Importance of a Garden During a Global Crisis
Growing a garden not only provides fresh food but a wealth of other benefits too. All that a homestead garden has to offer becomes vitally important during a time of global crisis.
During a global crisis (especially a health crisis), a vegetable garden becomes much more than just a hobby, it becomes a healthy, sustainable food source, a way to get exercise, improves the mood, and provides income.
Knowing how to grow food is something 
everyone should learn how to do. The knowledge could mean the difference between life or death in a time of global crisis.
Sustainable Food Source
Food plants can be grown indoors or outdoors, so regardless of the time of year food can be grown.
Microgreens can be grown in a shallow container indoors year-round. Microgreens are immature leaves from green, leafy vegetables like spinach, beets, lettuce, and kale. These immature leaves contain more nutrients than fully developed plant leaves and are great for use in fresh salad or stir-fry. Sow a tray of seeds every 10-14 days to keep a steady supply of microgreens.
Vegetables can be grown outdoors during the spring, summer, and fall. Preserve some of the fresh vegetables for later use and save seeds for future planting.
Create nutrient-rich compost from dead garden plants to improve soil fertility and soil structure. The soil feeds the plants and the plants feed the soil after they have fed us in a sustainable cycle of life.
Health-Benefiting Exercise
A global crisis means limited work and travel opportunities. Staying at home with a change in eating, sleeping, and exercise habits can be detrimental to health. Growing a home garden will provide health-benefiting exercise in addition to healthy food.
Tending to a garden provides physical activity that will help maintain and/or improve cardiovascular health. The walking, bending, squatting, hoeing, raking, and lifting involved in gardening will promote a healthy stay-at-home lifestyle until the crisis is over.
Mental Health
Gardening will help prevent depression, improve mood, and help maintain mental health by giving you something to look forward too.
When daily life is changed it can be easy to become depressed and despondent. Watching a garden grow, tending to the plants, and anticipating the ripening of vegetables can keep mental health on an even keel.
Having something to look forward to every day is essential to mental health when daily life is interrupted. Gardening also attracts pollinators, like bees, birds, and butterflies, and that improves food production and provides something to observe and keep the brain stimulated to stave off depression.
Gardens Produce Income
Traditional means of generating income changes during a global crisis and a garden can create a new source of income for you.
People will always need to eat and the vegetables and fruits produced in a homestead garden can also produce an income. Plant more than what you will need of a vegetable or fruit that grows well in your climate, then sell the extra produce.
Excess produce can also be used to barter with if the cash supply is reduced during the crisis.
Stay Healthy
It’s important to stay healthy, both physically and mentally, during a time of global crisis. A vegetable garden can enable you to stay healthy and maintain a semblance of normalcy during the time of upheaval that a crisis brings.
Learn how to grow food sooner rather than later. Start small with a few of your favorite vegetables, then increase the garden production each season. A few herb plants on the windowsill today can turn into a vegetable garden capable of sustaining a family of four in a couple of years.
