Welcome to the Beginners Garden podcast. I'm Jill McShehe recording for 2018, and today we're going to be talking about

crops that you can grow that will help you avoid consuming pesticides in the produce that you

eat. Now, as I mentioned in last week's episode, my number one goal when I first started my

garden was to save money on the

grocery bill. But not too far down from that goal was my hope to grow healthier food for my family.

We definitely couldn't afford to buy organic at the time, so it seemed a natural fit to grow

the foods that typically have more pesticide residue on them when they're grown

in a conventional environment. For those of you guys who have already started diving in to my online

course for beginning gardeners, the beginner's garden shortcut, you know that in my first lesson I

talk about identifying your broad garden goals and that is step one. And for many of

you growing healthier, uncontaminated produce is right up there. If that's you in today's episode,

I'm going to share five crops that you can grow that will help you with that goal. You may have

heard of the dirty dozen. If you haven't, I'm going to

give you a quick overview. It's a list that the Environmental Working Group has compiled, and they do

this every year, and it represents the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables you buy at the grocery

store when they're grown non-organically.

The process is this, and I'm taking this straight from their website. I'm going to link all of

the resources and everything that I'm talking about today in my show notes today. So be sure to

take a look at that. But the process is that the environmental working group ranks pesticide

contamination on 48 popular fruits and vegetables based on an analysis of more than 36,000 samples

taken by the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration. Let me just give you some stats.

70% of samples of these 48 types of conventionally grown produce were contaminated with pesticide residues. 178 different pesticides persisted

...