When I grew up my grandmother’s garden was organic not because she was new-age (not at all) but because she had lived before pesticides were wide-spread.  The old farmers learned how to use what they had to keep pests from their plants.  Sadly in our modern world pesticides are widespread and the approach to food production is about keeping things cheap not nutritious.  In some cases the pressure to keep things affordable at the market has made some foods downright dangerous to consume.  This is especially true for children as their little bodies are not as savvy at removing toxins as most adults.  The Dirty Dozen is a great place to begin to get strategic about your use of organic fruits and vegetables.  Ideally they’d be all we ate but kids are expensive and many folks budgets do not allow them to buy 100% organic all the time.  In some areas they are simply not available year round.  Dr. Andrew Weil and his team have already done a great job of detailing the information of the Dirty Dozen Plus.  For our family one of the ways we get more organic fruits and veggies for less is buying frozen options.  When fruits and vegetables are flash frozen they are preserved at their ripest and most tastiest point in their lives which makes them yummy when we cook them up.

Now if you want to get really radical grow your own organic food.  It is an adventure and great way to help get kids interested in vegetables.  They are so much sweeter and tastier when they are fresh from the garden.  Even though we have 0.13 acres we have a tiny little above ground bed that we built out of cinder blocks.  It has been just the right size to  get us started down the road of organic gardening.  We got a great ebook for gardening in Central Texas and just started planting.  We started with a winter garden which in San Antonio is way easier and takes much less watering.  Now days we’ve gotten fancy and do some summer gardening thanks to drip irrigation.  I used a drip kit from Amazon and built a nice little system…that I actually forgot to shut off today.  Luckily it is such a slow flow of water forgetting about it isn’t nearly as harmful as say a sprinkler or a flowing hose.