A healthy garden

Grow your own health food store by planting vegetables in the garden.

Vegetables freshly harvested from the garden very likely have more nutrients than store bought—for the simple reason that they are fresh. Freshly harvested vegetables will retain more vitamins and minerals than can be lost when stored for a period of time.

Take for example the tomato, one of the most popular gardengrown vegetables. A common grumbling of red tomatoes purchased from the grocers’ shelves is that they taste and look like plastic. There is nothing that can compare to a red ripe tomato freshly harvested off the plant. Fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes have higher ascorbic acid (vitamin C) content than do most storebought tomatoes.

Gardeners growing and harvesting their own produce know exactly how they were grown. This is a huge advantage over even “organically-produced” crops because even crops that are certified organic will have add organic amendments during the growth process and may have had biological control agents applied to reduce pests or diseases. Home gardeners know precisely how their crops were grown.

What about storage? Corn that comes from a personal corn patch may be only a hour away from the table. But corn that comes from Florida or even closer, from South Texas, will have been shipped. Fresh corn on the cob is a delicacy when eaten right out of the garden.

Do fresh vegetables from the garden taste better? It might be the “power of suggestion” or that they were grown in your own backyard, but many times, yes, they do taste better because they have retained higher levels of vitamins and minerals,

Much of the vitamin content of vegetables is lost within 24 hours of harvest. Crops harvested from a garden can go from the plant right onto the table with minimum time delay.

Some crops with high vitamin C content that can be grown in a healthy garden are of course tomato, but also red and green peppers, green beans, parsley, Romaine lettuce, watermelon.

Gardening is good to maintain a healthy body because we get outside and moving those joints, replenishing the important vitamin D for our bones. But gardening is also healthy because our vegetables are fresher, we know how they were produced. Our minds are healthier because of the pleasure we gain in harvesting our own crops.

Ellen Peffley Harp, a retired professor of horticulture at Texas Tech University, writes about gardening for several Texas newspapers.