> Next: Choosing and Planting Vegetables
Home Grown is Best
Everyone knows that vegetables are packed full of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that we need to stay healthy and vigorous. When you grow your own vegetables in a home garden, you pick the very best leafy greens, fruit, berries, and root vegetables at their peak of flavor.
We’ll help you choose vegetables you love to eat and are good for you. In this section, we’ll give you a quick review of how to choose from more than 70 vegetable species and families commonly grown in home gardens. Look for information you need among these topics:
-
- Why home-grown vegetables are superior to those from markets and stores.
- Why your vegetables taste better, smell better, and have better flavor.
- How vegetables being ripe is different than looking ripe
- What makes that home-grown difference.
- How to choose the vegetables that will grow best in your garden.
For many the appeal of homegrown vegetables is the luscious rush of flavors that fills our mouths—love at first bite—and the joy of spending time in nature.
It’s as though our ancestral memories have come alive, stirring from deep within. “Ahh,” we say to ourselves, “so that’s how corn is supposed to taste!”
The Gardener’s Reward
Where’s the Flavor?
The simple truth is, homegrown vegetables bear little resemblance to truck farm or grocery store produce. While we welcome the commercial growers’ ability to put fresh berries and grapes on store shelves in midwinter, something always is missing when it comes to their product’s flavor and texture.
Part of the reason stems from the practical needs of the growers. They rear vegetable plants that produce harvestable, shippable produce. Too often, the result is flavorless, woody, hard fruit and limp greens—and sometimes the illusion of wholesome freshness is just that.
Those red-ripe tomatoes found in your local supermarket may have been picked hard and green, trucked many miles, and treated en route with ethylene gas to turn them red prior to your purchase.
The appearance of such produce might fool the inexperienced, but the test they’re sure to fail rests in our taste buds. Commercially grown tomatoes—selected genetically for their ability to endure mechanical picking without bruising or spoilage—lack essential sugars and fully developed texture of vine-ripened fruit.
The Home-Grown Difference
Homegrown vegetables, by comparison, are nature-packed with flavor to spare and hold a complete complement of nutrients. Grown with your loving care, they have time to fully develop. They’re loaded with wholesome sugars and other carbohydrates, and have a bonus of healthy vitamins.
Vegetables from home gardens travel plot to table in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks, sparing them the inevitable conversion of their sugars into tasteless starches. Organic and pure, they deliver on every promise made to your sight, scent, and touch—both at harvest and on your table.