Jennifer Garner’s Backyard Is a Healthy Eating Oasis
The actress enjoys picking fresh fruit and veggies and spending quality time with her chickens and bees.
BG004/Bauer-Griffin
Jennifer Garner may be one of the most down-to-earth Hollywood types around. Plus, busy as the actress is, she sure does seem like a devoted mom to her three kids, with an eye toward helping other children as well. One minute she’s selling Girl Scout cookies outside a grocery store with her daughters (holding a hand-lettered sign, no less); the next she’s good-humoredly raising big bucks for Save the Children.
But those looking to gauge just how deep Garner’s lack of Tinsel Town pretension runs need explore no further than her own backyard, a Los Angeles-area farm that sounds like some kind of oasis of fresh fruits and veggies, fragrant flowers and honey bees.
A stroll through the actress’s Instagram account finds her filling a basket with fresh blueberries (fluffy dog in tow), hanging out with chickens, plucking blood oranges for juice off a fruit-laden tree, even harvesting honey from a honeycomb. (That sweet stuff is finger-licking good, apparently.)
Picking blueberries with her kids is one of the "little traditions" she shares with her kids, Violet, 12, Seraphina, 9, and Samuel, 6, she recently told the website Well+Good.
"Right now our blueberry bushes are going nuts, so we sneak down and pick blueberries together on the weekends," she said.
The kids also get involved in beekeeping, helping to tend the hives in the backyard.
"My kids have their bee suits and like to get involved with it all—it’s so fun, it’s like a living science experiment," she told Well+Good. "In our garden, we grow tons of fruits and vegetables," adding that the California earth is so fertile they can grow practically anything there. "We can’t stop planting new things!"
The actress, who has co-founded a brand of organic, non-GMO cold-pressed baby food, applesauce and smoothies called One Upon a Farm, traces her interest in gardening and farming with her kids back to her mother, who grew up on an Oklahoma farm, surrounded by cows, chickens and fresh veggies.
"Everything they ate, other than sugar and flour, they grew and raised," Garner said of her mom. "When I was a little girl, my mother always told me and my siblings fantastic, vivid tales of growing up on the farm during the summertime, when they would eat like kings, with fresh produce by the bunches and routine delicacies like homemade ice cream. It’s that same enchanted love for homemade and fresh that defines how my family lives at home today."
Having grown up eating fresh, homemade, nutritious meals with ingredients straight from her mother’s garden, Garner says she wants to replicate for her own kids, and the kids who eat her baby food – to pass along that dedication to clean eating she learned as a child.
"It’s key for us to know exactly what we are putting into our bodies in order to feel good and alive with energy," she said.
Of course, here at Healthy Eats, we couldn’t agree more.
Related Links:
