Growing Your Own Food

A friend of mine owns the wellness center Centro La Paz here in Rincon. They do yoga, pilates, colon hydrotherapy, massage therapy, and facials at the center. It's an incredible place. She also has a little farm. Every once in a while we get to go out and help her on the farm. The other day her family came over and brought us a bunch of vegetables from the farm, including this big beautiful pumpkin! Puerto Rican pumpkins are green but it is a pumpkin. Tonight for dinner I made the pumpkin and it was incredible! Using my own herbs from my garden, eating my own cabbage, growing my own pineapple, etc. is such a neat science experiment, but it is also super therapeutic.

Growing up, my parents were big on healthy eating and my mom definitely prefers naturopathic remedies. She's also an amazing gardener. She has the most incredible green thumb. She can take any sickly, little plant from even Hy-Vee or Home Depot or Walmart and rescue it. She found several fiddle leaf figs that were near death and resurrected them and now they're over five feet tall. My dad loves tending their land too, but he gets more joy in chopping down old trees and digging for moles. 😂🤣 BUT! They taught me this appreciation for growing my own food. Tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, corn, watermelons, cucumbers, carrots. All the good stuff that grows well in the Midwest. We each have a hydroponic seed starter system so we can start our seeds in the winter and early spring when the moon hasn't yet birthed the sun again. 

Growing your own food is such an act of rebellion and self-reliance. It doesn't cost a fortune either. There are quite a lot of vegetables you can grow out of scraps from the grocery store. Romaine lettuce for example can be cut down to the heart and stuck in a cup of water and it will begin to regrow. It will take some time for it to sprout and be ready for planting, but it can be done. The same can be done with celery. You can take potatoes and sweet potatoes that have sprouted eyes and plant them as well. Sweet potatoes grow really well here on the island, though they're a bit different than the sweet potatoes you find in the grocery store. We have an avocado tree in our backyard that has been here since the 1970s! The avocados are, you guessed it, different from Haas Avocados. They're quite literally like butter. In flavor and texture. 

Especially here in Puerto Rico growing your own food is one of the best ways to maintain autonomy and agency over yourself. Due to confusing and harmful laws like the Jones Act shipping to non-continental United States territories and states, like PR, Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S Virgin Islands goods are way more expensive, including food. That's why so many people prioritize growing their own food here. We grow herbs, sweet potatoes, cabbage, peppers, pineapple, avocados, and kale at our house. Do you garden or farm? What do you grow? Is there anything you grow from grocery store scraps?