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March 2004

Healthy Gardening

Mar 06 2004

Healthy Gardening

Written by Patrick

Saturday, 06 March 2004

The Sacramento Bee has a new article on the health benefits of gardening.

The health benefits are, of course, double. You get the benefit of excercise. Tending your garden, pruning, weeding, watering, all of these are an excellent low-impact excercise.

On top of that, if you grow fruits and veggies, you get the added benefit of eating healthy. Not only do you get to control the amount of pesticides used in your food, garden-fresh fruits and veggies have a much higher concentration of vitamins and minerals than typical store-bought.

Tending your own garden of nutritious vegetables is far superior to buying them, according to Richard Merrill, program director for the Department of Environmental Horticulture at Cabrillo College in Aptos.

The article goes on to say that tending certain types of vegetables, such as potatoes, eggplant and cucumbers worthless, because they don't carry the same nutritional value as, say, broccoli. The problemn with is that it ignores the excercise you're getting from tending the garden. Besides, who wants to eat just broccoli? Potatoes are an important part of MY relationship with food (whether mashed, fried, baked, or what have you), and I get in trouble if I don't put cucumbers on my wife's sandwiches. My rule is, grow what you like!

Eating your fruits and veggies often is a matter of taste. If they don't taste good, most people won't eat them.

"Many of the things that taste the best aren't so nutritious," admits Schwarcz. "People think nutritious, but they actually eat taste. No matter what you tell some people, they aren't going to eat it."

Luckily, fresh-grown fruits and veggies are suprisingly tasty. Vegetables tend to lose their flavor the longer their stored, and fruits usually have to be picked before fully ripe for transportation, so you can't beat home grown for taste.

Of course, as we head into spring, now is the perfect time to start planning your summer vegetable garden. We've already received our first shipment of tomatoes, and the peppers, corn, squash, pumpkins, watermelon, and of course cucumber & eggplant!

Tomato varieties available right now!