Why Organic Gardening Is Really Worth the Effort

Once you have tasted something freshly picked from your own organic garden lesser vegetables will seem tasteless and weak.

Your food may not look perfect but that will be irrelevant once you taste the difference between this food and that grown using commercial criteria.

My own food gardening journey started after I decided it was up to me to change my immune system after a third concurrent breast cancer and believe me if I can garden anyone can.


After my last cancer treatment I required regular colonoscopies but after the last one the specialist merely said keep doing what you are doing. The state of my gut had changed so greatly.

I do think changing to growing and eating my own organic food played a large part in these changes in my body.

You can buy great organic food as well but let's be honest most of us cannot afford to do this all the time but we can put a pot on the balcony, a planter box in the yard or as I did buy an old house and begin the journey of creating a vegetable garden from resistant clay soil.

I went to lectures with local permaculturalists and also joined the local organic growers association and gradually built up my knowledge on how to add strength and good health to my soil.

I had watched my sisters in New Zealand always adding every food scrap to their gardens and feeding their children on strong, gutsy vegetables from small garden plots, so I knew soil could be nutured and feed families in simple, inexpensive ways.

I remembered my father bringing boot loads of kelp from New Zealand beaches and digging it into the soil where he planted our yearly crop of potatoes.

Now seaweed emulsion can be brought from good gardening stores and it really adds natural strength to your food.

It is a journey learning how to grow food especially through the heat, drought and cyclones that are part of our new climate but creating rich and life giving soil not only heals your body but it is part of creating a healthier planet.