Should you bother with vegetable gardening?

Hey ya’ll, I’m Jess from Roots & Refuge Farm

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There was a time that all I wanted in the world was a little farm where I could raise my family and grow our food. Now, that is exactly what exists outside my door. In watching it unfold, a new dream was formed in my heart – to share this beautiful life with others and teach them the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Welcome to our journey, friend. I am so glad you’re here.

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Hey guys welcome to R and refuge Farm my name is Jess if you are new here I am so glad that you’re here and if you’re not new here I’m so glad that you’re back today I want to make a case for gardening I’ve been gardening for the

Better part of my adult life it is a huge passion for me and I would say in the top three of things that has enriched my life and changed it for the better so of course when you experience something amazing you want to share about it with people and that is

Ultimately a big part of why I have this YouTube channel and why I share this because I want other people to experience the Deep sense of joy and satisfaction that I have experienced in gardening now this isn’t the first time I’ve made a case for gardening but I

Know that right now all over our hemisphere people are in the throws of winter they’re pulling out their seed cataloges they’re considering and they’re about to start seeing products pop up on the shelves of the box stores that are all plant related and people are thinking hm maybe I should grow a

Garden this year and I just wanted to make a video to tell you yes yes you should now in the summer I might take you through my garden and it might be a very convincing tool but in the winter I can’t say that it really has a whole lot

Going for it to show you exactly what you have to look forward to now I could bring you into my lovely High tunnel and show you all of this lush green here in the midst of the gray winter and this might be enough to convince you to want

To garden and I could definitely show you clips from the summer garden of the mass amount of harvest that we brought in because I mean who doesn’t love a good haul video it’s so encouraging to see what is potentially possible however I don’t actually think the Harvest is

The best reason to garden and I encourage people whenever they decide to start gardening don’t say I’m going to grow a garden this year don’t say I’m going to grow my own food this year say I’m going to become a gardener this year because whenever you put your focus on

Growing as a gardener you’re not going to fail um even if your Harvest doesn’t come in the way that you hope the truth is in gardening there are always going to be failures I mean I’ve literally grown thousands of pounds of food in my gardening history and I still completely

Failed I grew like three cucumbers this year there are too many variables outside of your control for the Harvest to be the only reason why you garden now I think that if you shoot for becoming a gardener you will have no shortage of harvest there are going to be moments

That the abundance of it is literally a burden it’s hard work there’s really no instant gratification and you are going to have hit moments that you want to quit I know that really doesn’t sound like the best argument in a case for gardening however that’s the worst of it

And the worst of it is so massively outweighed by the benefit and I actually really think that if you set your mind that you are growing a gardener instead of trying to grow a harvest that even the failures will have value so whenever you wrap your head around the fact that

Maybe you may Harvest more lessons than Peppers your first year of gardening you’ll stick it out to the second year where you may be completely overwhelmed by peppers a lot of people have success in their early parts of gardening but I would say that it takes maybe 2 or 3 years to

Really have your head around it whenever I talk to people whove been gardening for 3 years the amount of confidence they have in the fact that this stuff wants to grow the amount of reassurance that they are able to find that there’s always next year people in their third

Year just seem to be very grounded as gardeners and they’re way more comfortable going after the garden without just the Harvest in mind I mean the Harvest is also very icing take a look at this sweet little baby cabbage doesn’t that make you want to plant a

Seed into tunnel number two take a look at those cute little brussel sprouts so my first official argument for gardening is for health but not necessarily just in the way that you think sure eating vegetables can be very healthy for your body but also hard work is really good

For your body you know I’m talking about the failures and the fact that it may kick your butt sometimes to the point that you might want to quit but you’re going to become stronger you’re going to become more capable AP and you’re going to have this sense of accomplishment and

Pride that honestly in our world of instant gratification we don’t always get the opportunity to experience I am a person that has dealt with a lot of anxiety and nervousness and fear in my life at one point I would even say that it was pretty crippling I had a hard

Time going into public spaces without having noise blockers in my ears I had such a hard time just functioning in a day-to-day way getting into the garden has brought such a sense of grounding and peace to me for me the greatest reassurance is taking part in this

Process that just works seeds want to grow plants want to grow they want to produce they’re made to do that and just kind of taking my part in the orchestration of this beautiful creation has brought me such a sense of peace and security on a mental level and on top of

That my body is way way stronger than it was before I ever gardened I’m way more capable I do deal with some pretty crippling health issues and have throughout my life and I cannot imagine where I would be at almost 40 had I not taken this route had I gone a more

Mainstream sedentary life that did not involve nourishing food and hard work I I would probably be way way more hindered than I am by the health issues that I deal with and I I put the emphasis on health first because we all live in a society that is really rough

On us mentally and physically the way that we do things with food with screen with social media it’s just wearing it’s hard to navigate and I think a lot of people think I want to get more healthy and so they start looking at dieting and gym regimens and while those things

Aren’t inherently bad a lot of times the health you are looking for is actually on a much deeper level and while gardening is not a magic cure I do think it provides an opportunity for us to really use our minds and our bodies in a

Way that they were intended to be used I would love to see people be able to reach the sense of peace and health that I have found in the garden along with the holistic approach to well-being that gardening really provides there’s also this really deep sense of Pride I really can’t tell you

How many times I’ve come and I’ve pulled a bit of food out of the ground and been like I grew this I’ll be standing in my kitchen cooking something and just amazed I grew this one of my favorite things every single year it never grows old you know

We come into January we we shop for seeds we make a plan in February March April we’re starting seeds We Begin sewing things we’re moving plants out into the garden by about June or July the garden’s really rocking and rolling the plants are huge and I always take

The time to go and I lay down in the garden rose just surrounded by all these plants and I just realized that not 6 months before this whole thing was just a dream 5 months before it was a handful of seeds and with just a little bit of

Int attention and partnership for me it turns into this massive thing that sustains my family throughout the year that’s incredible to me and again I’m afraid that we don’t really have a lot of opportunity for that kind of accomplishment we live in such an instant gratification Society a fast

Food world where you go through a drive-thru you turn on the microwave you want something you click a button and it’s at your doorstep in 2 days and well there’s definitely convenience in that I promise you there is something extremely valuable about something that you have

To work for and then you have to wait for and the garden will definitely force you into that my next two points go hand in hand and they both kind of have to be discussed together first I want to talk to you about thriving and then I want to

Talk to you about surviving so I started my YouTube channel in 2015 initially and then I really started posting regularly in 2018 sharing garden tours and all the processes of what we were doing here on our farm and at that time there was definitely a a very mixed

Demographic I had a lot of people who were hobby gardeners definitely some people in like the prepper crowd and homesteading crowd looking for sustainability some permaculturist though really at that time I wasn’t doing any sort of permaculture practices so I didn’t really have a lot of people

Like that but then Co happened and when Co happened a lot of people got really afraid because they saw empty grocery store shelves for the very first time and they also had a lot of time on their hands because they were stuck at home with nothing to do and it was Springtime

So there was this massive massive wave this influx into to gardening which I celebrated and I still do but it really begged the question are we doing this for survival or are we doing this to thrive because a lot of people came in looking for a way to survive they became

Aware of our broken food system I want to get to the topic about survival and I want to talk really frankly about that but first I want to encourage you in something I grow a garden first and foremost so that I can Thrive not so that I can survive it’s kind of like

What I was talking about focusing on becoming a gardener and knowing that the Harvest is going to to fall within that goal if you if you go after being a gardener you’ll get plenty of food in the meantime whereas if you go after just getting the food if you fail you

May quit trying to become a gardener and I feel like thriving and surviving kind of works like that so first I really want to talk to you about thriving because ultimately that’s why I’m growing food look at this kale isn’t it beautiful it’s called peacock kale it’s actually often used in uh Landscaping

Because it’s so lovely in ornate with the purple ribbing and these really beautiful purple inner leaves but it’s also fully edible and you can grow it just like any other kale cut it up and use it in soups roast it for kale chips crush it with some avocado and olive oil

And lemon juice to make a really lovely salad you can’t go buy peacock kale at the grocery store in fact in most grocery stores you can’t buy most of the things that you can grow in a garden when I first started gardening I started growing just like the basic plants you

Could buy at the store and started plants like yellow squash and green zucchini and red tomatoes and just your regular old kale and I got really discouraged because I was working so hard to grow this food and then I would go to the store and I would see the very

Same things that I was toiling over in my garden for like 78 cents a pound at the grocery store and it was super discouraging and then I found my first heirloom Seed Catalog and I realized that the world was my oyster when it came to Growing beautiful things I like

To say grow something lovely I I really think that Gardens though we can view them as a utilitarian thing we can view them simply as a way to feed our family and make our bodies healthy and all of that and that’s good viewing them for sustainability may be enough for you but

I had to overcome being a Suburban raised Millennial that had never really done really hard physical labor in my life I had to overcome some very sedentary habits a lot of anxiety and I needed something more to entice me to get in the garden and work my tail off

And so growing growing something lovely for me made it something sustainable it actually made it a valid way for me to feed my family because I knew that if I did not work hard for what I was growing that I would never get to experience I

Couldn’t just go buy it at the store for 79 cents a pound and that’s really when I learned the trick that I want to put my efforts towards thriving in life I want to eat food that you can’t commonly eat I want to experience a lifestyle that you don’t just experience by going

The path of least resistance and that again I’m tying it back to the sense of Pride and accomplishment that we don’t readily get the opportunity to experience in an instantly gratifying world I want delayed gratification I want to grow something lovely I want to

Be able to go out and sit in my garden and be surrounded by this beautiful organic ecosystem and eat food that I know has never been touched by chemicals and so like I am a growing Gardener not just after a harvest but but after an overall purpose in my life I am also

After thriving and I would encourage you to set that as your big case for gardening do it because you want to thrive oh check this out we just dug up this big horseradish route and now we got to get a shuffle cuz look how big it

Is this is going to be so much horse radish we’re going to move it out of these beds that’ll probably grow here forever that’s exciting that’s food and medicine all right now we have to have the conversation about survival surviving the victory garden the fact that food is freedom I don’t always have

This conversation not because I think that it is an inferior Pursuit I think food security for your family may be one of the greatest Pursuits that you can put your life towards it’s huge it’s incredible it’s not a common part of our culture and our society um just because

Most of us have grown up in the world of grocery stores and the idea of really needing to physically work for food security is someone what foreign to us even though 100 years ago it really wasn’t the reason I don’t always talk about it is because when you start

Talking about food security it begs the question why would you need it and when people start asking that question a lot of times it induces a lot of fear and I definitely think fear is an inferior motivator I always want to focus on inspiration joy peace thriving fulfillment because those things will

Actually motivate you to be way more secure than fear ever could with that being said truths are truths right now it’s a sunny day as you see by the Light that’s shining on my face and I could go out on a sunny day and I could say it’s not sunny I could

Say it’s dark and even if my eyes were squinting and even if I was breaking a sweat uh I wouldn’t today because it’s a cold sunny day let’s say it’s summertime if I were out on a sunny summer day and I had a tank top on and some short and I

Was insisting that it was dark I could go through that day to a certain point and maybe even believe what I was insisting on but at some point my skin would start to burn because even if you insist that it’s dark if you stand in the sunshine you could get a sunburn

Because the truth is it’s a sunny day our food system is really broken the average American has 3 days of food in their house most people are living in such a way that if the grocery store supply chain somehow fell through they would be in a world of trouble and

Beyond that most people don’t know how to garden and this is why when I talk about survival and preparedness I actually don’t like that route is the greatest case for gardening because I’ve seen in a lot of preparedness groups and survival groups a lot of people are planting their bugout bags and they’re

Buying their emergency seed vaults but they’ve never grown a garden and a big thing is is if you actually want to be in a position to be self-sufficient and have food freedom and food security you’re going to need to know what to do with those seeds so that’s why I think that it’s

Important that we talk about that now I’m not talking about like societal collapse though I kind of like reading World War II books and I kind of like reading post dystopian novels and all of these different things like I I kind of like imagining well what would I do in a

Situation like that um as long as it’s not making me fearful if I ever were to be getting into place of fear I would not want to do that there are also a lot of other reasons why it’s important to have some skills and have more than 3

Days worth of food in your house for instance job loss unforeseen circumstances inflation things like Co where Supply chains are messed up storms just since I started Living a more prepared life I have seen so many instances through social media of people dealing with twoe power outages after a

Hurricane and literally not having food to feed their kids right now if people dealing with really quickly Rising rent costs and not having a budget that they can stretch at the grocery store to buy the things that they need and I think that we have discounted the need for

Food security because we’ve lumped everything in as if talking about security and survival was all about societal collapse when in actuality it’s just wisdom to be able to grow your own food and as soon as I start talking about the need for food security the need for food Freedom the need to take

The bull by the horns and say I’m not going to depend on everybody else to make sure that my family’s fed I’m going to do something about it there are people who go but I live in an apartment but I’m retired but I’m this but I’m

That I can’t I can’t I can’t okay granted I know that that’s true I’ve been in positions in my life that I could do very very little towards this I still gain the skills finding the skills and even if you’re just growing a couple pots on a patio even if you’re just

Doing a 4×4 Garden this is why I don’t like fear as a motivator because fear will tell you your your 4×4 Garden will do nothing nothing for you but inspiration motivation and wisdom will tell you hey you are learning skills that if there were ever a need you would

Have them and maybe you are in a place where you really can’t do much of anything you need people who can to do because if everybody who could grow a garden and grow some food did we wouldn’t be in the precarious situation that we’re in and if you do any study of

History at all you know that food equals freedom I went into the grocery store yesterday and and I saw a display of kale I took a picture of it because each little bunch of kale I don’t know five leaves was something like 297 and I’ve got a whole bed of kale

Growing all of a sudden I felt like I’m kale rich and when I first started gardening Kale did not cost $2.97 you could easily buy a bunch of kale for something like7 so there’s this meme that goes around every year about the $287 tomato or something like that

Basically it’s a joke about how much of an investment it takes to get into gardening and how little it often times yields especially in the beginning and I think that if you were to look at your early years of gardening try to quantify the value of gardening based on your

Failures or the things that were not wildly successful sure you could discount it the thing is though is that you don’t stay there and the value of the food that you’re able to grow in your home it really cannot be compared to that which is being sold for 79 cents

A pound at the grocery store even 2.97 a bundle at the grocery store because even with Organic labeling we really don’t know what’s going on in that food and there are a lot of things that happen in the food industry that are really not for our health over the last 70 to 80

Years Humanity has seen an influx of using chemical pesticides chemical fertilizers completely over farming our soils and not caring for the health of our soils the focus has 100% been on the Harvest and the bottom dollar and with that being the case we the consumers are eating food that is essentially a

Science experiment and further advancements are being made where labeling is not clear about bioengineered ingredients it’s becoming more and more vague foods are being bio-engineered to be able to be sprayed with gobs of poisons and still grow soil is being massively depleted meaning that

A lot of the food that we do buy really doesn’t have the nutritional value that it could if it were grown in healthy soil and all while this is going on cancer rates and diseases are going through the roof and if you speak up about it people want to argue with you

About the validity of genetically modifying things and how this is all just conspiracy and to that I would say just go out in public and look around humanity is getting sicker day by day and getting more dependent on a very very broken food system the value of

What you can grow at home and guarantee that you know what’s in it the soil that you can create to make more nutritious and nourishing food the peace of mind that things that you’re feeding your baby are not sprayed with some unknown chemical that could be damaging their

Gut and hurting their body all of that is worth it now I’m not trying to make a case for a $287 tomato I’ve never grown one of those in fact when I look over the last decade and a half of gardening for me I would say that the food that I grow is

Incomparable to anything that I could buy at the grocery store and I get it for a fraction of the price and that’s with building fancy beautiful extensive Gardens when I look at a jar of spaghetti sauce that’s $8 because it’s non GMO and doesn’t have a bunch of corn

Syrup added to it I know that I can make a better product at home for a heck of a lot less than $8 but the peace of mind that I absolutely know what is in our food is priceless the peace of mind that comes with the freedom that is the skill

To grow food and the established soil and the spaces to do it is priceless and while I really don’t like harping on about the problem because I I don’t think that It ultimately leads to a solution I also don’t want to stand out in the blaring sun with people insisting

That it’s dark watching them get a sunburn and acting like that’s okay if you have felt even a little bit that you should start growing a garden even if it’s small even if it’s in a pot or in containers on a patio in a neighborhood

If you just want to till up a plot if you have felt that inlining and that gut feeling that maybe that’s something that you want to do just do it the number of people here on my platform that have come to me and said oh I just really

Feel like this is something I’m supposed to do I never had an interest in it and then all of a sudden I just have this desire to maybe we should stop trying to argue ourselves out of the desires of our heart and we should just do them

What do you think your your life is going to get worse because you grew a garden it’s not and while I definitely do not like to give fear any value as a motivator I will tell you that don’t experience it nearly as much with the established Security in place that I

Know how to grow food and then I don’t have to buy $3 benches of kale and a dollar jars of spaghetti sauce so that is my honest and real case for gardening it’s the reason why I do it and it’s the reason why I think that if it’s

Something that somebody has interest in they should definitely put the effort into doing it I’d love to know what your case for gardening is how it has changed your life and for those of you who have gardened before any words of encouragement that you may have for a

New gardener someone on the fence deciding whether they want to take the plunge into the soil I’d love for you to share those in the comments down below I will be as always sharing my gardening experience this year um teaching you guys how to lessons we’re going to start

Seed shopping soon uh seeds starting turning this space into something Lush and beautiful bringing in the Harvest showing you guys what to do with it I do have a lot of resources I’ve been making content here for consistently the last 6 years about gardening and homesteading and growing food I’ve written a couple

Of books about it I’ll put some links in the description down below if you’re looking for what’s next please do subscribe and join me here on this journey thank you for hanging out with me today I bless you until next time