Like many of you, the bite of winter has truly hit home. With every year that goes by, I realize that winter is less attractive due to the extreme cold and I am quite sure that I lived in a milder climate in my past lives. The ability to travel to warmer climes does help to circumvent Mother Nature's winter wrath, but there are also ways to help achieve this without ever leaving home.
Creating a welcome space to help us to "live the dream" by creating a life that is truly linked to all the love of gardening and horticulture 12 months of the year. Experiencing the wonder of a flower opening, a seed sprouting or dead twigs miraculously sprouting green leaves could be a regular occurrence in your life. Better yet, with the rising costs of literally everything you can also offset some of our grocery costs by growing a little bit at home during the winter months.
We can easily grow at least some of the produce we consume – even at -30 C outside. There is nothing like fresh herbs to cook with and building a salad with what you have grown. Nutritionists share that we should be adopting a more plant-based diet that is rich in fruits and vegetables and the Canada Food Guide has shifted towards recommending a high proportion of our diet to be made up of plant-based food. Plants offer us a host of health benefits, bringing fibre, vitamins and minerals. What they also offer us is suggestions that they also contain compounds that prevent a number of life-threatening diseases which cannot be substituted with dietary supplements. All this and I have not even mentioned the exquisite taste of what we grow ourselves.
As a horticulturist, I of course appreciate and even need to have that daily fix of growing things. Growing food to me is extremely important to my green thumb and my prowess as a chef. It all stemmed from the satisfaction I gleaned from being part of generations that value feeding the family with food grown with our own hands. Hippocrates proclaimed almost 2,500 years ago: "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."
My hope is that I can encourage you to make this winter the beginning of growing at least some of the food you consume. It is not necessary to purchase any fancy grow systems, that can range from a few hundred into the thousands of dollars. Many of these systems claim to be state of the art — plug in, go and grow — but often have complex hydroponic or other systems that can be difficult to manage. Growing plants for food does not need to be a complex chore.
If we wish to be successful, we simply need to provide what plants need to grow. Water, light, oxygen, nutrition and warmth are the simple essentials for success. If you are new to growing plants indoors, keep it as basic as possible. You will need to invest in some type of light that can easily be moved up and down over the plants you are growing. A simple fluorescent or LED shop light might be the answer to providing for your plants as they are both economical and simple to install. However, if you look online or visit your favourite garden centre or supply company, the sky’s the limit with what you invest.
Watch next week for more intel on simply growing some food indoors. Watch our facebook page, youtube channel and website for more tips and if you are interested, CBC Blue Sky show is going to focus on this subject with Horticulturist Patricia Hanbidge on Tuesday, December 6th. If you miss the show, tune in for the recording of the episode on
Hanbidge is the Lead Horticulturist with Orchid Horticulture. Find us at ; by email at [email protected]; on facebook @orchidhort and on instagram at #orchidhort.
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