Planning Your Garden With Weight Loss in Mind

Here in Kentucky we’re in the middle of winter. There is snow on the ground.

It must be time to start planning the garden.

When you plan a garden, there are the obvious things to consider. Make sure you plant where your garden will have at least 6 hours of full sunshine everyday. Make sure to choose a site that is well drained. That kind of stuff.

But this is a weight loss garden. We need to think about a garden that will help us loss the pounds and inches. We need to grow food we can eat without worry. We want to grow great low cal snacks. We need nutritious meals that keep us slim.

Salads

Salads can be great low calorie meals served by themselves. They also make great snacks and side dishes. A good weight loss garden should make room for lots of salad fixin’s.

Salad plants are often some of the first foods we can harvest from our garden. Most of them are cool season, early crops.

Early season salad plants include:

• Lettuce – Grow several varieties. Stagger plantings so you can have a continuous harvest well into the planting season.
• Greens – Leafy greens such as spinach can also be added to your salads.
• Radishes – There are many varieties of these. They are quick growing cool season goodies.
• Broccoli – Makes a great health addition to the salad bowl. If you want to grow these from seed you’ll need to plan ahead so you’ll have them to transplant size in the early spring.
• Cauliflower – This is also an early season plant the needs to be grown from seed indoors and transplanted early.
• Green Onions – These will add some early season zest to your salad.
• Sugar Snap Peas – Sugar snaps are great in your salad… if you can resist eating them as soon as you pick them.

As the season extends into warmer temperatures you can add many other goodies to your salad ingredients.

• Peppers – Bell peppers, banana peppers, even some hotter varieties are great in the salad.
• Tomatoes – There are so many varieties. For the easy salads you might want to try some of the cherry types. You can just pop these into the bowl with no cutting or prep.
• Carrots – Add these sliced into small pieces or shredded.
• Squash – I like zucchini and yellow squash cut up into my salads. They add nice crunch and flavor.
• Cucumber – Peel em and slice them into your salad.

Snacks

Just about everything on the salad list is good for snacking.

I also like sweet potatoes cut up raw.

You will also find berries and fruit make great snacks. They help satisfy that sweet tooth. They even make good deserts.

Food For Meals

When I was growing up my dad grew a big garden in our suburban backyard. When the garden was in full production we often had vegetable only suppers. And we weren’t vegans. We never even heard of vegans. It was just all those fresh from the garden veggies were so good, we didn’t need anything else. Green beans with little early potatoes, a nice ear of corn, ocra, garden tomatoes – the kind with the flavor you can’t get from the grocery store, and maybe a nice baked sweet potato.

So your taste buds and imagination are the only limits here. Grow what you like to eat.

Try to think ahead and plan for something good coming from your garden continuously. Instead of planting several huge rows of beans, stagger smaller plantings over several weeks. This will help you avoid the feast-or-famine condition most gardeners have.

Tagged as: garden planning, snacks