Okay, so we're not all farmers.
We don't all want to get up at 0 dark hundred to milk Bossie the cow or feed the chickens.
Few of us have one of those cool John Deere green machine tractors with a bazillion things to hook to the power take off. Never mind that most of us don't even have a "back 40" to plow and plant and use the aforementioned tractor on.
As a matter of fact, probably none of us could even afford the "economy" version!
So, no one could expect us to plant anything that would help feed the family, right?
You know I'm going to say "wrong"!
Back to the basics:
Surely there is a small area of "dirt" where you could plant a few things. Even if it's just as an exercise to see if you might enjoy gardening - just on a small scale of course. Nothing scary here, folks!
So what is almost fool proof yet provides clean, healthy additions to your family's diet?
Radishes & lettuce - easy to grow even in a pot!
Green beans - just a short raised bed made from scrap lumber - nothing very labor intensive here. And this short bed will produce an amazing amount of beans. And they are so not like the canned ones!
Peas - easy peesy! Plant them as early as you can work the ground and stand back! You don't need a fancy fence: you can stick broken off branches in the ground and the plants will cling to them. And we certainly have enough broken branches after this spring!
Lettuce - tuck it in the end of the row of beans, put it around the radishes - or make it a home of it's own!
All of the above are items easy to start from seed. If you are unsure of your ability to leap into the seed to table routine, there are lots of plants that come all ready to just sit out on the deck/lawn/whatever and all you'd have to do is keep them watered!
Now, surely something in the above list tickles your fancy - or at least your gardening instincts? We all fall into the trap of "run to the store and throw money at it" when we think of food. It can be as easy as walking out your door and picking it out of the garden. Knowing where it came from and how it was raised (not to mention that it is pesticide free) is worth far more than the money involved.
I keep coming back to the fact that today's world is an uncertain one - nothing is as stable as it used to be. Not the governments, not the atmosphere and surely not our lives. Putting a seed in the ground and raising even a small portion of your food can give you a feeling of control in a world where so many of us have no control over much of anything!
Go for it - there really is no excuse actually!
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