7 May 2025 · 5 min
Nicole Johnsey Burke shows how to get vitamins from garden vegetables instead of supplements. Pair bell peppers with lentils to boost iron absorption, ferment vegetables for B12, and grow kale for vitamin K. Sunlight while gardening gives you vitamin D.
Chapters
Foreign. I'm not exaggerating when I say that you can replace pretty much all those vitamin supplements that you're taking by growing the right vegetables in your garden. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on all those pills, you could just simply step out into your garden and pick the food that your body is craving. Today I'm going to show you the key vitamins that pretty much everyone is buying in supplement form and show you how you can replace those with garden vegetables Inst and I'll help you see that food beats a pill pretty much every single time. The most popular vitamin pretty much everyone's taking is vitamin C. But did you know that kale, parsley and bell pepper all give you more vitamin C than you can get from one orange? In fact, if you chop up a red bell pepper and eat one cup of that chopped pepper, you're going to get three times the amount of vitamin C that you need in a day. Imagine skipping that pill and just downing a red bell pepper instead. Vitamin A is another popular one. It's great for skin, for immunity, for eyesight. But instead of taking a pill, you could instead grow carrots, sweet potatoes and a ton of leafy greens. All these plants give your body beta carotene, which it turns into vitamin A. And did you know that cooked carrots actually convert to more vitamin A than raw ones do? So eat up. Everyone's taking B vitamins cuz they want more energy and they want to be smarter. But you can just eat some spinach, some beets and some peas. All of those grow in the cooler parts of the year so you can grow a ton. Now let's talk about iron. Most people think that you got to eat a lot of red meat to get your iron. But did you know that lentils and pumpkin seeds are packed with iron? And also my favorite plant in the garden, Swiss chard has loads of iron in it. Swiss chard is a supermodel in the garden. It's so beautiful. Bright colors and it grows from early spring all the way till late fall. You can have Swiss chard pretty much every single day. And bonus tip. If you combine your vitamin C filled plants, your parsley, your bell pepper and your kale with your iron filled plants, then your body can absorb it better. Swiss chard is such a cool plant. It doesn't just give you iron, it also gives you magnesium, which we're all into taking right now because were all stressed and not sleeping well. Magnesium is known to relax you, calm you, and also help you make it through the night. But you can get magnesium from a ton of plants in the garden, Swiss chard being one of them. Spinach is another. Avocados and pumpkin seeds and also black beans. So be sure to stick some black bean seeds in your garden this summer. Vitamin K is so good to give you nice strong bones, but you do not have to take a pill. You can grow kale or broccoli, Brussels sprouts and spinach. All of those. Love the cool weather. You can get a ton of harvest just from one garden. Now, vitamin B12 is one we all know we should be getting more of, but it's pretty hard to get from plants. Mostly this is known as coming as an animal product. But there is two ways that you could get this in a plant friendly way. One is by taking nutritional yeast, which is technically not a plant, but you could sprinkle it on your salad. The other way is to ferment plants that you grow in the garden and creating a kimchi with cabbages or greens that you're growing in your garden, turning those into kimchi. That's where you can get your B12 naturally. Vitamin D. We all know we need some more. I don't know if your doctor is like mine, but she told me I needed to take a vitamin D supplement. Well, we need to take their prescription notepads away from them and tell them instead to write, you need a garden. Here's the thing. Vitamin D, you can't get it from a plant, you can't eat it from the garden. But vitamin D comes from the sun. And you definitely will get sun in your body, on your body, when you're outside taking care of all these plants. So there you go. You don't need a pill, you just need a garden. Just call me Dr. Burke from now on. There are so many other vitamins that our bodies need that the plants will give us. We've got zinc that garlic provides. We've got calcium that our bodies can get from collard greens and mustard greens. And we've even got purslane, this little weed that most of us just throw away. It actually provides omega 3s for our body. What? It's crazy. The garden gives us so much and I would love to show you how to start your garden so you can stop buying all those pills and put your money on plants instead. I have a guide right below this video if you want to check it out. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere you love getting your podcast delivered on Apple, podcasts on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.