Growing Food and Lawn Care
This post offers basic benefits and drawbacks of growing food and lawn care, with an emphasis on growing food, minor considerations for lawns, and maintaining them without toxic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Lawns
Lawns look beautiful when maintained. They feel great when walking on them barefoot. You can play, take naps, and have dates/picnics on them. Lawns make an excellent addition to your garden and land when you have children and/or pets, offering an open place for your kids and animals to play!
Lawns require time, money, mowing, weed-eating, edging, aeration, de-thatching, fertilizing, use of significant water through irrigation, and overall maintenance. If you have a lawn and want to maintain it organically, I suggest Dr. Earth's Lawn Fertilizer and exploring companies who specialize in organic lawn care to service your lawn. This is recommended when the reasons above are important to you, and you want to protect your children, pets, and soil.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Growing Food
Growing food offers you different benefits than your lawn because your garden will produce and give back to you in the long run. Lawns don't do this unless you are a dairy or meat farmer raising animals who live on grass. Even then you'd grow native grasses to graze your livestock on. A close alternative to lawns, are yards cultivated with native grasses and flowers.
Growing vegetables, herbs, and fruits creates a hands-on experience in the process - from seeds and starts - all the way to preparing, cooking, and eating what you've grown. This gives you a direct connection with your food that you do not get at the grocery store.
Having healthy and well maintained fruit, vegetables and herb gardens increases the value of your property.
Gardening, touching the earth, and being active outdoors is grounding and can provide health benefits.
You will encourage biodiversity in your garden, attracting bees, butterflies, and beneficial insects.
Having a garden brings beauty, life, and color to your garden and landscape.
When you value these benefits, the drawbacks of growing food are small. You will have to spend time, money, effort, and care to maintain the food you are growing, and you won't always get instant gratification. This is a long term investment because you will be getting back what you put in - reaping what you sow - when you come at the effort involved this way. And when challenges do arise - like the irrigation system having a blowout, an infestation of aphids, gophers, or a family of deer feasting on your crops - they are easier to work through and create solutions for because you know what your efforts are built on, and what you are cultivating.
I am here to serve you in these values and efforts!
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