Top 3 Reasons I Grow Food in My Front Yard

What's up everyone. Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Today I'm kind of just hanging out in the garden. It's a beautiful Saturday. We're finally getting some sun in June. And what I thought I would do is give you my three reasons why I love to and encourage people to grow their own food. It's going to be my personal opinions, things that work for me and everyone comes to gardening with a different sort of flavor. So join me. I'm kind of just going to hang out, do a little off the cuff freeform video while I change out the soil in this bed here. I fill it up. Maybe I'll do a little pruning. Maybe we'll even go out to the front yard. So let's go ahead and get into it. Reason number one, general sense of wellbeing. I'm definitely not a doctor. I'm not going to make any medical claims, but both on a mental and physical perspective and actually kind of in two ways physically speaking, I love to garden. So the first thing that I love about it is it forces me to be outside. Now, you know, if you're an indoor gardener, that certainly could not be the case. But for me, I do both. And so I get to come outside and do stuff like this where I'm topping off this bed. Now that does a couple of things. More access to vitamin D, sunlight, proven improver of our moods. We actually, in fact, somewhat need a little bit of sunlight in order to have a pretty healthy mental state. I think people get things like seasonal affective disorder if they're in colder climates with less sun, et cetera. Number two, physical activity. I mean, I'm not getting the craziest workout of all time doing this. However, I'm still beating the person on Netflix or myself in the past playing video games or on Netflix. Third and most obviously on the physical side is in my opinion, improved nutrition. So improved nutrition. Again, am I a registered dietitian? No. However, provided you know how to grow healthy, nutritious food using minimal inputs, even organic pesticides guys, you can use organic pesticides and herbicides and it can still be certified organic. I don't even do that in my garden. So I know exactly what went into my food. I know exactly how it was grown. And there's a lot of research out there that points to the freshness of the food having some impact on the nutritive density of that food. So what's really interesting for me is, you know, I just cropped out, in fact, I'll show you a bunch of chard. So here's a huge thing of chard that I just cropped out. This is going into a meal within the next 20 to 40 minutes, I would say. So is it going to get any fresher than that? I can't go to the grocery store and buy, you know, organic fresh chard that is any fresher than that. Nothing's beating that. Can't even go to a farmer's market. A lot of the times they're cutting those early in the morning. So if we're talking a raw overall freshness perspective, it is really hard to beat growing your own food. And then finally the mental side of it, which of course is just my own personal experience. I'm someone who really likes figuring out puzzles and games and things like that. So it's very easy for me to slip into modes where I'm just kind of playing games or maybe just doing something that might not be the best use of my time. What I've found is treating gardening as a game has really helped me get out there, grow a lot. And in fact, now this is what I do full time. But you know, if you're finding that you're sort of resorting to things like Netflix or I don't know, video games or just non-productive behaviors, certainly do what you want with your life. But I've found that if I redirect that time to coming out in the garden and trying to solve a couple of problems, well then seems like my life ends up being better. Before we get to tip number two, let's hydrate this. So all I did here guys was just add a little bit of organic potting mix on top cause there's some residual sinking as the growing season goes on. We're just going to water it from the top and then pretty soon I'm going to flip that switch again. And this is going to pump into the reservoir right here, which is 75 gallons of water just to top that off. Reason number two is just general self-sufficiency. I mean, I'm someone who's always wanted to know how things worked, why they worked the way that they did. I was interested in science at an early age. By the way, I'm saving pea seeds here so you can watch me do that as we chat. But I wanted to know how things worked at an early age. And I was very fascinated by, um, you know, why things were the way that they were and how maybe if things were to go bad in life, how would you, how would you survive? You know, I grew up reading those books, Hatchet, uh, if you guys are familiar, my side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain or the far side of the mountain, all these books about a kid going out into the wilderness, trying to survive. And it's just fascinating to me how fragile the ecosystem that we live in really is. You know, I think there's some quote and I don't know who said it said the world's three days, nine meals away from global revolt or something like that. You know, if we all were to go hungry for that long, we would have a pretty rough society on our hands. So it's always been fascinating to me. And I honestly find that when you plug into a skill like gardening and this month, if you're watching this at the time of release, I'm living entirely off of what I can grow fish forage or barter for. So I'm getting a very deep understanding of how much time and effort it really takes to grow your own food or to source your own food. And there's a respect level there that comes from that, where I am now much more conscious of things like food waste. You know, not that I was very wasteful in the past, but I am, I now have an acute understanding of how painful it would be to go out, catch fish like I've been doing and then just let them go bad in the fridge. That would be heartbreaking because it would take me, it's taken me hours to catch a single fish this month and certainly anything that we grow takes a minimum of a month, if not much longer. I mean, most of the potatoes that I harvested this year took three months and that's a relatively short potato to be honest with you. So there's a lot of patience and a lot of care involved in food production, whether you're doing it yourself or you're paying at the grocery store for someone else to do it for you or at the farmer's market. And so self-sufficiency is certainly one for me. I'm not someone who's going to say if you don't know how to do a hundred percent of your survival skills, you're screwed. I mean, I think that we're in a world where fortunately most of us do not have to worry about that just because we don't have to worry about it doesn't mean we can't become interested in it. And that certainly is a big, big draw for me. And there we have it. Just another skill to learn through the art of gardening and saving your own seed. Got a mixture of different pea seeds ready to go for a fall crop. My third reason why I grow my own food is actually the people. I get to meet so many awesome people just partially because of where I live. I mean, look, I'm walking under my Arbor. You can see there's cars all over the place and this is my front yard garden and this is where I grow most of my produce. And so people will walk by all the time. There's probably 10, 20 maybe even 30 neighbors that I know who have kept up with the progress of the garden. And so, you know, one thing I think we're missing in today's society is a sense of actual community. You know, back in our tribal times, that is how we lived. You know, Dunbar's number is 140. We could only manage that many relationships at once. And that was sort of just the way that we evolved. I feel that we have lost that a little bit these days and we're sort of isolated. We can find ourselves on the computer. We can find ourselves in a bed, in a car, at work, in a car, in bed. And then you just repeat that cycle and you don't really have the opportunity to meet too many new people. So as I sit here working in my front yard, boom, that's my little way of meeting people. And it's not just my neighbors, you know, as I go from garden to garden and I do all my garden tours that you guys have probably seen me do, I get to meet farmers, I get to meet botanists, I get to meet horticulturalists, I get to meet houseplant experts. I mean just so many different people that I get to cross paths with. And I find that gardening can connect you to pretty much any type of person, you know, even on the political spectrum. You have people that are all the way on the left that really love to grow plants and people that are all the way on the right that might be more of like the homesteader prepper type of person that still really loves to grow plants. And I find I can connect with all of them in that regard, which I really find super valuable just because I'm interested in people, not necessarily, you know, all the intricacies of what they think about the country, right? I'm more interested in that human being. And so that is what I found has been just such a benefit to gardening. You know, when I started Epic Gardening full time in 2016 I had no idea that it would become what it has become. You know, I didn't even know that I would have a space this big. This is the biggest space I've ever grown in besides other friends' yards, you know. But it's just crazy what it's been able to do for me. And I'm not saying that everyone's going to go out and start Epic Gardening, but I am saying that, you know, start a garden and start somewhere. Start small and then, you know, we got someone, someone yelling. That's part of the perks of living in the urban neighborhood. Start somewhere, start small and you can definitely experience all the benefits that I've noticed myself, if not even more. And I would actually be very curious what you guys think as the reasons that you garden. I know some people out there are doing it for their mental health. I have a friend who's in Canada who has a autoimmune disease who's doing it for his physical body. So that's it for today's video guys. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have a reason that you garden that was really important to you that I didn't mention, let me know in the comments because everyone comes to it with their own perspective and I would love to know yours. So that's it. I will see you on the next one. More tutorials coming soon. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.