I bought a sandwich and as I sat down to eat it, the first thing I did was remove the tomatoes. My husband looked at me baffled and said “I thought you liked tomatoes love?”

The thing is I do love tomatoes, I love to grow them and I love to eat them. However I do not love the mass-produced commercial ones that you find in supermarkets, like the ones in my sandwich that taste nothing like tomatoes. They look like tomatoes, but they are fake and a huge disappointment to the palette. They taste like mushy cold water, which a real tomato is NOT!

Real Tomatoes should be sweet and mouth-watering and always leaving you wanting more and they should NOT be cold.

We take too many things for granted these days and we also settle for mediocre versions too just out of convenience, which is pretty sad. We eat on average 3 times a day, so why should that experience be an average or underwhelming one?

This is why growing your own grub comes up trumps and why so many choose to do it. If you’ve been pondering with the idea of growing your own here are some of the many benefits:

• Organic – It’s not rocket science that pesticide free organic food is better for you and the environment, after all who actively wants to eat chemicals especially ones you actually don’t know what effects they have on your health and wellbeing?  So knowing you have nice clean produce on your plate saves on the health worries.
• Keeps you fit – who needs the gym when with an effective weeding and cultivating routine an hours work can burn you around 238 calories.
• Mental Health – It’s well documented these days about the positive effect any type of gardening has on your mental health. Studies have shown it to lift the mood and help improve self-esteem. It’s also been known to reduce levels of depression and anxiety.
• Variety – The spice of life, why be restricted to the same variety of carrot or other vegetable when there are actually so many to choose from, there are colours, textures, shapes and cool heritage varieties too. Experiment and find some new favourites and impress your friends and family with them. The supermarkets grow the same boring varieties because they are disease resistant, can be grown for high yields and are tolerant to glyphosate.
• Fresher – The sad truth is that once a fruit or vegetable is picked it starts to decay and lose its nutritional content, so the sooner you get to your plate the better it is. And most GYO enthusiasts will tell you sometimes homegrown doesn’t even make it to the plate – well why use the middle man when you can pop it straight in your gob!! 😉
• Ecological – When you grow your own there are no food miles in terms of transit from farm to supermarket to home, your food goes straight from plot to plate, so you reduce your carbon footprint dramatically. It also means you’re helping improve our soil structure which has been abused with chemical pollution for decades now and is badly suffering for it.
• Community – When you grow your own on an allotment or kitchen garden you become part of this amazing friendly community of fellow enthusiasts whether online or on your plot. These enthusiasts are always willing to share surplus, seeds and advice and will tell you some fantastic tales of their successes and sometimes failures, it really is great to be a part of.
• Taste – If any of the above hasn’t got you running to get your name down for an allotment then this should. If you’ve never tasted a freshly picked fruit or vegetable then you are seriously missing out. It’s an explosion of flavour with every bite that really gives your unimpressed palette a wake up call. I had never tasted a real carrot until I begun growing them. Call it food snobbery, but I want flavour and freshness. I don’t want to just consume a meal just going through the motions. I want my senses to explore and enjoy these culinary delights with every mouthful – Don’t you?

Growing your own doesn’t need to be difficult you can grow a bounty or just some small selected bits like salad or peas in pots on a balcony or in window boxes if you’re short on space. It’s incredibly easy, you just need some earth, seeds and water and in a few weeks you have a harvest. It can also be educational for you and your family seeing the actual process of seed to plate happen and let’s face it it’s well cool. You are self-sufficient and not relying on the supermarkets to make the decisions for you – I’m pretty stubborn like that – I call the shots!

So there you have it, I hope your tempted to eat the best too and join the GYO revolution!

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Thanks for reading,

Bo x