A few weekends ago Tyson and I went to the local nursery and spent a couple of hours admiring their latest selection of vegetables.  Our original plan to venture on a fact-finding mission quickly turned into locating a shopping cart and loading it with the nicest specimens of soon-to-be food-bearing plants we could find.

Hey, impulse shopping has landed me in much worse situations.  Online shopping comes to mind.

This will be my first summer growing vegetables, but the idea of growing my own food is becoming more and more appealing as it becomes apparent that buying produce in the grocery store is not only costly, but not environmentally friendly at all.  I find great satisfaction in knowing that I can grow some of my own food.  All it takes is a little effort and some motivation.

There are some pretty harsh chemicals being used on fruits and veggies grown south of the border (where we get most of them), such as dieldrin, a very toxic, carcinogenic insecticide that was banned 25 years ago, but persists in some agricultural soils.  In Mexico, toxic pesticides that are illegal for use on food are sprayed legally next door to the fields growing our fruits and veggies.  You can guess what happens then.

So as you can imagine, I’m pretty excited about my little patio garden.  Observing my plants grow is satisfying and neat to watch.  I’ll be placing my vegetables in large pots on my sun-drenched deck in a few days.  Because my deck has an overhang, I have to remember to water them constantly.

I’m extremely lucky to have grown up with parents who love to garden, and I have spent many childhood summers taking for granted the product of their backyard labour.  Fresh veggies and fruits grown mere metres from the house adorned our dinner table for months out of the year, and I’m lucky that my folks are on-hand for gardening advice now!

Vegetable plants are cheap, and keeping them in good health requires some decent soil (also cheap), sunlight and regular watering.

I’m off to water my veggies, I hope next weekend it will be nice enough to plant them outside!  And maybe I’ll be harvesting my very own tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, beans and green onions soon.