Why Garden?

Good health starts in the soil. 

Have you ever thought about it? Whether you are a vegetarian or an omnivore, all nutrition originates from the soil. Plants soak up nutrients from the soil and sun, and animals eat those plants to get their energy and nutrition. With this in mind, it is obviously very important to make sure your food is coming from good soil. Healthy soil.

However, if you buy all your food from the supermarket - how do you know if it came from good soil? According to the USDA food database, 1 cup of raw spinach contains 141 mcg of Vitamin A (or roughly 56% of your daily requirements). However, what we often don't think about is the fact that this is just an estimate, or average. If you go to the grocery store and buy spinach for your salad, it may actually have much more or much less than that amount of vitamin A. 

The amount of vitamin A that spinach has depends upon its growing conditions. Did the soil that it grew in have adequate vitamin A for the spinach to absorb? Or was the soil replete of nutrients and full of arsenic? Did the spinach have adequate sunlight to allow it to grow and absorb the appropriate nutrients? Was it allowed to ripen adequately? All these things can affect the nutrition of that cup of spinach that you just bought. 

What better way to ensure that your food has adequate nutrition and growing conditions than to grow it yourself? Gardening allows you to choose high quality seeds and plant them in soil that you have personally tested for quality. Being so involved in your food's growing process allows you control over how nutritious it is. You don't have to worry about pesticides being used, or anything that you wouldn't want to put into your body.

One of the most interesting things that I found when researching gardening is relating to B12. Vitamin B12 is one of the biggest nutrients that vegetarians have to worry about getting enough of. However, B12 is very common in the soil. In days gone by when most people grew their own food in their garden, vitamin B12 was not a problem, because not all the dirt would get washed off of the produce. People consumed adequate B12 from the soil that remained on their food. In today's society, we buy all our produce from the supermarket - where it has traveled thousands of miles from its original growing place and has been washed and sanitized numerous times. The produce that we are eating has been so sanitized that no dirt remains on it, and therefore no vitamin B12. Vegetarians that grow their own food would have no trouble getting enough B12.

Gardening is also a great way to get exercise which can help you lose weight and prevent diseases such as osteoporosis, heart disease, diabetes and even arthritis. The increased sun exposure can help you get adequate levels of vitamin D as well. As you can see, there are many reasons why you should try your hand at gardening.