The 2009 No-Cost Garden
Posted by carrie_roll
By Anneli Rufus and Kristan Lawson (GreenJoyment community members)
Is backyard gardening the smart new way to drastically lower your monthly food bills while simultaneously helping the planet? Or is it an overpriced hobby that ends up costing more than it saves?
Well, that depends upon the gardener.
Although gardening is heavily promoted as a key to shrinking our carbon footprints by reducing our number of trips back and forth to the store — and hey, even the Obamas have planted a White House “Victory Garden” — no one wants to admit a certain dark secret: Gardening, the way most people do it, can be pretty pricey.
The average packet of seeds costs $3 or $4, and growing a wide variety of produce requires dozens of packets. Pre-sprouted starter plants cost even more. Add in the accoutrements, and growing your own produce can cost more than buying it at stores. It’s even costlier if you try to follow all the recommendations and tips and advertisements for the latest environmentally friendly products. From heirloom seeds to fair-trade tools to biodegradable pots to non-toxic fertilizer to clogs to sun-hats and beyond, gardening could actually plunge you into debt.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We’re taking gardening back to its roots and reinventing it for harsh economic times. We’re making gardening free again.
Because this year we’ve taken a vow: We will try to grow at least half of our food in a garden that costs us absolutely nothing to create and maintain.
We’re cheap. We’re lazy. We’re vegetarians. We want to make the world a greener, cleaner, more affordable place. Hence, the 2009 No-Cost Garden.
We’re scavengers. For us, scavenging is a reflex: Whatever the situation, we automatically ask ourselves, How can I get/do/have this (legally) for free or really cheap? Applying our scavenging principles to gardening, we’ve scored lots of free seeds and tools and made accoutrements from scrap. This year, it looks like we’ll be gorging on arugula, tomatoes, zucchini, chard, Chinese broccoli, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, beans, basil, thyme, oregano and collard greens. We’ve posted a step-by-step crash course on no-cost gardening to show how anyone with even a teensy patch of soil can follow our tips and start their own free garden. And even those without yards can grow their food guerrilla-style on abandoned public land.
No-cost gardening is a new idea for a new era. So let’s eat!
Here are a few pointers to get you started:
- Maximize your growing area. Whether you rent or own your home, try to clear out and make use of any potential gardening beds. The sunnier the spot, the better.
- Save — and plant — the seeds from store-bought produce.
- Find a community “seed swap” near you … or organize your own to trade extra seeds and starter plants with friends, neighbors or coworkers.
- Ask your local ecology center whether a seed exchange is anywhere nearby. These free give-and-take “seed libraries” are growing in number and popularity.
- Use scraps and scavenged items as tools. Plastic juice bottles with perforated lids become sprinklers. Old chopsticks become dividers. Strips cut from plastic yogurt tubs become identifying tags.
- Plant as wide a variety of vegetables, herbs, fruits and legumes as possible. It makes the harvest so much more interesting, and makes your home-grown meals less repetitive.
Read more here at our “Scavenging” blog, where we give illustrated step-by-step instructions for making your own no-cost garden — even if you don’t have a backyard:
http://scavenging.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/the-2009-no-cost-garden/