For awhile now I’ve been very concerned about the state of our food. I’ve been concerned about how it is grown and processed. I have been worried about if I’m consuming pesticides or maybe I’m eating wax that was put on a fruit or vegetable to make it more presentable to the public. I don’t know about you but I prefer my food as close to the way God intended it as possible.
Organic food has always been more expensive, but in the last few years all food have really went up in price. It’s estimated that food has went up 10 percent! These last couple years we now more than ever need to sit down and think about what we can do to save money on food and think about how we can provide food to our families if it vanishes from the store shelves again. I’m not saying go to the store and buy out all the beans and rice. I’m saying maybe we should start looking into saving seeds. Maybe we should start our own gardens.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when just beginning a garden, but I’m here to tell you it is as simple as finding some dirt and planting a seed. These roma tomato’s in the picture above reseeded themselves and popped up in spring. I did nothing this year to get all these tomatoes and comparing this plant to my others I started this year, this plant by far has the biggest fruit! I’ve never seen roma tomato’s that big! Especially organic ones! I bet if you buried a tomato in your back yard in the fall you’ll get tomato’s next spring. Pretty incredible! The best thing about these tomatoes is that I paid nothing for this plant. I’m getting an armful of roma tomato’s for free. To care for these plants all I did was pull up the weeds and grass around the tomato plant and put a tomato cage over it. I prune it with pruners and that’s it!
Are you thinking “well I don’t have a yard because I live in an apartment.” Don’t worry, many plants do well in containers. Here are some squash plants I planted in a container because I’ve been having an unusually hard time with squash bugs this year. How nice would it look having a little garden on your apartments balcony! I remember when I lived in an apartment and saw someone with a back porch full of vegetable plants. It was an inspiration to me. I thought well if they can so can I!
These peas and green beans came from my back yard. I spent $3.00 at Walmart for each pack of organic seeds and it provided me with many meals just like this! I remember when I didn’t have my pea plant and spent more than that pack of 100 seeds on a little bag of fresh peas at the grocery store. Green beans are just as expensive. Just think of you planted every seed you had in that pack. You would have more peas and green beans than you would know what to do with! You would have to take up canning! Then you would have fresh veggies for over the winter.
Here is a bowl of chopped peppers I got from four plants. Those four plants are still producing and probably have enough on them now to fill up this bowl again.
Three peppers at the store where I live costs about $3.50. Three peppers wouldn’t even come close to filling up this bowl! Now I have bags of frozen peppers I can just get out and toss into my meals. The best part is that I know exactly where these peppers came from and exactly how they were grown. It really puts my mind at ease.
Something else that saves a lot of money is saving seeds. I bought some delicious heirloom cherry tomatoes. It was a beautiful mix of different colors and two toned tomatoes. This afternoon I decided to make a quick sourdough pizza for myself and cut up what cherry tomatoes I had left. I set this strainer next to me and squeezed out the seeds into it. After I got my pizza in the oven I rinsed off the seeds with high pressure.
This is what I got out of four little tomatoes. I would say I got around 150 seeds from lunch. I’m going to let these seeds thoroughly dry and save them in a baggie for next spring. You can do this with every mature fruit you use.
You can also get seeds from your own garden by letting your fruit fully mature. When I save bean seeds I let them dry out on the bush, when I save cucumber seeds I let one or two get big and yellow cut it open and repeat the steps above. Seeds such as carrots you let a couple of your carrots grow until it flowers and dries out then collect your seeds from the dried flower. Saving seeds is so simple and easy. It’s definitely worth your time to save your seeds. You will always have food security.
I hope this article has persuaded you to start your own garden and save your own seeds. You won’t believe how much money you could save on just a few plants. It really is worth every bit of work that goes into having a garden. It is such a blessing that God created every plant to have a seed for us.
11 Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good. 13 There was evening and there was morning, a third day. (Genesis 1:11-13, NASB)
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