If you’ve every struggled making ends meet, I’m sure you’ve noticed what a large chunk food takes out of your monthly budget. Surely you could grow a garden to offset the cost of feeding your family. You’ve looked into starting a garden, trying to find out if it’s really worth it, and over and over again you hear about those delicious $20 tomatoes so and so grew. $20 for a few tomatoes isn’t exactly cheap, so maybe the whole gardening thing isn’t worth it.
Yes, you can absolutely grow a garden that costs thousands of dollars every year. You can buy the super expensive garden beds, with top of the line garden soil and mulches. You can buy fertilizers, fungicides, and pesticides, weed your life away, and only produce as much value as you put in, if that.
Or, you can garden like our great grandparents did.
They didn’t have fancy raised beds, commercial compost or garden soil. They didn’t depend on fertilizers to help their plants grow or pesticides and fungicides to keep them alive through the growing season.
They certainly weren’t rich, but they were well fed.
How to grow a productive garden on a tight budget
A lot of us are going to be working with less than rich, black, healthy soil. We need to start concerning ourselves with the health of our soil if we are going to grow vegetables that don’t require undue babying. Since we won’t be buying in soil and compost we need to create good soil where we are.
Step 1) Stock pile carbon and other organic materials.
If you have a lawn, start saving all of those grass clippings for your future garden. When the leaves fall, or trees are due for trimming, save all of those as well. If you have neighbors throwing away their tree trimmings, be weird and go pick them up.
The goal is to make your own compost. Carbon, brown materials (branches, fall leaves, anything that is removed from the plant dead) is the building block of life and soil. The nitrogen, or green materials (grass clippings, vegetable scraps, anything that is removed from the plant alive) feeds the microbes and soil life that feed our plants.
It will take longer to establish your garden if you spend the time to gather organic materials. However, it’ll save you so much money in the long run. By learning how to compost, you can grow a garden for years to come, never being dependent on store bought fertilizers.
Use animals to build your garden beds
Animals are great for building compost. By using the carbonaceous diaper method, you can create beautiful, rich compost all while keeping your animals healthy and clean. If you have chickens, build them a chicken tractor the size of your preferred garden bed. A 4’x8′ bed is fairly standard, and that size will hold about 6 birds.
Leave the birds over the future garden bed for about a month. Every day add a fresh layer of carbon (wood chips, shavings, leaves, peanut hulls) to the pen. The birds will gently till up that area, scratch around the bedding and best of all poop in it. After that month is up, move them to the next spot you want to turn into a garden bed.
You can plant in that bed immediately, or you can let it sit for a few more weeks before sowing your seeds. Animals are an amazing jump start to improve poor soil to grow a garden quickly.
Use cover crops if animals are out of the question
Let’s say you’re living in an HOA and it’s not possible for you to have chickens, what strategies can you use to increase the fertility of your soil? (You can keep rabbits, though :D) Or maybe you’re a vegan and don’t want to use animals or their by-products as part of your fertility management.
Solution, stock pile organic matter and cover crops.
Cover crops can tolerate very poor soil, and they can be anything you wish, even weeds. Some cover crops will be more vigorous and competitive with your crops, though, so you’ll need a strategy for those. Most likely a shallow tilling from time to time.
Common cover crops include oats, rye, clover, buckwheat and field pea. The clover and field pea have the added benefit of being nitrogen fixers, meaning that they will add some more nitrogen back to the soil than other plants would. Many cover crops are also allelopathic, meaning that they will inhibit the growth or germination of other plants. This fades while the plants decompose, so wait a few weeks after tilling in cover crops before sowing seeds or transplanting.
With cover crops you’ll typically want to grow them until right before they go to seed. Chop them down and mix them into the first few inches of soil. Wait a couple of weeks and start sowing. In between your rows you can dedicate space to constantly growing cover crops/weeds that you can chop and drop into your garden beds throughout the season.
It won’t be the prettiest garden you’ve seen, but it will be healthy and cheap 🙂
Step 2) Diversify your plants for natural pest control
Flowers are absolutely lovely, but they’re also insanely beneficial for the garden. They don’t just attract the bees that pollinate your tomatoes, but they also bring the predators to deal with the pests.
If you want to give pests a buffet, then dedicate one bed to one crop only. However, if you’d rather be the one to enjoy those vegetables, intersperse herbs and flowers between your crops. If you don’t have a flower blooming at a particular time, allow some of your crops to bolt. Brassica flowers, carrot flowers, onion flowers, etc. are all loved by beneficial insects.
If you have a small space, stack your plantings. Pair tall plants with low growing ones to maximize your growing space. For example, under tomatoes grow oregano, thyme, basil, or marigolds. The creeping herbs will provide habitat for insects and small animals, and the flowers will bring in more beneficials.
Let the beneficial insects “work from home”. Set a goal to create an ecosystem in your garden where the insects wake up, hop up onto a flower, walk around for food and then go back home. No long commutes or heavy traffic to worry about.
Step 3) Save your seeds
Seeds aren’t super expensive when compared to the value of food they produce. However, having to buy seeds year after year can add up, and it can be risky. What happens if the seed company you buy from goes out of business? Perhaps supply chains are interrupted and the world shuts down? Remember 2020?
So, saving seeds increases the money saved and provides more resiliency during times of crisis. Plus the seeds you save will become more and more adapted to your unique climate. A seed you buy from a northern climate might struggle in its first few season in a southern climate while the plant genetics tries to adapt to it’s new environment.
When it comes to saving seeds, start with the simplest crops. Tomatoes, squash, corn, beans all have easily harvested seeds. Leaf crops like lettuce, spinach, and brassica’s are also simple, although you’ll need a little more time cleaning those seeds from their chaff.
You don’t have to save seed from every crop every year. Seeds are viable for many years so you can plan to save a,b, and c seeds one year and x,y, and z seeds the next year. Don’t worry if you don’t harvest all of your seeds right in the beginning. It is a skill that can take time to learn.
Do you have any money saving tips to grow a garden you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it in the comments below. 😀
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