Gardening = good for you, good for your wallet.
There are a lot of good reasons to garden:
- You always know the quality of your veggies.
- It takes ZERO gasoline to transport them to your table
- Cost to product ratio for gardening: $1.67 for a packet of cucumber seeds = more cucumbers than I will be able to eat, all summer long. As opposed to seventy-five cents a week for cucumbers whose skin is so thick it hurts my teeth, and they are WAXED. (eewww...) You do need to add in the cost of things you'll need- but don't go thinking about expensive tillers and topsoil... just wait!
- You always know the quality of your veggies.
- It takes ZERO gasoline to get them to your table.
- Watering, weeding, planting, and picking all count towards your weekly exercise goals! :D
- No pesticides to worry about.
But- no full garden. So, instead I had to only pick plants with a high seed to yield, so no corn (only a couple of husks per plant, not worth it. I'd never get enough to keep me in corn all summer anyway) no melons (only a few melons per plant, I'll still end up buying) and no novelty items like pumpkins or gourds- even though I'd only want one plant, they take several square feet for only one or two fruits per plant. Not in my plans- I'll just buy them if I want them, but I'll buy from the farmers market so I know they are fresh (and didn't take 6 tanks of diesel to reach me).
I don't have a yard I can tear up, but I DO have a large front porch that gets a full day's worth of sun. If you've got eight or nine square feet of sun exposure (a porch, a deck, a flat cement roof you have access to) you can have a garden. All you need is some lumber and some soil. You don't even need potting soil- just go to a local greenhouse where they sell soil by the shovel full. To build a box garden all you need to do is hammer boards A and C onto boards B and D, hammer plywood on the bottom and glue some garbage bags down so that the plywood doesn't get wet and degrade. Easy as pie! (The eating, not the making.) Fill the bottom with a clay-rich soil (you can buy this bagged) and the rest with potting soil or soil from a local greenhouse.
It really is easy, and cheap. You may spend a hundred dollars total for all of your gardening supplies- but think of the cost of tomatoes per pound and how they come to you from CALIFORNIA, and you will be willing to spend this money so that you have fresh, yummy ones on your front porch. If the thought of building a box is overwhelming, then just buy a bunch of pots. You'll want to look at the root dimensions of your plants- the back of the seed packets should have them.
Now, you seed. I put my tomatoes in peat pots which I then put in ice cream pails. My mint and sage are in clay pots and won't need to be re-potted, and my Italian herbs will go in a window box. Here they are:
Planting your seeds is easy. For herbs, you just scatter them and cover them in a very thin layer of soil. You'll have to weed out the tinier plants that won't survive, but it's not too complicated. Really! You can do this! For your tomatoes and other vegetables, poke a hole about an inch deep with your finger. Plant three to five seeds. You won't get three to five plants. One or two may come up. Watch them for a few days to see which is thriving more, and pinch the other one. I know, I know, it feels like murder! But it's for the good of your belly. Once the plant is tall and thriving, re-pot it in your box or in a much larger pot. There you go.
This summer I'll have:
- Cherry tomatoes
- Roma tomatoes (two plants, which will yield enough for me to make spaghetti every week and have enough left over to store sauce for the winter)
- Big Beef tomatoes, which I will eat with salt. Mmm...
- Red and green bell peppers (heirloom, NOT hybrid. So much more tasty.)
- Sweet peas (hard to get fresh enough, even at the farmers market. I like mine about five minutes after being on the plant.)
- Green beans
- Sugar snap peas
- Cucumbers.
It's worth it.
Some common misconceptions about potted gardening:
- It takes a lot of water. No- not really. As long as your plants are getting indirect sun in the late afternoons and evenings, you can water them then. The water will be absorbed into the soil instead of evaporated, and it's really not consequential enough to hurt your wallet that badly.
- People who have never gardened can't do it. Not really. Anyone can care for a plant. Make sure it gets direct sunlight- but not too much. Don't drown it in water. If the water starts standing, turn off the hose. It's better to water a little daily than too much weekly. Make sure it's in a big enough pot. Bigger is better than too small. That's all you need to know!
- You have to throw out the soil with the plant, so it's like totally expensive to buy soil every year. No, no, no, no, no. Buy soil ONCE. When the plant dies, cut it off at the stem, don't pull up the roots. Turn the soil with a shovel and break the root apart with a hoe. The old roots will nourish the new plant next year.
- You don't get enough produce off one plant for it to be worth it. Um... like tomatoes? One roma tomato plant will be more than you need unless you want to freeze sauce. Trust me on this.
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Comments
The Italian herbs got moved off the garden rack onto the microwave for that very reason!
But it's so time-consuming to shave them every day.
Tillers are bad-ass fun, though. ;-)
In response to your less silly comment: I'm really grateful to have had a garden growing up. My parents always stressed the fact that it wasn't so long ago when EVERYONE had to work with their hands, everyone got dirty, everyone knew what it was like to sweat and to be hungry sometimes. Of course, it's not entirely true- but it's true enough. I'm very grateful to have the conveniences I have in life, but like my parents I will teach my kids to sweat and be grateful for it.
(I'm just a little evil, I think!)
But maybe I an figure out a place for a pot of tomatoes -- anything else will need a lot of security from the critters.....I'm going to research it.
If I could, I'd get one potted for you. Good luck! I hope you can find a way to manage! (Maybe your local greenhouse can pot it for you and have a cute guy deliver it! Though they'd probably charge out the hoo-ha, so maybe not.)