Growing your own vegetables can be a great way to get outside, interact with nature, and reduce your reliance on polluting and often wasteful food industries. And you can even keep growing crops throughout the winter, as one vegetable gardening content creator recently shared with her 97,000 Instagram followers.
The scoop
"Keep harvesting food throughout autumn and winter with these handy tricks," Amy Chapman (@inthecottagegarden) wrote in the caption, proceeding to give a wide array of helpful tips.
For one, she recommended that gardeners give plants extra protection from the cold by draping frost-proof fabric over some bamboo hoops, creating a little tunnel of warmth.
She also recommended using a greenhouse, although if you don't have access to one, you can always move plants to a porch or cold frame.
In addition, she showed how she protects individual plants by covering them with bell-shaped cloches. All in all, it's clear that all hope is not lost for your fresh veggies once the temperatures start to drop.
How it's helping
By growing our own vegetables, we provide ourselves with delicious produce and valuable nutrition while decreasing our reliance on commercial food production, which involves a lot of polluting pesticides and fertilizers. (The EPA recently claimed that "too many pesticide formulas exist for the agency to check them all for safety.") It also allows us to separate ourselves from the often wasteful practices of grocery stores.
In addition, growing your own vegetables requires none of the copious plastic packaging that comes with practically anything you would otherwise buy at a store.
And if the cold does end up killing off some of your plants, never fear — you can still do better than most grocery stores by starting a compost pile instead of sending organic matter directly to a landfill, where it releases planet-overheating gases as it breaks down.
What everybody's saying
Many of Amy's followers were excited to put her tips into practice.
"I'm waiting for payday so I can get a cold frame. Determined to have some winter lettuce and spinach!" wrote one commenter.
"Yesss a cold frame makes all the difference!!" Amy replied.
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