The benefits of growing your own fruits and vegetables with Keder Greenhouses
Growing your own fruit and vegetables offers numerous benefits, from enhancing your health to reducing your environmental impact. Homegrown produce provides fresh, nutritious food while supporting a more sustainable lifestyle.
Gardening also promotes physical activity and boosts mental well-being, making it a rewarding hobby for both body and mind.
Whether you're a beginner or looking to expand your greenhouse harvest, this guide covers the key benefits of growing your own food. You'll also learn which crops are best for getting started and how a Keder Greenhouse can extend your growing season, allowing you to enjoy fresh produce year-round.
Why grow your own?
There are so many benefits to growing your own, so let’s summarise each of them. Whether you want to improve your mental health, get outside more, or help the planet, there’s plenty of motivation to get started now.
Cultivate well-being
Gardening has been proven to offer invaluable mental health benefits, from reducing anxiety and isolation to slowing cognitive decline. Numerous studies show that gardening significantly lowers depression and anxiety while improving social function. A 2014 study also found that people living near green spaces experienced less mental distress.
But why is gardening so beneficial for mental well-being? Staying active plays a key role, releasing endorphins much like a workout at the gym—especially during more physically demanding tasks. Additionally, simply being in nature can clear the mind in minutes, while community gardening provides a valuable social outlet.
Gardening to stay active
Gardening and the activities required to grow your own fruits and vegetables can also benefit your physical health. Besides the mental health benefits of the exercise gardening provides, you can also improve your dexterity, and strength, and lose weight too.
Growing fruit and vegetables requires several activities which can exercise every part of your body. Firstly, it could offer physical strength through safely digging, lifting, raking, and improving your soil before planting. Secondly, the fine motor skills required for careful pruning, seed sowing, and pricking out can be particularly helpful. Regardless of the gardening tasks being carried out, your body will benefit.
Growing is green
Beyond the benefits to physical and mental health, growing your own fruit and vegetables is positive for the planet. It helps reduce your overall carbon footprint, particularly by cutting out the long-distance transportation associated with shop-bought produce.
Home-grown plants also support biodiversity, creating a healthier environment for beneficial insects and pollinators, especially when grown organically without chemicals.
Additionally, growing your own food significantly reduces waste. It eliminates the need for single-use plastic packaging and prevents the loss of produce that occurs before it reaches stores. By growing your own, you're more likely to use everything you harvest, helping to reduce food waste. With millions of tonnes of food wasted in the UK each year, even small steps like this can make a meaningful difference.
Health benefits of homegrown produce
The mental and physical benefits of growing homegrown produce have been clearly established. However, what about the health benefits of eating your homegrown fruits and vegetables?
Because you only harvest what you need when you need it, the time between harvesting and eating is greatly reduced. Not only does this preserve flavour, but it protects nutrients too. That means your harvest of fruit and vegetables is more nutrient-dense than that bought from the supermarket. The deterioration of nutrients in crops starts from the second it’s harvested, so harvesting from your garden to enjoy immediately is bound to be healthier.
Best fruits and vegetables for beginner gardeners?
If you’re new to gardening, there are plenty of fruits and vegetables you can try to get you started. The below fruits and vegetables are all low maintenance, and easy to grow for beginners.
French beans
There are two types of French beans to grow, with slightly different growing requirements.
Climbing French bean varieties crop over a longer period
Dwarf French beans are compact and faster cropping
You can sow either outdoors in late spring or early summer or start them earlier indoors to plant out in late spring.
An easy vegetable to grow, they have fantastic health benefits. They’re high in vitamin C, helps to fight inflammation, and is a great source of folate and potassium, great for regulating blood pressure.
Strawberries
Easy to grow, and versatile, strawberries can be grown in beds, containers, or even hanging baskets. And they’re good value for money, eventually growing ‘runners’, after fruiting has finished, which are small plantlets which can become their own plants. The three main types are:
Summer-fruiting – The most popular, with the largest fruit
Perpetual – Small fruit flushes over a long period
Alpine – ‘Wild’ or ‘woodland’ strawberries with small crops over the summer
These jewel-like fruits are filled with antioxidants, responsible for their bright red colour, which helps with preventing diseases. They have fewer calories than most other fruits and can be beneficial for managing blood pressure.
Beetroot
These root vegetables are perfect for growing if space is limited, taking up little underground and overground space. They’re even suitable for container growing. When growing in the optimum conditions, these can be ready to harvest within 40 to 60 days, and the leaves are edible too. You get your bang for your buck with beetroot. Also, beetroot is pretty pest and disease-free. They can be sown straight into the ground from early spring too.
Beetroots are considered a superfood, thanks to how packed with vitamins and minerals they are. They’re packed with protective antioxidants. And red beetroots contain betacyanin, which is thought to have some cancer-fighting properties.
How a Keder Greenhouse extends your growing season
Keder Greenhouses are designed to extend your growing season so that you can grow plenty of healthy fruits and vegetables year-round. The unique cellular cladding is designed to distribute light evenly throughout the greenhouse. This means the space is equally lit, ensuring each plant has ample sunlight to grow. Also, this property means your plants won’t grow leggy, and won’t get scorched either, even on the sunniest days.
Similarly, the even light distribution means the greenhouse gains equal amounts of warmth, too, reducing heating costs during the cooler months. You can enjoy growing your own healthy fruits and vegetables for almost the whole year, starting seedlings off earlier and harvesting later.
There are so many benefits to growing your own fruits and vegetables. Whether it’s helping the environment, saving your pennies, or amazing health benefits, it fun and well worth the reward.
 | To find out more about our Brand Ambassador and Guest Blog Writer visit https://www.kederdomestic.co.uk/david-domoney |
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