Home-grown Food

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Home-grown Fruits and Vegetables Taste The Best!

With all the things going on lately, I didn’t have a chance to write about my garden and tell you what I’ve been doing in my attempts to grow my own food this year. Home-grown food is always better than the food you can buy at the store, so I’m excited every year to get started!

I quickly1 learned you can’t be successful every year you are trying to grow some plants. I’ve had quite a few failures, some of which were my fault, while others were just a result of diseases going around.

After last year, which was a complete failure, I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d bother trying to grow anything this year. I basically lost all my tomato plants to a fungal disease. The strawberry plants didn’t produce that many healthy looking strawberries either. Although it wasn’t a huge amount of effort, it was a bit disheartening to get a 100% failure.

The reason for it was probably because I had the plants too close together. So, a few weeks ago we were out shopping at a local store and I had noticed they were selling some strawberry plants for a cheap price. Since they were quite cheap, I decided to pick a few up and fill up one of the garden boxes with just strawberries!

My nephews and nieces love strawberries and usually eat them every year from the garden, so we really need a lot of plants. We now have something like 30 strawberry plants!

Some of which are from last year and so this year they should produce a lot more fruit. About 12 plants were bought from the store this year and will likely produce less (second-year plants produce more than 1st and 3rd), but they’ll be good until 2015.

 

As you can see I have lots of strawberry plants in this box. I started pretty late this year so I thought I’d just use it for strawberries this year and grow more of a variety of foods next year as I’ll be more prepared.

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Since there wasn’t much room for these strawberry plants, I decided to put some of them on the fence. The downside is that they won’t spread. But on the plus side, they are less likely to be eaten by the snails!

 

These tomato plants are doing much better in the pots. It looks as if the flowers are just about to come out.  In the small box, I have three tomato plants growing, but they don’t seem to be too healthy. But my father sprayed them with a fungicide recently and since then they’ve been looking a little healthier. I’m hoping they will start to thrive soon.4

As you can see, there is a blueberry plant on the left and tomato plant on the right.

This is the first time I’ve attempted to grow blueberries!  If you’re going to try and grow them yourself,  it’s important they are grown in an acidic compost.

Home-grown food saves money and tastes better!

The best thing about growing your own food is that the fruits and vegetables taste so much better! I’ve mentioned this in the past when I successfully grew my own food in 2009. I had grown tomatoes, carrots, broccoli, spinach, and strawberries.

There’s really no comparison between home-grown fruits and vegetables and store-bought food. Plus you also save a huge amount of money! I have saved literally hundreds of pounds from growing my food. It’s definitely worth giving it a go if you have the time.

I’ve also found it to be very therapeutic and relaxing.

Article reviewed and updated: February 2019.

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