medicinal.

I believe that food should be the first place we turn when we need medicine. And I'm convinced that food from our own immediate environment is a significant key to building our health and resilience, so we can reduce our reliance on pharmacies as well as supermarkets. Mushrooms are such super-foods that no matter how many times I fail at growing them in abundance, I intend to persist till I crack it. (It's mainly a case of moving it up the list of priorities...)

Anyway, if you're keen, consider starting with a kit the first few times to dip your toes in. There are lots of mushroom growing kits out there; search online for "mushroom growing kits" in your area. 

And while you're waiting for your kit to sprout, you might like to check out these online courses, the first one free and the other so reasonably priced that its almost a no-brainer.

Free Mini-Course: Get started with your Mushroom Growing Journey

Grow a Mushroom Garden at Home: an Online Course

Or search for another mushroom growing resources that tickle your fancy - they're springing up everywhere (pardon the pun).

Grow edible insects in a tub on a bench

The insects in the picture are silkworms, which are easy to raise on mulberry leaves at home. Many other types of insects can also be raised at home -- as food for you, your chickens, or your fish.

Around 2 billion people, world wide, eat insects.

Yes, we picky folks would need to get past the ick-factor.

And no, insects aren't pettable.

But if you have serious space constraints and you can get past those two hurdles, you could produce your own ethical, high-quality, super-local, balanced and complete protein at a fraction of the cost of any other comparable protein source, on a bench in a corner.

No, I haven't tried this personally yet. (At least, not for human food. We've had a few goes at growing black soldier fly larvae for chicken food and fish food, but we're still very much in the learning stages.)

But if I had no space to raise other kinds of livestock and I couldn't afford to buy ethically raised meat, I wouldn't hesitate to put "learn how to farm insects for food" at the top of my list of priorities.

I don't believe that fake meat from a lab is the answer to any of our meat-related challenges. Nature placed insects near the base of all food chains with the same exquisite wisdom she applied to the rest of her Creation. I would much rather eat insects as designed by Nature than meat designed in a lab.

So. If that tickles your fancy, here are some resources to explore:

Insects are delicious and nutritious

Farming Edible Insects - hello zero footprint protein

12 Garden Insects You Can Eat

And if you're not keen right now, that's ok. File it away at the back of your mind for if you ever do need or want to explore it.

TAKE ACTION

Ok. That was lots of ideas. But ideas are utterly useless without action.

So don't close this tab until you've chosen one thing to take action on. The very first thing that pops into your mind as you mentally scan back through this list -- that's the one.

If you’re new to growing your own food:

• Choose an option and take a first step to get started. You could note in your notebook (from the first post in this series) what you need to do next to keep moving, but do that after you've taken action. 
• If you have to look something up, limit your research so you don't fall down the rabbit hole and never make it out! Just look up the basics so you can get started.
• Consider what basic supplies you’ll need and add them to your shopping list if you can't find them in your house.
  

If you’re not new to growing your own food:

• Chose one thing you’re growing but not making very good use of. Ask yourself, what would I need to do differently to bring this food from where-ever it grows, into my kitchen more regularly?
• Or, What one thing is there that I'm not growing yet but would like to?
• Or, What one thing I'm already growing would I like to grow more of, so I could use it more often?
• The best way to get better at growing your own food is to make it as easy and simple as possible to eat something--anything--directly from your garden on a daily basis.  “One Garden Meal Per Day” expands on that idea.
• The eBook  "One Small Serve" describes a selection of low-maintenance, nutritious perennial plants and ways to build a "one serve at a time" food growing habit that's small and simple enough to maintain -- including for someone who knows that gardening will never be the center-piece of their life.
  

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This is the next in a series about reducing your reliance on supermarkets and industrial food. In case you missed the others, they are:

3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better

Strategy #4 – to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket

Strategy #5 – What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?

There was a time when our family was completely reliant on the supermarket. We had no idea where our food was coming from and we were powerless to take care of our own basic health needs or to do anything about rising food and fuel prices. 

Today we eat in ways that are much healthier and more economical both for us and for the places and communities our food comes from. And if extreme weather were to cut off our family's access to town, we'd be able to go for many weeks (barring serious accidents) without needing the supermarket or the pharmacy.

A big reason for all of that (besides our efforts over the years to learn to grow lots of our own food and to use simple, natural remedies to take care of our health) is that we've learned to reject convenience foods and replace them with carefully selected and prepared whole foods, which is the topic of this post. 

What would be helpful?

Before we go on: this post is in the nature of an overview, with some hints and tips thrown in. You may find this is enough to prompt ideas or jog you into action to take more steps on your own journey. 

But if you find yourself wanting more detail, please comment at the bottom and tell me what would be helpful for you. In the coming months I'll be investing thought and time into creating more practical, step-by-step, "hand-holding" style resources and I'd love to hear what would be most helpful to you for where you're at right now. 

With that said, let's get started...

Why buy whole foods?

Heavily processed foods, obviously, give you heaps of convenience. You get to eat them right out of the packet or with very minimal preparation. But convenience foods also cut you off from nature, from the sources of your food, and give you:

• less nutrition,
• more additives,
• more packaging,
• higher cost per meal,
• less empowerment (convenience foods are habit forming in two ways: 1, their ingredients interfere with your body’s innate intelligence about what is good for it, and 2, you come to rely on them as a quick fix ),
• gradually declining health and energy levels, and
• the nagging awareness that you’re buying from giant conglomerates that are squeezing the life out of farming communities, and the biodiversity out of ecosystems, around the Earth.
  

In the long run you're paying for that cheap convenience with your health and well-being, not to mention what industrially produced and processed foods do to our ecosystems and communities. 

When you buy whole foods, you do have to prepare them yourself. There’s no getting around the fact that in order for you to eat nourishing food that doesn’t cost the Earth, some planning and organization is required on your part.

But that's really the only downside, and I've found that it's at least as much about planning and organizing as it is about spending more time in the kitchen.

And in my opinion, it’s worth it. When you do put in the effort to buy more whole foods and learn to use them, you’ll get:

• better nutrition (so much so that its impossible to state the difference in one small bullet point)
  
• gradual restoration of your body’s innate intelligence about what you need, vs what the food industry wants you to want
• a feeling of empowerment: as you learn to use whole foods you'll also be learning to be more in charge of your own eating habits, enjoyment, and health, and less reliant on anonymous giants who have no interest in your health
• a sense of satisfaction in knowing you’re taking better care of the Earth just by how you eat
• a sense of re-connection, perhaps even of home-coming, as you engage with your food closer to its source
  
• positive knock-on effects in other areas of your life as all these things begin to strengthen you in subtle ways

A whole food example

Here’s an example from my life of buying a whole food and using it in ways that help me feed my family well without spending my entire life in the kitchen.

I buy organic brown rice and cook 1 to 2 kg of it at a time. 

Whole grains are more nutritious than processed ones, but they can be problematic to digest and get the full nutritional benefit from unless we know how to prepare them properly. So I have a preparation and cooking process for brown rice that involves a few steps and some forethought and planning.

The process requires my presence in the kitchen, but not a huge amount of hands-on time; I can be doing other things while the rice is doing its thing. 

The result is cooked rice that’s highly digestible and nutritious, keeps well in the coldest part of the fridge, and can be used in different ways as a base or a side in a variety of meals.

I don't bother freezing it (in fact I'm not sure what freezing would do to its texture); in nearly 15 years of doing this I've never had my cooked rice go off before I could use it all up in my family of four. 

A few other ideas

Legumes

Legumes/pulses (such as dried beans or lentils) are relatively economical to buy.

(Unfortunately, pulses/legumes are among the crops routinely sprayed with glyphosate--Round Up--to desiccate them before harvest so it’s important to get them organic if you can manage it. The increased cost of organic pulses brings us closer to what real food really costs when farmers reject the industrial cheap food model and insist on something healthier. And on the upside, dried legumes do keep – so once you're comfortable using them you can consider buying organic in bulk for a better price. Best of all, if you live in parts of the world that grow them, buy your legumes directly from a farmer and cut out the industrial supply chain altogether.)

Like whole grains, it’s important to learn how to prepare legumes before cooking to increase their digestibility. Once you have the hang of it, legume preparation fits in with other kitchen routines and the pay-off in improved nutrition is well-worth it. Left-overs from bulk cook-ups of legumes can be refrigerated, frozen, and used in a myriad of ways in subsequent meals. Wisely prepared and combined with other whole foods, legumes can be a simple and nutritious whole-food staple in your kitchen.  

There’s even a recipe for chocolate brownies that uses cooked dry beans in place of flour. Search the internet for “recipe for black bean brownies” and you’ll find a plethora of options. (I credit Katie at KitchenStewardship.com for first introducing me to this idea, and she’s an excellent resource for all things whole food, real food, and healthy eating.)

Cooking in bulk for frozen meals

When you go to the effort of cooking any meal that can be frozen, cook much larger amounts and freeze some for easy, home cooked “convenience meals” on other days.

Cooking veggies in bulk

When you cook any kind of veggie, Its almost always worth doing double or triple, or as much as you can fit in whatever cooking vessel you're using.

The excess can go into bubble and squeak, frittata, be reheated under the grill and served topped with grilled cheese, or be quickly reheated in a fry pan and served with fried eggs on top or scrambled eggs mixed in.

Having already-cooked veggies at hand makes it easier to increase your veggie consumption, something most of us could do with, and it's hard to go past the all-around nutrition of a pan of fried garden greens and homegrown eggs.

(It’s really ok, even beneficial, to cook and reheat your veggies, including greens. Read more here about cooked vs raw.)

Teaming up with a friend

Team up with a friend, cook in bulk, and swap portions. You and your kids will appreciate the variety, and you’ll get ideas to expand your own repertoire.

Take action 

If you’re not already practiced at bypassing processed foods, here are some action steps for you to try... 

• Sit down with a cup of tea, your notebook, and Google (or preferably Ecosia.org rather than Google). 
• Choose just one type of whole food that appeals to you, to work with initially. If you need to, look up the basics for how to store and prepare that food. Scribble down 2 or 3 meals in which you could use that food as a main ingredient over the coming week, or whatever time frame makes sense for you. 
• Put that food item on your shopping list. Then prepare it in a basic way and in sufficient quantity for the 2 or 3 meals you listed. (Don’t buy it in large bulk quantities yet, and don't cook any one meal in bulk for freezing until you're confident your family will eat it happily - The last thing you want is a freezer full of meals your family won't eat.)
•  Pat yourself on the back. You’ve just prepared the foundation for several meals and taken a step away from reliance on convenience foods.

If you are already practiced at bypassing processed foods:

• Take stock of your meal planning as it relates to your supermarket habits: Are you already doing all you can to streamline your processes? Are you as efficient as you can be? Are there any areas where you could work smarter instead of harder?  What about nutrition, are there areas where a little more attention to detail might yeild a boost in nutrition?
  
• Pick an area (just one!) where you know you can do better, and note down what action you want to take.

You're not trying to be super-human

Remember, no matter where you are on this journey, you're not trying to be super-woman or super-man. The objective is just to live a life that feels as right to you as can be.

In the context of your current circumstances, and with the goal being health for your family and for the ecosystems and farming communities that feed you, what could feel a little more “right” for you? 

Start there.

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Arrowroot (Canna edulis)

This is Queensland arrowroot, photographed in mid August about a week into our Southern Hemisphere spring. You can see tired, yellowing foliage that's been hanging on all winter, old dead stumps where Alain has been cutting fodder for the chickens, old tubers for the pigs, and in the middle foreground, a new shoot just about to begin to unfurl its first green leaf. 

This clump needs to be lifted out, divided up and put to use as I described here.

The next pic, below, is a new row of arrowroot that Alain planted a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote this post.  

Chickweed (Stellaria media)

Chickweed is a salad staple in our garden whenever and where-ever it can find a cool, moist, protected spot. I don't know how to grow it on purpose; it's a generous volunteer whose presence reminds me that abundance is all around us, if we're looking. 

This time of year, when the weather is cool and has been consistently damp, chickweed is everywhere. In the images below, it's growing around the bases of our blue barrels and coming up in between the things in the barrels. As I see it beginning to volunteer, I often clear a space for it. It's a prolific seeder; once you have it, you have it forever

Chickweed needs regular harvesting to keep it from becoming stalky. Cut it with scissors, take it inside, and chop it into a salad or put it in a bag in the fridge where it will keep well for many days.

You can read more about chickweed here. 

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale)

I love dandelions. Most of us know them for their persistence in lawns and roadsides, their sunny yellow flowers  (from which you can make wine), and their fascinating seed heads.

Your grandparents know that dandelions are deeply nutritious, both the roots and the leaves. Eat the leaves and flowers in the spring, and the roots in the autumn.

Dandelion leaves have an amazing array of nutritional benefits. Even their bitter taste is beneficial, which is an idea that takes some chewing on in our sugar-addicted culture.  

You can make, very simply at home, a medicinal tincture from dandelion roots (sorry 'bout the ads in this video).

Did you know that the word "officinale" in the Latin name for dandelion refers to its "official" use as a simple, safe, and effective medicine for a wide array of ailments?

Here is a great read on wild greens; scroll down to find dandelion near the bottom. Finally, I mention dandelions in the section on wild plants in this post.

Pepinos (Solanum muricatum)

Pepinos are related to tomatoes and potatoes, so they're similar, only tougher and don't seem to get as many pests or diseases. They can sprawl on the ground or be supported by a low trellis or cage. Super easy to propagate from cuttings and tolerant of neglect, although they will fruit much better with plenty moisture and mulch/compost top ups. Read more, and see pics of ripe fruit, here.

Taro and other water plants

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is an important staple food that grows in moist to wet conditions throughout the humid tropics. You eat the large corm at the base of the biggest plant, the mother plant, leaving the surrounding small plants in the ground to grow big in their turn. You can also replant the top of the mother plant. Taro is starchy and filling and can be eaten in many ways... search online for recipes and you'll find they're endless. 

In the pic above, you see taro planted in a wet area where our rainwater tank has a persistent leak. This was only planted toward the end of last summer, so it hasn't had much hot sunny weather yet to help it get going. 

And this (above) is taro planted in a container submerged in water. Its not looking very happy in this spot because its been cold. I'm hoping/expecting it to perk up as the weather warms up. 

You can learn more about taro here. 

Also in the pic above, floating on the surface of the water you can see azolla, which we grow as fodder for our chickens. Learn more about azolla here.

Finally, to both sides of the taro tub you can also see kangkong, or water spinach (also looking very sad and wintery after the unusually cold winter we've just had, but it will soon perk up). That's kangkong runners you see trailing out across the water, with leaves smaller than the taro but much larger than the azolla.

Kangkong is related to sweet potato and looks similar. You can learn more about kangkong here, and this article has a short video about growing  it in water.  

Another post I've written about water-loving food plants is "7 Steps to a Frog Pond That Also Grows Food."

Taro safety note: There are many, many plants with similar "elephant ear" shaped leaves to taro. Some are edible and some are poisonous. There is a great deal of confusion on the internet about their names, and I would love to learn more, especially about how to identify them effectively as they all look similar to the untrained eye.

Please, when you grow plants that look anything like these for eating, do what we did and get your propagation material from someone who has been eating it themselves, and whom you trust to be providing you with the correct plant.

Also, all parts of the taro plant must be cooked to make them safe to eat. 

(There is one exception, with the common name of celery stem taro or tahitian spinach, which we have in our garden. We put the stem of this one in salads, uncooked, and have had no trouble with it. But if you try this, again: get your planting material from someone who is already eating it raw; don't find out the hard way that it was the wrong variety!)

Modular veggies

I'm finishing this post with a couple of pics from our "modular veggie garden," which has lots of things in it but especially any European veggies we grow, because its set up to allow for netting to protect from insects.  You can learn more about our modular veggie project, here.

The reason I call them "modular veggies" is because I love the idea of taking care of one or a few barrels at a time, in small chunks of effort, rather than having to maintain a large annual garden area. We tried that in this earlier, larger veggie growing project, and found that we couldn't sustain the care it needed. 

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment below

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