Buying fruit and vegetables is different from grasping these same earth products from your own garden and from your own trees.
The market is important, there is no doubt about this .. but have the opportunity to wake up in the morning and eat fresh figs directly picked from their own tree, or pick some small leaves of salad from each plant forming a nice dish of raw vegetables for lunch, it’s simply amazing.
As I described on my instagram profile, today I started planting new salads in my garden: from lettuce to chicory and other varieties.
PESTICIDES AND CHEMICAL FERTILIZERS
Did you know that most of the fruits and vegetables bought at the supermarket contain pesticides and chemical fertilizers?
These same chemicals are connected with many diseases, including diabetes, precocious puberty, obesity and cancer. This is what emerges from a complaint made by the PAN Europe (Pesticide action network), a network of non-governmental organizations that promotes sustainable and natural alternatives to pesticide use.
If you were not yet aware of it, it is good that you know it now. In this way you can consciously choose whether to continue to buy these products at the market or to evaluate an alternative.
Where I was raised, we used to say
“prevention is better than cure”!
One of the sustainable alternatives, for those who do not want to get their hands dirty with the land, is to turn to farmers who use organic farming methods, a set of practices developed by researchers, scientists and farmers all over the world, to restore a balance and a healthy conviviality between living beings, natural resources and the environment.
To learn more about organic farming I recommend this book.
PRACTICAL ADVICE ON THE CHOICE OF THE BEST VEGETABLE PRODUCTS
If instead you are not very interested in following these precautions, you can consider these simple but important tips:
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In choosing vegetables or fruit, favor less contaminated foods. You can recognize them firstly with an exterior appearance. For example, if a peach is excessively beautiful and without defects, i.e. it does not present any spots or obvious marks on the skin, it is certainly irradiated with chemical agents.
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Carefully wash the fruit and vegetables with water and bicarbonate or water and vinegar. For example, when you pour the salad into a container with water to wash it, add half a tablespoon of baking soda and mix. Then let it take effect for at least 10 minutes, after which you can rinse and serve.
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Peel the food before consumption (this phase can be omitted if we are dealing with food coming from your garden or from organic agriculture). Apart from systemic pesticides that have the ability to penetrate into the fruit pulp, most of the chemicals remain concentrated on the peel.
YOUR PRIVATE VEGETABLE GARDEN
If instead you have the idea to develop a vegetable garden in your home, if you have enough space or a garden to take advantage of, it is useless to say that it is the ideal choice… even if it is more expensive in terms of time and of work.
All you have to do is go to a store that sells small seasonal seedlings, get some fertile soil, a shovel and start planting.
At the beginning it may seem pesky and tiring as a job, but sooner or later you can see that it will give you great satisfaction: to see a plant that grows from a few centimeters up to a meter or two in height, simply with a little water every day and some attention in pruning, it leaves really speechless.
THE POWER OF A SINGLE DATTERINO TOMATO
Years ago, I remember that I often used this example: a single datterino tomato contains about 40 seeds. Everyone of them can generate a plant that in turn can give life to 40 tomatoes.
Each of these tomatoes in turn contains another 40 seeds capable of generating other plants … and so on.
Is not it incredible?
What is really important and in my opinion makes the choice obvious, is the quality of fruit and vegetables that is produced in your garden. The reason is simple: neither you nor I need to produce in large quantities and at a frenetic pace. So we leave the growing time of a plant or tree to be natural.
In this way we also avoid the intake of hormones that are super used in most crops and in fact are also very harmful to our health.
