Urban gardens have life-changing benefits… Once you start your gardening journey, you’ll soon realise that growing your own food while living in a big city is an eye-opening experience.
Space doesn’t have to be an issue! All you need is a window, balcony, courtyard, terrace or rooftop that gets six or more hours of sunshine every day.
Today GreenCity is going to share some of the benefits of this fun and healthy lifestyle.
Knowing where your food comes from
One thing’s for sure, you’ll finally know where your food comes from and how it was grown.
You’ll soon realise that growing your own organic food is a beautiful, rewarding adventure. By tending to your plants, you’ll also develop a relationship with them, resulting in some lovely healthy fruits, vegetables, roots or leaves.
Increasing your respect for fruit and veg
Growing your own food helps you learn about different fruit and vegetables. You’ll see how certain varieties require specific processes, sometimes long or unexpectedly fast, and when you have food on your plate, you’ll view it differently, with much more awareness and respect.
Healthier cooking
Without even realising it, you’ll start eating more healthily and organically. Your harvest will encourage you to cook more, and you’ll be trying new recipes and even improvising in the kitchen in no time!
Seasonal eating
Once you start growing your own vegetables, you’ll have a better connection with the seasons, so you’ll be eating more seasonally, which means more variety too.
Before you set up your own urban vegetable garden, you probably still bought tomatoes in winter. Well, if you grow your own, you’ll find you won’t eat them again until well into the spring. You’ll replace them with turnips, different varieties of spinach, lamb’s lettuce, winter radishes or chard. There are plenty of delicious and nutritious seasonal varieties for you to choose from!
Rediscovering the true taste
Growing your own produce will also allow you to rediscover the true taste of fruit and veg. There are so many nuances when it comes to taste, textures and flavours. You’ll soon say goodbye to shop-bought bright red tomatoes with absolutely no flavour.
Expanding your knowledge of flowers
For healthy crops, you need to attract pollinators. The relationship with them is a real win-win: they feed on your flowers and in return pollinate them, which results in fruit and veg. Feed them and they’ll feed you!
Reducing organic waste by composting
Gardening will allow you to discover and marvel at the perfectly balanced food cycle created by nature. By making your own compost at home, you can reduce organic waste, because nothing is really a waste when it comes to compost, and the compost liquid you get is an excellent fertiliser you can use to feed your soil and plants.
Relieving stress
Urban gardening is also a great way to relieve the stress of city life: you’ll regain a sense of calm and it’ll give you a chance to stop, observe and think. Gardening is an excellent way to meditate through this healthy connection with nature.
Enjoying quality over quantity
You may not become self-sufficient, and this isn’t the ultimate goal of having an urban garden anyway. Think quality over quantity. The GreenCity lifestyle will definitely have an impact on what you buy, and will change your relationship with food, not to mention your entire perception of our perfectly balanced ecosystem.
If you can think of any further benefits to add to this list, leave us a comment below. We’re sure you have plenty of wisdom on the subject!
