10 Simple, Cheap Home Gardening Innovations to Set You on the Path to Food Independence
by Alex Pietrowski
The issue of food quality and food independence is of critical importance these days, and people are recognizing just how easy and fun it is to grow your own food at home. When renegade gardener Ron Finley said, “growing your own food is like printing money,” he was remarking on the revolutionary nature of re-establishing control over your health and your pocket book as a means of subverting the exploitative and unhealthy food systems that encourage the over-consumption of processed and fast foods.
Thanks to the Internet, the availability of parts and materials, and good old-fashioned ingenuity, there is a wide range of in-home, and in-apartment, gardening systems that are easy to construct and maintain, and that can provide nutritious, organic, and low-cost food for you and your family. Once you realize jut how rewarding home gardening can be, it is tremendously fun to experiment with different systems and ideas for best producing your favorite healthy, fresh fruits and veggies.
Since everyone’s gardening space, interests and budgets differ, here are 10 simple ideas and how to’s for getting a small, affordable, and easy to construct gardening system up and running in your home.
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Aquaponics
Read: Aquaponic Gardening: A Step-By-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together
Here is a simple affordable home aquaponics system that can be adapted. Be sure to read the comments below the video for additional insight and afterthoughts on this simple system…
Vertical Gardening
Read: Vertical Gardening: Grow Up, Not Out, for More Vegetables and Flowers in Much Less Space
The easy and affordable example below can be adapted for many different fruits and veggies, or scaled for larger purposes…
Simple Greenhouse Designs
Read: Greenhouse Gardener’s Companion, Revised: Growing Food & Flowers in Your Greenhouse or Sunspace
Easy to build hoop house greenhouse how-to…
How to build a backyard fence-rested greenhouse…
Cold Frames for Winter Gardening
Simple winter cold frame garden…
Composting
Read: Let it Rot!: The Gardener’s Guide to Composting (Third Edition) (Storey’s Down-To-Earth Guides)
3-bin compost system using free pallets…
Cheap do-it-yourself worm composter…
Ideas for Apartment Gardening
Living in an apartment can mean you have to be more creative and imaginative with the space you have. Here are some resources and ideas for finding and setting up your apartment garden.
Read: Apartment Gardening: Plants, Projects, and Recipes for Growing Food in Your Urban Home
Here are some useful tips on finding space for your apartment garden…
We hope that you find the inspiration to find out for yourself just how easy, fun, and liberating home gardening can be as further stress on our collective food systems continues to drive up prices and drive down nutrition.
Gardening is both addictive and contagious, so be prepared to have fun, grow some tasty food, and meet some new friends once your neighbors hear about your success.
Alex Pietrowski is an artist and writer concerned with preserving good health and the basic freedom to enjoy a healthy lifestyle. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com, where this first appeared, and an avid student of Yoga and life.
