5 Reasons To Grow Your Own Fruit And Vegetables

Having your own vegetable patch or fruit garden was once commonplace, but fell out of favour as the food industry become more commercial and supermarkets began to take over. In recent years however, more and more people have started explore growing their own produce again. Here we give 5 reasons why you might consider starting your own kitchen garden.

- Freshness

Fruit and vegetables taste better and are healthier if eaten as soon as possible after picking. Most fruit you buy from supermarkets and the like is picked well before it is properly ripe, to extend shelf life, and this usually has an impact on flavour. Growing your own lets you taste the freshest possible produce as it's meant to taste.

- Quality

Commercially grown crops are often selected for their high yields, uniform appearance and long shelf lives rather than for quality and taste. When you grow your own, you can concentrate on the quality rather than the economics.

- Price

Much supermarket fresh produce is hugely overpriced, despite their advertising claims. Growing your own from seed is about as inexpensive as you can get, and even growing from small plants you buy is likely to provide you better food at a lower cost. With many plants, you can use the seed from one growing season to provide plants for the next - a self sustaining cycle that will cost you only time and effort to keep going.

- Provenance

More and more people have concerns about how our food is produced, with chemical pesticides and GM food a particular worry. With your own vegetable patch, you know exactly where your food is from and how it was grown.

- Variety

There are literally thousands of different varieties of fruit and vegetables, but supermarkets tend to concentrate on only the most profitable and easy to sell. This means that our choice is often limited to a few select varieties of apple, for example, rather than the hundreds of traditional kinds that exist. Growing your own lets you pick the varieties you like the most, and experiment to find new ones you'll rarely see on sale.

There is of course a downside to all this - it takes time and effort. In these increasingly busy times, we might not think we have the time to spare, but starting small with a few herb plants on your windowsill, or even the odd tomato plant, will give you a taste of growing your own and might even be enough to hook you into it for life!

About the author: Andrea writes for the Recipedia Food and Drink Glossary which you can find at

Raw food a guide

It's a funny old world, things go in and out of fashion and it's said to be the doom of man that he forgets (I like that one!). One thing that fits into this pattern is the consumption of raw foodstuffs, back in the day it was ALL we could do!! Yet now it's seems to be viewed as a new and healthy trend. Chew on that for a while, there is really very little out there in the dietary world that we haven't already done, got bored of, forgotten about then had come back as the latest trendy thing to do.

Reading this may mean you are interested in raw food consumption, and good on you! Fresh food eaten raw can literally make your day! It's also one of the simplest of techniques to master; you need a few good tools and a little imagination.

The principal behind raw food consumption is simple: raw food is intact, all the fragile nutrients are present and none of it's "life force" is lessened by processing. It's bonkers when you ponder that most of our food takes days, weeks or even months to reach us from the moment it leaves the soil or is plucked from it's branch. Then the first thing we do is heat treat it!! Cooking as we know it undoubtedly lessens the nutrient potential of fruit and vegetables. As does heat treatments like pasteurizing, or freezing and excessive delay in food reaching our plates (food miles).

So what do we need to eat raw? Strictly nothing more than our teeth, but to spice things up and broaden what we can make a few benchmark tools are required! A Single auger juicer will allow you to juice, grind, mince, and make sauce, importantly you much choose a slow turning machine, as high speed juicers introduce heat and oxygen (two destroyers of nutrients). A powerful blender will add smoothies, milks and more to your menu. Think of a dehydrator as a low temperature oven than gives your fruit and vegetables a shelf life but without lessening the nutrient value too seriously, a dehydrator in your kitchen will allow you to make all sorts of snacks and goodies and make sure nothing goes to waste!

We think that live natural food creates lively natural people. Next time you're in the queue at a burger bar you too may feel, as we do, that we are on set of a zombie movie! Find a juice bar or whole food cafe and compare the buzz!!

In conclusion then we are cellular beings, what I mean by that is nothing hokey it simply means that we are make up of billions of cells, these cells are constantly replicating, dying off, fighting disease and doing thousands of other functions on our behalf. Cells are like miniature factories, then need raw material, and they produce waste materials, we think the best raw materials you can give yourself is a fresh raw "living" diet!