Grow Food Easily in a Square Foot Garden and Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Grow Food Easily in a Square Foot Garden and Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Still Square Foot Garden1Square Foot Gardening is a simple method of how to garden with less work and will grow a lot of food in a small space.  In this video, Mel Bartholomew shows us why and how to garden with this method.

The grocery stores are filled with produce which makes many people ask: why should we grow our own food? Well, think about how that lettuce got to the store.  It had to come in refrigerated trucks or airplanes, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to get to us.  Then we also use gas to get to and from the grocery store.  This is called the carbon footprint of food.  Compare that now to walking out your own front door and harvesting your lettuce right there.  It’s a huge savings in fossil fuels if we can grow our own food.

Another benefit to grow our own is better health and increased freshness.  When you buy lettuce at the store, think about who harvested that lettuce?  Did that person have a cold that day?  Did they sneeze on that food?  Then it goes into a truck, did that truck driver wash his hands?  Then it goes in to a store, maybe it’s not very fresh, it’s starting to decompose on the inside.   It’s not a pleasant thing to think about it, but we should!  Sometimes kids say they don’t like the taste of vegetables but perhaps it’s because they’re eating vegetables that are not crisp and fresh.

Also, when we rely on large agriculture businesses to provide us with food, not everything is harvested because it is not perfect.  Then it goes on the grocery shelves and not everything is sold.  Sometimes up to 50% of the produce grown is thrown away.  In our own garden, we don’t waste any of the produce.

In this video, Mel shows us how to mix his version of perfect soil made of peat moss, vermiculite and blended compost.  Mel says, “You mix your soil once and can grow food for a lifetime.”  You then add your soil to a garden box built above ground.  This means you can garden anywhere, even if you live in a condo or apartment.  You then plant the seeds according to the space they need – so you never have to thin out baby plants as they grow.  You can save those seeds for future use.  Watch and learn as Mel Bartholomew shows us how to grow food the Square Foot Gardening way.

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