A SEASONAL PLATE
The health benefits of eating seasonally are mind-blowing!
There’s plenty of talk about eating ‘seasonally’ these days. Even some of the fancy restaurants and big-time chefs put a lot of time and effort into creating a seasonal menu. So what is it, why is it important and how can you create your own seasonal garden?
Seasonal Food simply means that you are buying or growing food at a time when a given type food is at its peak, either in terms of harvest or its flavour. When you are buying fresh produce from the market it is most likely at its cheapest because it is more readily available at that time of year and less transportation is required to get it to your market. The flavour will be at its optimum and from a grower’s perspective, it’s way easier to grow at that particular time of year.
These days it is so important for us as individuals to make small but impactful decisions that will ultimately improve our current climate crisis. Buying seasonally is certainly one way we can do this so let’s unpack ‘why’ this is the case.
When fresh produce isn’t in season, we as consumers have sadly fallen into the habit of still expecting that it will be on the market shelf. The reality of how that produce arrived on the market shelf is rather overwhelming and daunting. Let’s take the banana for instance. This is a tropical fruit that despises cold weather, but you can still find bananas on the market shelf at almost any time of the year in Scandinavia. So how does that work? Transportation. Costly transportation and transportation across sea and land that leaves a heavy carbon footprint. If buyers push up demand and expectation, then more bananas will make the journey and we leave behind an even greater carbon footprint.
When I was a small child, I distinctly remember only certain fruit and vegetables being available at certain times of the year. My mother would hold off on some of her favourite recipes, waiting patiently to recreate that seasonal favourite dish. These days, those dishes can just be cooked whenever.
The health benefits of eating seasonally are mind blowing. Fruit and vegetables that are grown out of season are way more likely to be sprayed with pesticides, have loads of preservatives added and ripening agents added. These heavy chemicals can sit in our bodies and cause horrible diseases and long-term alignments. Seasonal fruit and vegetables on the other hand not only taste better because they ripen naturally, they are less prone to pests whilst being grown and they function as a natural antioxidant, help the detoxification process and can reduce DNA damage. Pretty cool.
There is a growing trend amongst farmers and world health experts these days that if you had to make one choice between buying organic and buying seasonal, they’d all prefer that you bought seasonal. Disclaimer: if you can do both that’s obviously a double bonus.
So how can you grow seasonally in your own urban garden? Here are 4 simple tips.
1) Understand your microclimate, not just your climate. Just because you live in the subtropics doesn’t mean it’s typically a subtropical climate. Take where I live for example. It’s in the subtropics but being on top of a mountain we experience temperatures sometimes 5-6 degrees cooler than at the base of the mountain. We also have cool coastal breezes, so we don’t get high humidity. Even on our local street, there’s one patch literally 1 kilometre down the road that gets frost in winter and yet we’ve never had one frosty patch of lawn in the entire 20 years we’ve lived here! The takeaway here is this: don’t simply follow the maps indication of what climate you live in to determine your planting. Get to intimately understand your own microclimate and how the seasons change.
2) Organise your planting at least 1 season in advance. Sometimes in the gardening world things take on a mind of their own and before you know it the next season has started, and you’ve literally missed the boat. When I plan out my planting chart, I always work a minimum of 6-12 weeks in advance. I like to grow from seed so if it’s Summer and I’d like to plant capsicum, then I really needed to have those seedlings prepped 10 weeks in advance so that I can plant them out as established seedlings.
3) Have more than one bed going at once. If you only have 1 bed that you are planting in, you will struggle to grow seasonally simply because the growing season of some vegetables are SO long whilst others are SO short. I like to plant and group my vegetables into long and short companions which basically means, I plant the short season vegetables that are companion suited together and the long ones in a separate bed. This way when I’m ready to flip a bed I can do it all at once rather than try to manage a patchwork of mess.
4) Use your garden as a natural fridge. Rather than harvesting everything all at once, leave things in the garden until you need them. This will require you to successional plant which is basically a fancy word meaning space things out over the season rather than planting it all at once. By leaving things on the vine or in the ground, the plant will naturally preserve the produce and the temperature will be regulated by the plant itself.
If all else fails when planning to eat seasonally, aim for the 80:20 rule. If 80% of your plate is seasonal and only 20% is made up of out of season produce, then your health and the environment will certainly be much better off.
