Homegrown Food

After listening to our guest speaker, Gary Kleppel, on monday, talk about "saving ourselves before saving the world" I realized that much of my family already does some of the things that people should do to make themselves self sustainable. While we wouldn't be able to survive on just the food we grow by ourselves, my family does grow some of our own food in our gardens. We grow quite a variety of vegetables in our garden and are fortunate enough to have apples, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries all naturally growing on our land. We usually take most of the food we grow to my grandparents house where we have a large dinner on certain occasions with people from the rest of my family. For this reason I cant wait for the upcoming Thanksgiving break.

Supporting locally grown food was a major topic of discussion and I believe it's a good idea, especially helping the local farmers. My great uncle, who still gets up every morning to work on his dairy farm at the age of 72, is one of my main reasons for supporting this. I also worked on a fruit farm close to my hometown during high school. the fruit farm I worked on then took all of the fruit that I would help pick to the farmers market down the road, and in my hometown this market was pretty successful. People would crowd it on the weekends when it was open and try to carry as much fruit as they could back to their cars.

I admit, I really don't like gardening, and at times it seemed pointless to spend time playing in the dirt when you could easily go to the store and buy food, but I think the feeling of accomplishment that is accompanied with the food itself makes it worth the effort, and it also seems to have an effect on bringing family and community closer together.