Growing Your Own Food Is A Revolutionary Act
Tags: Gardening, Plants, Garden, Zero Waste, Food

Growing Your Own Food Is A Revolutionary Act

My Iceberg Lettuce in all its beauty.

A few weeks ago I was attempting to prepare some special dish for lunch, and the recipe included spring onions. I had never heard of them, never tried them, and didn’t even know what they tasted like. But oh well, the recipe needed them, so on April 17th I decided to get my very own spring onions.

While cooking my meal, I noticed that every spring onion had a lot of roots. Wait. What if I planted them? What if I started a tiny garden on my windowsill? After all having my own garden had always been a dream of mine.

And so it began.

I promptly chopped off the white base of each spring onion (the one with the roots), planted it into a small vase, and just let it do its thing. To my surprise, after only a few hours, the plants were already growing. I was honestly shocked. By the end of the day they were almost 1cm longer. No joke.

A few online searches helped me figured out that it’s totally normal, and — most importantly — that it doesn’t work exclusively for spring onions, but you can actually regrow the great majority of vegetables from scraps!

My small garden

I am by no means an expert. I’m pretty good at taking care of succulents and bonsai trees, but I had never planted veggies before, so this is all still new to me and I have a lot to learn.

At this very moment I’m growing:

3 spring onions.

2 salads.

A carrot.

A tomato plant.

A leek.

They’re all growing on my 1.5m x 15cm windowsill, and only require a little bit of water every few days. Pretty mind-blowing.

Only take what you need

One of the first lessons that growing your own food teaches you is that you absolutely don’t have to take more than what you need.

As long as you keep them alive with some water (and, of course, sunlight), your plants will keep growing and thriving. They will be available for you pretty much 24/7, so there is just no need to cut off more than what you will actually use in your meals. If you do, you will only risk throwing away nourishing food that could have been used another day, and the plant will take a longer time to recover.

At first, it might not be easy. In fact, our current economic system teaches us the opposite: that we need to get, earn, take, exploit as much as possible. As quickly as possible. We want it all, and we want it now… Just look at the consequences this behaviour is having on our planet.

But there is a way out.

Connection with nature

Another benefit of having a mini-garden is the fact that it strengthens our connection with nature and its cycles.

After waking up, one of the first things I like to do is to check up on my plants. Watching them grow, little by little, is tremendously thrilling, and makes me think of how much we take for granted.

Nowadays most of us buy our food from supermarkets. We pick up the best-looking (prepackaged) fruits and veggies, go home, store them in the refrigerator, and then forget about them until we either 1. end up eating them or 2. wait too long to the point they have to be thrown away. Point is, even though we come into contact with our food at least 3 times a day, we are totally disconnected from it.

Who grew our food? Where did they grow it? Who picked it up? How did it reach the shop we found it in?

Now, let’s dig a little bit deeper.

How many times have you actually thought about where the food you eat comes from? How many times have you thought of the connection between us and plants, between plants and insects, between the soil those plants grew in and the microorganisms living in it? I never gave it too much thought before starting this project.

Growing your food as a revolutionary act

The society we live in is highly obsessed with concepts such as productivity and efficiency. Many of us easily know how to turn on a PC, how to use programs like Microsoft Word, how to invest money. And yet, virtually none of us have the basic skills to sustain ourselves by growing and/or gathering food from nature.

Is this what we call “progress”? What’s the point in sending rockets to Mars if we can’t even keep ourselves alive down here?

Reconnecting with our roots and learning how to live in harmony with nature once again, then, becomes a moral duty.

Resources to start your own garden