Why Kitchen Gardens Are The New Victory Gardens

Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're all craving. My name's Nicole Johnsey Burke, and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden. Each week here on the Grow youw Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.

The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. This is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes. It was in gardens, local fields and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, and the backyard. This is a quote from one of my favorite leaders in the local food movement, Joel Saletan. Joel Salatin lives right outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, where if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know I was first introduced to the idea of a kitchen garden way back in 2006. Today we are going to talk about the fact that kitchen gardens are now the new Victory Garden. Today I'm going to explore with you the history of our food, how over the last century, it moved from the garden into the supermarket. And today I want to talk to you about the history of the Victory Garden and how today, in this important time, as we face a global pandemic and lots of challenging times ahead, the kitchen garden can become the Victory Garden, and food once again can be near kitchens, tables, and bedsides. I know you're going to love this episode and it'll inspire you to start your own kitchen garden or bring it to the next level. So let's make kitchen gardens the new Victory Gardens. I will see you inside this episode. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. I am Nicole Burke, the author of the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival, and It's coming out May 5th, 2020. This week it premiered as the number one Herb Gardening. Wait. Number one new release in the Herb Gardening category on Amazon. And that's all thanks to you guys. So if you haven't pre ordered yet, or if you have, thank you so much, please send an email to helloardenary.com with your receipt and we will enroll you in our super mini gardening course called before youe Begin. So this episode is actually brought to you by my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, because that's exactly what we're going to be talking about in this episode. First, I want to outline for you a little bit of the history of our food supply. I promise you, on the Grow youw Self podcast to talk about the surprising stories behind the food we eat. And a lot of that is talking about the source. If you go way back, way, way back to the very first episode here on the podcast, I talked about three things you can do that can change everything. And I have to say that episode has never been more relevant than it is right now. But today I want to tell you even more surprising news about how our food came to come to us the way that it does today, and how we can make a difference in our food supply right now, even in the middle of a serious global pandemic. So if you are listening to this in real time, almost all of us around the country and even around the world are simply staying home. We're just home all the time. And we're doing it to. What's the word? Level. Level. The curve. Flatten the curve. That's right, sorry. Flatten the curve. The people that are out are the heroes, the ones who are working in healthcare and our food supply and getting our essentials and necessities to us. And we are so, so thankful. I know my team with Rooted Garden is still working or consider essential service because we're providing food supply for people, which is pretty amazing. So hats off to my team and to all those who are part of all these essential businesses. We need to keep going. But for the most of us and for most of the American public, we are just home. And we've never been home this much before. So this is a hard time. But one of the positive side effects that's happening is people are waking up to the wonderful opportunity to grow a little bit of their food at home. In fact, last week the New York Times printed an article literally all about growing food at home. The title of the article is Food Supply Anxiety Brings Back Victory Gardens, which sparked my thought and even the title of the podcast to be that Kitchen Gardens are actually the new Victory Garden. Because even in their own article they said they weren't sure they wanted to use the word victory garden. So we're going to solve that for them today and call it a kitchen garden instead. So, anyway, I was even interviewed last week by USA Today. They're trying to tell the story. I don't know if it will actually go to print, but the whole point of the interview was discussing this idea that Americans are turning to the garden during this time. So that's a good side of this really terrible time. And I wanted to take this opportunity to talk with you about the goodness of a kitchen garden and how I do really feel that our world could look a lot different right now if all of us had a little kitchen garden in our own backyard. If you've heard me talk before, you know, this is a mission I've been on for five years now, that by the time my daughter, My youngest, who's 8, graduates from high school, so 10 years, if she gets to go back to school. She will. She'll definitely go back to school by the time she graduates, that the kitchen garden revival will have happened and everyone will have. Will be growing a little bit of their own food at home in their own kitchen gardens. So my vision for that is never more clear than it is right now. So, blah, blah, blah. That's enough of the backstory. Let's dive into today's topic about the Victory Garden and how the kitchen garden is literally the new Victory Garden. So to talk about this, let's first go before the victory. I mean, after the Victory Garden. So we're gonna go to, like, the early 1900s. Well, I guess it's right around the time the Victory Garden started. I found this totally fascinating, and hopefully you will, too. So I wanna give you a little history of the grocery store in America. You know, if you're like me, I was born in the late 70s, and I've just never known anything different than going to the grocery store and especially grew up getting 100% of our food from the grocery. And I'm sure most of America has felt the same way for decades, if not almost a full century. But it hasn't always been that way, just as I hinted to with that great quote from the amazing Joel Salatin. So, actually, they say that the chain grocery retail went way back, all the way to something like the great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. So it was back in the mid-1850s, and they started to kind of start playing around with this idea of providing services for larger areas. So before, like in the late 1800s, a grocery store would be a really small Little building and would only be focused on just one aspect of food. And generally that was dry goods. So we're talking like you know, canned goods that had been canned from the garden or say dried beans or maybe something like that. And then every other part of the grocery, like say the bread or the meat, all those things would be separate stores. So things started to change in I guess the early 1910s and mid-1910s. This report said that Piggly Wiggly. I don't know, you guys, did you ever have a Piggly Wiggly? We had a little Piggly Wiggly in my town in Mississippi. So Piggly Wiggly was begun in Memphis in 1916 and is really credited with being the first self service shop. So in other words, where you could actually go around and pick your own food. Now today we take that for granted, Right, but I mean, of course you're going to pick out your own food. But this was really the first of its kind. And then there was a Loblaw Grosseterias. I don't know if I'm saying that right, in Toronto, Canada in 1919. That also was doing the self service deal. Well, but in the 1920s we started to see this introduction of chain stores and they began to be a more dominant force for grocery stores in America. So you may recognize the word Kroger. Kroger actually began around this time. American Stores, National Tea, Loblaws and Dominion Stores are all known as stores that were really starting to grow with their chains during the 1920s. They were known for running what they called economy stores by the end of the decade. So most of these were still pretty small and just had like a counter service and were only staffed by a few people. They did not have meat, they usually didn't have bakeries. It was still really focused on dry goods. But as they got to basically the mid, say 1930s and 1940s, things started to really shift. So in California there's a store called Ralph's Grocery Company. It started to get bigger and bigger. And Los Angeles was seeing the beginning of a drive in market where there would be this area where there would be like the dry goods store, but then there'd also be a baker, a grocer and a butcher. And they'd all be in the same general area. So even though they were each their own stores, the general public kind of viewed it as one store because they were all together. But the big change happened, and this is the one I alluded to in the intro. In 1930, Michael Cullen, who had been an executive of Kroger opened the first. It was called the King Cullen Store. And most people see that as America's first, its very first supermarket. Although some others, you know, you know how it is. Everybody says they're the first, but there may be like three or four at the same time. Anyway, he put his supermarket on the fringes of New York City, and there was parking, and it was kind of like, it felt like a bazaar, you know, where you go up to all these different little spots in the store and you could basically buy almost anything that you needed for your food supply. So by the 1950s, this movement basically took over pretty much every place. Every city in the US Had a supermarket. That's literally the definition of a supermarket. Did you know that? I did not know that. The supermarket idea is it's all these markets together, rather than just one. Instead of just going into one store and getting dry goods or canned goods and then the butcher in another place, those things are all done in one place together. That is the supermarket. So a lot of people see the 1950s and the 1960s. So that would have been right around the time, I guess my parents were growing up, as the golden age of the supermarket. So this is the time when the stores were bright and shiny and everybody was excited. It was like a big treat to head out to the supermarket. Ironically, this was a time when my paternal grandfather, his name was Leroy, he was a butcher at the local supermarket in Northern Mississippi. So it was really interesting to read the story and realize my family's place in it. One of my grandfathers, that one was becoming a butcher in a supermarket. And my other grandfather was studying horticulture. He became the head of horticulture at Mississippi State University. He was on the mass production side of food for the groceries. And my other grandfather was a butcher at a supermarket. And if he had been employed, I guess, I don't know, 20, 30 years prior, he would have been working only at a butcher shop instead of a big market. So pretty crazy to see how things change. So this article was. So the few articles I read about the history of our grocery store just talk about how things got super shiny, super bright, super beautiful. It was like just super fun to head to the grocery store. Loads of beautiful colors and packaging, and everybody just fell in love with this idea of heading to the store to get all their foods in one place. Well, the 1970s came and things started to shift a little bit, and so things moved to this idea of a discount store or a warehouse type store. You guys, I'm sure, have had some Exposure to this kind of feeling, right. Of like Sam's or Costco or, I don't know, just this big idea of like getting tons of food for a very cheap price. So this became like a new thing in the 70s of doing big discounts on all this food. So we went from this time, well, we'll go back to what the food was like before the supermarket. But you can see where we're heading, where suddenly price is the driver and presentation as the driver rather than actually the quality of the food. So then in the 80s and the 90s, so this would have been right in the middle of my growing up, we had this split. So some grocery stores went up in their pricing and their kind of, their demographic they were trying to market to a higher price point demographic. And then the other grocery stores went toward warehouses and discounting. So I'm sure you all have experienced this where you had the, the Whole Foods, you know, kind of the boutique feel for a grocery all the way down to, you know, going to a, I don't know, an Aldi or a Sam's or, or a Costco. So this happened quite a bit in the 80s and 90s and really created the situation we are in today. So, yeah, so pretty crazy, right? So you go not even a century back from the 1980s and 90s, and most of our food was being, you know, definitely grown more locally. And then most of it was. Even if you were buying it, you were buying it directly from the supplier. So you'd be buying, you know, meat directly from the butcher who's either the person who's growing that cattle or is directly connected with the grower. And if you're buying the produce, you're buying it directly from the farmer and maybe even the dairy. If you're buying dairy, you're buying directly from the person who's raising the dairy cattle all the way to 70 years later. 60, 70, maybe even just 50 years later, all of our food is now in basically two types of markets. And that's where the general public gets 100% of the food that they purchase. None of it's coming from someone, you know, they very rarely are going to be purchasing it directly from the producer. There's now this vast middleman of all of these packagers and shippers and then the, what do you call them, the stores. So you, instead of going directly from the grower to the eater, we've got at least two to three steps in between. And that, my friends, is the situation that we find ourselves in today. And America was Somewhat in the middle of this situation, this change when the Victory Garden came about. So now that we've talked about the history of our groceries, let's now talk about the Victory Garden. So the Victory Garden came about during World War II. I'm sure you've heard the term before, and I want to tell you a little bit about it. It's pretty exciting. So in the middle of World War II, you know, the world was going through a war. It was crisis, actually, they're saying the Victory Garden. Some say the Victory Garden really started at the end of World War I. So let's just say between the world wars is when the Victory Garden took over. So what was happening is, you know, especially in America, but all parts of the world, resources were just being taxed in all sorts of ways. And most of the supplies, especially the stored food, like canned foods and things that were already prepared, were really reserved for the fighters, the soldiers, the armies, the navies. And they proposed this idea for the general public to start growing a little bit of their own food. So Victory Gardens were also called war gardens, and some called them food gardens for defense. So they were vegetable, fruit and herb gardens that were planted at homes and public parks all over, not just in the US US but in the UK And Canada, Australia and Germany during both wars. And so they say that the governments actually were the ones that were encouraging people to plant the Victory Gardens. Not just this is important to supplement their rations, but also to boost morale. I love that point. So George Washington Carver, I'm pretty sure he's the guy who. He's connected to the peanut. Right. We'll have to do an episode on that. He wrote an agricultural track and promoted the idea of what he called a Victory Garden. Most people were using these rationing stamps and cards. And if you're not familiar, basically it was like limiting the amount of food that any one person or family could buy, and maybe even they had rights to get some of it at a discount. I'm sure you've seen. I've seen at my grocery store, there are certain items that the store now has limit marks on, like you can only buy two cartons of eggs, and you can only buy two things of milk. So the hope here was that this would not just help reduce the rations, I mean, reduce the pressure on the rations, but also to help people feel better. So they say that this worked, that it seriously was a morale booster, and that gardeners were actually quote, unquote, quote, empowered. I really messed that quote up. Empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce that they grew. This made victory Gardens a part of daily life on the home front. It said that the stories say that it made people feel like they were doing something to help when they otherwise couldn't. And. And I just think that's so great, right? So listen to these numbers. It's so crazy. They said at the beginning, you know, people kind of laughed it off, like it wasn't a big deal and seemed just like a stunt. But so many people took the challenge to heart that at one point, they think that maybe 40% of the US's fruit and veget, not fruit, but fresh vegetables, were being produced in, like, home and public park gardens. They said they think that 20 million gardens were literally set up as Victory Gardens during the war effort. Is that amazing? I mean, if that is not a positive side effect of something totally horrible, I don't know what is. So I would like to propose that we start our own. Our own revival. And you guys know that my word for a victory garden is a kitchen garden. So now I want to finish up with my argument that kitchen gardens are actually the new Victory garden. So back then, people were probably a lot more ready to grow in the sense that this was in the 20s and the 30s, and so these people were closer, more closely connected to their food than we are today. So I know, like, my grandmother was a child during that time, and, you know, her parents were literally farmers. So my grandfather, he grew up on a farm. So when the government asked those people to start a garden, that wasn't something so unattainable for them. You know, they had just seen their parents come off the farm. So even though they were starting to shop at grocery stores and starting to have chain stores to buy their food from, they were still pretty connected to the garden. And I'm guessing the idea of planting seeds and watching them grow to food wasn't nearly as overwhelming as a thought as it is for us today. Because for most of us, I know, for me, even though I have a BS in accounting and math, even though I went through years of school, I never once learned how a seed grows into food. Until about 10 years ago, I didn't know that carrots don't grow at the same time that tomatoes do. I didn't know how long a tomato takes to grow or that one tomato plant only produces so many tomatoes. Most of the general public in the US I know probably is right there with me. And even though we eat these foods all the time, we shop for them at the grocery probably every Week. Most of us don't know how to grow them. And it's okay. I'm here for you. So that's why I want to suggest that kitchen gardens could be the new victory gardens. One of the main reasons, so I think, at least from the photos I've seen, in general, victory gardens were more set up like row gardens. So you've heard me do the distinction, if you haven't, that kitchen gardens and vegetable gardens are different, and that kitchen gardens are set up as raised beds. It's a smaller setup. You're going to grow more vertically rather than out and wide, and you're going to plant more in a small space. So that's the difference between a row garden and a kitchen garden. And from all the photos I've seen, I could be totally wrong. Most victory gardens were in ground row gardens. And so that's why I want to suggest that for us, for us that are a century later, who aren't so connected to the family that we have, that knew how to grow their own food, kitchen gardens are really a better vacation tree garden for us. So the first reason is because kitchen gardens are easier to create. A kitchen garden with a raised bed is something that you can create literally in an afternoon. Now, you can make it fancy and take all week, but you could literally put a box together and set up a raised bed in just one afternoon. And we all seem to have an afternoon at home right now. Right. So kitchen gardens are easier to create. You can build a raised bed in a short period of time. You can fill it with really great soil. Soil. And then you can plant it right then and there, either with seeds or with plants from your local store. The second reason why kitchen gardens are our victory garden is because kitchen gardens make the most of a small space. Back then, 100 years ago, people's yards were bigger than ours. Their cities were not as packed as ours are. And I'm guessing their gardens had more exposure to sun and just more space to spread out. So a row garden is perfect for that. The roots spread out wide and the vines grow wide on the ground. But for us, in smaller spaces with less sunshine, a kitchen garden is a better fit. So a kitchen garden, because it's a raised bed, it's going to make the most of your small space. I like to compare a kitchen garden in a raised bed to a row garden with a suburb versus a city skyscraper. So in the suburb, the buildings are generally one or two stories high, and they go really wide out. Right? Because land is not at a premium, but Inside the city, all the buildings go up and down really tall and down low so that they can pack as much in a small space as possible. Well, the same is true when you compare a kitchen garden to a row garden. So a raised bed is going to let your plants roots grow down deep. And when you use trellises, your vines will grow straight up and down out of your raised beds so you can really pack the plants and make the most of a smaller space. Whereas a row garden is really going to need to spread out wide and long in order to get the same amount of production. So the third reason why I think kitchen gardens are our victory garden is that they're easier to tend and they produce continuously. So one of the reasons I always we've always created raised bed kitchen gardens for our clients is because most of them, just like us, have never had exposure to tending a garden before. And working in a raised bed is so much easier than working in a row garden. First of all, you don't have to kind of, I don't know, stand in the muck when you're working on a hill or a mound. You get to stand on level ground around your bed. It's easier because the plants are elevated. So especially if you have, I don't know, a back that hurts sometimes or you just get tired from leaning over and tending, it's so much easier to a bed that's one or two feet tall. And then also, these beds are going to be producing more regularly for you. So generally a row garden or a farm is set up to produce all at once. Whereas a kitchen garden is more set up for you to come out and to pick a little bit from it regularly. So you just come out, grab a little bit, and then go back in, enjoy it, and come back again the very next time. Day the fifth reason why kitchen gardens are our victory garden, and this actually is where both of them are the same, is that they both are going to provide a getaway for us when we just can't get away. I was talking with my mom as soon as we got the shelter in place order, and I said, you know, for me, this isn't that hard. I know this is really hard for a lot of people. I know it's hard for my kids, I said, but I feel like I've been under a shelter in place order for a lot of my adult life. I actually lived in China during the SARS epidemic, so that was probably my first exposure to this idea of kind of sheltering in place. But even when I came back to America and had my children. I had them so close together and the years were so tough that with them, I mean, they were beautiful, but they were tough, as you can imagine. So I had four under four and a half years. It was really hard to go in public with them by myself. And so there were so many days when I was just home with them, just again and again and again. And just like for so many of us now, with the shelter in place order, a lot of my days looked the exact same again and again. And that was exactly the time period when we started our backyard garden. And I've told so many people this story for years, way before this whole thing started, that the garden was really my getaway when I could not get away. It was my way to escape just the normal of everyday life inside the house, to get away from the chores and the responsibilities and just relax and find myself and discover something new. And so this is. I can see this story playing out when I read the articles about the Victory Garden, the way that this was a morale boost for people, because I know it was that for me and I know it will be that for you and for the rest of our country as we deal with the idea of staying home, creating a garden outside the door really makes you feel like you get to leave, even though you can't. So that is the fifth reason. So let me review. Number one. Kitchen gardens are our victory gardens because they are easier to create. Oh, actually, I think you only had four points here. Kitchen gardens are our victory gardens because they're easier to create. Kitchen gardens are our victory gardens because they make the most of a small, small space. And there are victory gardens because they are easier to tend and they produce continuously. And then finally, kitchen gardens are our victory gardens because they're going to provide a getaway when you cannot get away. Are you convinced yet? I hope so. So here are three steps for you to set up your own kitchen garden right now and join the kitchen garden revival. I loved in the article I read from the New York Times, they said they were talking a couple of different companies that they had interviewed and how things were getting exciting. And he said they're pretty sure they did not want to call it a victory garden. So they're, like, trying to come up with a new word. I'm trying to see, I don't know if I have in my notes, but they came up with their own little way of describing it. And I thought, I have a word for this. Let's call it a kitchen garden revival. Now, unfortunately, they did not interview me for this article, but you and I can say it ourselves. So I want to invite you to join me in the kitchen garden revival. This is a way for us to not just support what's going on and all those people who are out there fighting on the front lines for us, but also to boost our own morale and feel good about the whole situation, even when it's super tough. So here are three steps for you to get started. The very first thing you got to do is choose the best location for your kitchen garden. This is going to be a tough situation. I mean, a tough thing to do sometimes, especially if you have a lot of locations that are possibilities or it can be tough if you feel like you have none that are great. I just heard from someone this morning wanting to order a consult and she said, I'm just not sure I have the space. So wherever you are on the spectrum of thinking, you have way too many choices or you don't have any good choices at all. I have to say that kitchen gardens always are a possibility no matter where you are. I generally say with my Kitchen Garden Academy students that if you've got 16 square feet of space, you have enough space to set up a kitchen garden. So, so pick a location. Generally you want to prioritize the sunlight, of course, but please know that even if you don't have optimal sunlight, you can still have a kitchen garden. In fact, I just wrote a blog post on gardenary.com entitled How Much Sun Does a Vegetable Garden Need? And I share my thoughts on how much sun you need. What's like the minimum for you to say that that spot could work for your kitchen garden? So go give it a read and a good one. The second thing to do once you choose your location is to build a raised bed. Now, I realize most of us are in a shelter in place, so let me give you a few options for doing this. One, you can call the hardware store. They're all still working and they need purchases. So call ahead and give them your supply list. Tell them what you need and most of them will bring the order straight to your door. You can call a local lumberyard or you can call the big box stores. If you're looking for a step by step, I have a great guide for you to build a bed for under $100. It's a cedar garden bed and you can find that on the gardenary blog as well. So you can do that by ordering ahead and just having them deliver them to your car when you drive up. Or you can Even just use the supplies you have around your home. So in my recent kitchen garden workshop, I talked about just using bricks or stone or wood or anything you can find to build up around a space that you can legitimately call it a raised garden. I say minimum. You want to have a 6 inch tall raised bed that would be for greens and herbs, which would totally be worthwhile. And then if you can get it up to a foot or even a foot and a half, that is great too. The third step is to learn your climate and plan your plants. So all of us are gardening in different places, and I have a unique perspective because I've gardened all the way from Philly to Virginia to Tennessee to Texas and now in Illinois. So I've kind of seen it all. Well, not all, but I've seen a lot. And what I've learned in gardening in all these different climates is that you can always make something work. You just have to time it right. So before you head out to the plant store or just decide the things you have to plant, you first want to start to study your own climate and understand what grows best during the the current season you're in. So wherever you live on the map, now is a great time to start studying the high and low temperatures of every month in your town and then starting to match the plants that love that temperature and plant them in your garden. Now, I'm sure that sounds super simplified, but really I've learned as a garden coach that the simpler you can make the steps, the better. And then you can just come back in and fill in the details. So that really is all there is to it. Choose a location, build a raised bed, and then learn your climate and plan your plants. Simple, right? So the kitchen garden is our new victory garden. I am ready to see a kitchen garden revival. And who knows, maybe this very difficult time of all of us sheltering in place will mean that the kitchen garden revival might have happen nine years before I thought it would. Maybe perhaps this could be the time where all of us get to learn again what our ancestors knew three or four or five generations ago. How to have food growing right beside the kitchen, right outside our back door. I don't know. This is a super tough time and we're all going through so much. But if we could look back and see that one result of this difficult time is that we all got reconnected with our, our food. We started to buy food from our local farmers and growers and we reorganized our food system, which is currently not working well for any of us, I would say I would be super proud to know that I was a small part of that. So to close, I want to read you some from my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. All right, I'm actually holding the book in my hands this time. Before, I've only been reading from my computer, so here we go. Can you hear the pages turning? All right, I'm going to talk about why a kitchen garden mental health is quickly becoming the key indicator of overall well being. Depression, anxiety, stress and burnout are all serious in themselves, but these challenges are also linked to cancer, high blood pressure and heart disease. Our minds and our bodies are connected in ways we're just starting to understand. And in this fast paced and demanding world, we've got to find ways to slow down, reconnect with nature, and care for ourselves again. When you learn to grow yourself, you literally grow yourself. Do you get it? That's the name of the podcast. The biggest reason to have a kitchen garden is for your own happiness. Stepping outside into the garden each day has been proven to help to do just that. And there's no more practical way to push yourself outside than if the tastiest parts of dinner are growing right there. You have to eat anyway, so why not pursue a mindful activity that not only feeds your mind and your soul, but also fills your stomach? A kitchen garden may just be the most practical hobby you can pursue. You'll learn new skills, get exercise, wake up your senses each time you step outdoors and return with an armload of fresh food. Let's Kitchen Garden for Our Kitchen Community over the last few decades, there's been a growing interest in knowing our food sources, returning to organic growing methods, and appreciating the nutrients available when eating freshly picked food. The kitchen garden is a key part of this movement. Although the garden won't provide the entirety of your family's fruit and vegetable needs, it gives you a taste of what's growing locally, an appreciation for the process of growing organic and natural food, and a connection to the growers and farmers in your area. Nearly all my clients with kitchen gardens often also have a Community Supported Agriculture membership to supplement their gardens. Once they taste a freshly harvested carrot or a tomato just picked from the vine, they cannot return to the ship stuff at the grocery store. By eating locally, you'll be more connected to your local community, better understanding your particular seasons, appreciating the unique foods you can grow in your area, and supporting the people who do great work there. You should kitchen garden for the world. No matter your position on global warming we likely all agree that things are not changing for the better. And although it's not the only contributor, a few major aspects of our world's troubles are food miles, packaging and waste. Currently, most of the food consumed in America has traveled more than 1500 miles before reaching the consumer's plate. The petroleum demand on food is huge. By growing food in your personal kitchen garden and eating locally from farmers and CSAs, you vastly reduce the number of miles your food needs to travel. Beyond the miles, food that's shipped across the country or internationally is also heavily packaged. Our plastic consumption in North America is at an all time high, and a lot of that is due to the enormous amount of plastic used to package our shoes food the kitchen garden is one part of the answer to this issue. Even if you just grow grains and herbs in your kitchen garden, you'll make a serious cut in your plastic waste in just a few months. Why a Kitchen Garden Revival? Kitchen gardens, though we may have forgotten the term, aren't a new concept. They've been a thing for thousands of years. But somewhere along our way of progress, we lost the kitchen garden. With the input of technology and industry, our food systems have changed dramatically over the last century. And while not all the change has been bad, the kitchen garden is something that should have stayed to create whole and happy lives for the beauty in our homes, for the benefit of our community, and for the good of the world. It is time for a kitchen garden revival. A revival is a magical thing. It's something I can wish for, but not really something I or any one person can make happen alone. It's like a seed that starts small and is barely noticeable at first. It must be buried and grow strong roots even when no one notices. There are 1,000 things that could go wrong. But with just the right amount of rain and sunshine and not too many weeds or pests, that seed can grow so big and so fast that no one could tell where the vine begins or ends. Perhaps this book will be that seed. Fingers crossed. But I'll need you to bring the rain and the sunshine. You can begin with just a pot of garlic chives on the front porch or build a formal potager. Wherever you are, there's a kitchen garden that fits. And if you have a kitchen, and I'm sure you do, you need a kitchen garden. By picking up this book, you're already part of the kitchen garden revival. Your interest to read this far means you're part of the vine that's growing from that tiny seed. And I cannot wait to see how Big you, your garden and this movement will grow. Thank you in advance for bringing back the Kitchen Garden with me. Now let's go plant some seeds together. Thank you guys so much for listening today. Thank you for bringing back the Kitchen Garden with me. Now let's make Kitchen Gardens the new victory garden. I would absolutely love it if you would take a screenshot of yourself listening to this podcast or if you would share it with your friends and invite them to join the Kitchen Garden Revival with us. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the Grow Yourself podcast. We are at 10,000 downloads. That's amazing. I can't believe 10,000 downloads. I was gonna say 10,000 people, but I realized we've had 14 episodes, so that's not quite right. Thank you so much for putting me in your AirPods or your earbuds or whatever you're listening to through these days. And I just can't thank you. Thank you enough. If you would subscribe and leave a review, I would absolutely love. Love you for it. And please share the podcast with anyone that you think needs some encouragement to start their own kitchen garden today. My book, Kitchen Garden Revival is available for pre sale, so when you purchase it, please send me an email@helloardenary.com so I can send you a free mini course. You can learn more about the book@gardenary.com book and don't forget about my kickstart your kitchen garden workshop. You can sign up and watch the workshop. It's one and a half hours and I walk you through all the step by steps that we just talked about in this episode. The three steps to set up your kitchen garden. They're right there in great detail with beautiful photos to guide you along the way. So if you want some help, you should totally sign up for that workshop. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next week. Hang in there. Stay safe and go start that kitchen garden.