Growing Nutrient-Dense Food
People who grow food at home do so for many reasons: the opportunity to grow fruit and vegetable varieties that may taste better than supermarket varieties; the freshness of homegrown produce; the simple satisfaction gained from growing your own food; and so on.
But the greatest—and most overlooked—benefit of growing your own food might be nutritional. Simply put, homegrown food can contain more nutrients, and a wider variety of nutrients, than store-bought food.
Here’s why, in simplified form.
Plants and their fruits contain only the nutrients they draw from the soil they grow in, along with nutrients they synthesize from that soil. (Let’s leave aside the role of water and air here.)
This means that plants grown in nutrient-dense soil themselves have lots of nutrients; those grown in nutrient-scarce soil don’t. When we eat these plants and their fruits, we take in the amount of nutrients that they’ve gathered or made from their soil, whether that amount is a lot or a little.
It’s pretty obvious, then, why soil health is a crucial factor if you want to eat foods high in nutrients. Healthy soil contains lots of minerals (soil particles from broken-down rock) and lots of microorganisms that do a lot of that breaking-down. Unhealthy soil lacks these two things, either because it never contained them or they’ve been depleted through bad growing practices, and then never replenished. These minerals, and the ones synthesized by plants from them, are nutrients we need in our diet.
So, if home food-growers increase the nutrients in their soil, they can increase the nutrient density of the fruits and vegetables they grow, and eat. They can’t do the same, obviously, for store-bought produce.
Three simple things growers can do to improve soil health:
Get a garden soil test. Collecting garden soil for a test can feel like a pain, and you might worry the results will be too science-y to understand. But a test is the best way to know what your soil lacks so you can amend it if necessary. And the process can, in fact, be easy. King Conservation District, for example, offers a testing service for free, along with simple instructions for soil-sampling.
Add well-rotted manure or plant matter to your growing area. Compost from these sources contains some of the needed minerals for soil health and the microorganisms necessary to break down soil minerals for plant absorption. It also improves soil tilth (“texture,” in simple terms).
Add an organic fertilizer. This kind of fertilizer is mostly rock minerals and plant materials containing the nutrients your garden soil may lack. You can buy it at most retailers, or you can buy the ingredients and mix your own, using recipes available online. If you’ve done a soil test, you can tweak the ingredients to compensate for what the test shows is lacking in your soil.
