Part 1: What Shifted In Our Family
Written by: Melissa Botten: MOM, CHN, RYT, Student of Spirituality, Bosslady🐝
There is something really special about seeing a seed in your garden, turn into food. Food gardening is like creating magical experiments, especially for the novice gardener like myself. I am always game for a good challenge plus personally/astrologically, very detail oriented. So, growing things I may someday eat, is super fascinating to me….. My Virgo tendencies, allow me to further my curiosity and pay close mind to the whole process & in this case, turning over a seed into an edible food item.
Just over 2.5 years ago, I was invited to the North Long Beach victory garden, for the tomato festival. While there, I asked all of the booth presenters & food gardeners if they could help me get my kids a job. What I meant was, “put them to work, get em’ outside volunteering, allow them to learn something, and to help our family’s mental health improve. Little did I know, that we were about change our family’s lives in an amazing way.
Food Gardening, introduced us to creating a food source, getting outside in a new way and putting our hands in Mother Earth with more of a purpose.
We also got to meet new people of common interests, improve our relationships with each other, build a greater sense of hope and inspiration & overall, improve our mental health.
Anyone else out there have trouble getting your kids to eat regular, routine amounts of veggies and fruits? Is it a fight, or are you at an improved level from the last time you checked? You laugh hearing this, but Wow….. I am serious! My children are very open minded and excited to try new things, but they are also my greatest critics when it comes to food and innovation. So, if you ever really wanna know the truth, ask a child, or just ask mine.
While maintaining balance as best we can as parents, putting the green stuff out onto the table is risky. Will it go to waste, will they pretend to eat it, then hide the evidence in their cheeks or pockets like I used to do? I remember one of my aunts telling me as a new mom, that my children will act & do to me, as I did to my parents. Ha! I’m doomed.
As a young lady growing up during some of the trendiest, dangerous and most fad diets in history, I was so confused about food & nutrition. I also knew at a young age that I was a vegetarian, in my heart I knew. I was just like many kids that grow up in the mountains or have dad’s that are hunters. We eat the meat because that’s just what we do for meals and family tradition. Both of my parents were providers and my dad was the hunter.
From a young age I had food allergies, which did help devote my need for understanding vegetables, consuming plants, roots & herbs….. and the nutritional advantages & intolerances that go along with it. Because of all of the information that I didn’t understand at that time, my weight ups and downs became part of my lifestyle. Hi I’m Melissa, I’m a recovering yo-yo dieter.
My experience was mostly because of the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing, I was following trends. and a trend is not necessarily a bad thing but what’s missing most of the time is information around that.. TREND.
Understanding that not everyone can afford a nutritionist or go to school to get a certification in nutritional science, it’s hard to know who to talk to about your health concerns that are personal to YOU. There are so many opinions out there, do this, do that, not this, try that. However when we discovered that we can grow our own food and how easy it can be, everything changed. This is where our family and my private practice took nuritional healing to the next level.
This is just a another good thing about holistic healing & nutrition, it has little to no side effects except for improving your health. Let a kid plant a seed and see what happens. Let them dig into the ground, spit in the soil on top of that seed(this is fascinating for the DNA will grow into the seed of that plant). This technique of swapping saliva is essentially, claiming that food source for the person who spit on it. I’m not sure how a much closer you can get to your food than that.
So dig in friends! Grab a simple pot with ventilation in the bottom, get some soil and seeds, and get growing! Sprouts from growing veggies are ready within days… Your thyroid will thank you. Radishes and peas grow REALLY FAST as well as many other veggies that will yield harvest in 90 days or less. Also, this food your growing… it’s ALL FREE. So if anything, save your money for vacations and grow your own food!