If you’re a chronic illness warrior, you already know you should be eating lots of fruits and vegetables. But you’ve also heard about all the pesticides, hormones, and other gross-sounding stuff being added to our food, and that probably makes you leery. Understandable. You can control what you and your family eat, though. Grow your own, and do it organically!

It sounds hard, doesn’t it? I will admit that the first year is the hardest, since if you’re going to make beds you’ll have to do the work to prepare it. After that, though, all you really need to do is mix in some new, rich soil each year. Here’s why you should do it:

1. You can control exactly what you feed yourself and your family.
2. There’s a huge variety of seeds and plants available both online and in local gardening stores. The one I just ordered from and love is SeedsNow. There are others, of course, but finding purely organic seeds isn’t as easy as stopping into your local home improvement store.
3. It’s way cheaper. We had enough tomatoes last year that we gave some away and canned eight big Mason jars full that have since become delicious sauce.
4. At any time during the growing season, you can wander outside, pull off a few veggies, and have a snack. Also, it’s a pretty cool to snip herbs straight from the plants and throw them directly into your pot.
5. Even if you don’t have a lot of room, you can still garden. Tons of veggies grow well in containers. Even someone with a tiny apartment can put a couple of small pots on a windowsill for fresh herbs.  There are tons of fun and different ways to grow food even in a very small space. My Pinterest board, Vegetable Gardening, has several. While you’re there, check out the other boards. Tons of good stuff!

I wish this was my garden…courtesy of Dollar Store Photo

As a bonus of sorts, here’s a list called the Dirty Dozen. They’re the fruits and vegetables that have the most pesticides and other bad things. If you’re going to spend money on stuff from the store, try to get these organic if possible. It’s expensive, I know, but if nothing else, maybe concentrate on the top six of the Dirty Dozen.

The Dirty Dozen

Here’s the list of The Dirty Dozen for 2015, the most updated list available. There’s also a Clean Fifteen in the same area.

Do you garden? What do you grow? Any tips on organic gardening? Tell me in the comments!

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