I also want to let folks know that you don’t have to own a yard to garden – I’ve built a site called hyperlocavore.com – and I am here to help you find people to start a yard share garden with. The site is free, and we do our best to match eager gardeners with people who have space for you to grow your own! It’s a win for everyone!

Please visit!

Question: are you putting in a fall/winter garden? We want to this year as we are in mild Northern California zone 8 and can probably grow a lot of stuff, but don’t know when to do it! the books say August but our summer crop will still be growing throughout August! I know it will still be warm in September, but I don’t know how the hours of daylight will affect growth for the fall plants. I need to find myself a “garden coach”!

Since I began gardening years ago I tracked my spending and saving and was surprised how well I did with little effort. I am also a big advocate of all natural products VS the preservative laden stuff on grocery store shelves, so canning and freezing the harvest is easy for me.

I wanted to make a suggestion in regards to growing it all VS a farmer’s market or pick-your-own field. Here where I live in Western PA, there are a lot of farms that raise all sorts of berries and fruits and they have pick-your-own prices and by the bushel prices. You can still save a ton and have fun with the family if you go there to pick rather than cultivate the bushes or trees on your own.

Also, I am lucky to work with several farmers. I have the opportunity to buy fresh picked corn for canning and freezing rather than taking up the garden space at home. The cost for a 20 dozen sack of corn ends up pennies per serving! I am buying fresh beef in the same manner, organically raised for only $2.60 a pound, vacuum packed ready for the freezer!

The time we spend in our six-bed garden would only amount to an extremely part-time job. You see, most of our labor was at the beginning: building the garden beds and fencing. We take a half hour or so every few days to water the garden (if necessary) and to put down organic liquid “fencing.” We spend maybe 15 minutes or less every few days picking herbs and veggies for dinner. In the Fall we’ll compost plants and cover the beds, and later, we’ll have to add new compost and spend time sowing and planting. This still represents less time than we have spent watching movies or doing the household shopping every weekend. In fact, we can produce our corn, lettuce, strawberries, peas, green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, watermelon, fava beans, shell peas, yellow squash, herbs, carrots, celery and cucumbers and STILL host birthday parties and bonfires, go out with friends, take a class, work, catch some television, etc.

Sure, we could be working instead of enjoying our families or reading a great book, but most people don’t aspire to fill their free time with even more work if they don’t have to. I realize this blog is about money, but “getting rich,” in my book, is about quality of life (and food!) as well.

I see gooseberries and currants at the Farmers Market all the time (I usually go to the Wednesday one) — so that’s an idea for your pricing in the future?

The red currant jelly looks delicious. Brings back some really great memories. At our summer house a few moons ago we used make, or boil, out of black and red currants juice concentrate that was then bottled and enjoyed, cold or hot, back in the city throughout the fall and winter.

For my farm share, there is a tomato blight here in New York so we likely won’t get ANY tomatoes.

Even so, we ended up planting snap peas, bush beans, okra, cucumbers, radishes, strawberries, green onions, two varieties of tomatoes, raspberries and thornless blackberries.

We also planted 3 cherry trees (two varieties) just inside our property at the side of our house, along with 2 pecan trees in the front. When they mature they will shade the house, helping with cooling bills in summer in addition to providing fruits and nuts.

Unfortunately, we have been having a cool and damp summer so far, and as a result have been fighting tomato spot and cherry spot.These are bacterial ailments that thrive in damp and cool, but luckily are surface blemishes. The tomatoes can still be eaten so long as you cut off the spots, but they don’t look so hot. The cherry trees have not matured enough to fruit, so it just makes the leaves look bad.

So far, the cucumbers, the okra and the bush beans have produced the best, but the best thing is we have been learning what NOT to do next year.

Scorching heat here has pretty well killed off everything except basil, some chives, one squash plant, one melon plant. The latter two have to be covered every day…everything has to be watered every single day. Tomatoes turned to mush on the vine before they ripened…dunno if they had a disease or just cooked under the searing sun. The squash plant has made one fruit: since the whole lash-up cost about $65, I call it the $65 butternut squash!

LOL! That doesn’t count the $150 water bills.

Anyway, you can use your currants to make your own pectin for making jams & jellies with fruits that don’t have much of their own pectin – like strawberries.

You can find more information about it on the following website: http://www.portlandpreserve.com.

In response to Richby30Retireby40: Gardening is not profitable?? Seriously?? I have 3 kids who eat like starving people. $4 worth of green bean seeds produces enough green beans for our family for a year. All I use to can them is water and a little tiny bit of table salt. The jars they are canned in paid for themselves the second year. A couple dollars worth of zucchini, summer squash, and butternut squash seeds produce tons of food for our family for the small price of blanching them in some water and freezing them. I use this for casseroles, soups, breads, even desserts all year. $10 worth of potato cuttings grow into $50 worth of potatoes. $4 worth of lettuce seeds grew more leafy lettuce than our family and our neighbors could eat this summer. All that saves me hundreds of dollars at the grocery store throughout the year. And this is not even getting into the tomatoes, pickles, and jelly my kids go through. My kids eat approx. 25 qt. of jelly a year. I can make it for less than half the price of the store’s brand jelly. Grapevine was free, started from another grapevine. Sorry to keep going on, but it can be very profitable, if you do it right.

And any organic gardening project, however small, will reduce the demand for petro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

So, is there anything about your gardening project that’s not ‘win-win’?

I’m growing a number of things (in Southern Cal) this year, but I’m really excited about my tomatillos, which I’m growing for the first time. They are just blossoming now, and I’m envisioning home-grown Salsa Verde in about a month.

Salud,

Da-veed

Now we live in the hot interior of B.C. and we get the most fantastic gardens! Our “saucy” roma style tomatoes are going crazy. We let them crawl instead of staking them and they do wonderfully. They tend to ripen all at once so we are preparing for a major salsa and picante saucing session in about a month. We use a propane turkey cooker stand outside to do our canning. It’s the best!

The beets have done extremely well. We’ve canned many and have many, many to go. Thankfully we discovered a tasty Turkish beet salad that is a staple now for summer grazing.

Love your garden posts J.D.

Rgds,

RB

We have been chronicling everything on our blog, from the first days of indoor sowing, to building the beds to harvesting and planning for next year. It was HARD work- exhausting in the early days. Deer and rabbits have cost us our tomatoes and a couple of other plants this summer. Still, we are thrilled with our harvests thus far. We don’t regret the hard work and expenses this year because we’ve learned so much from this experience. We know now how to make next year’s crop even more successful and economical. Next year my goal is to see how much of my vegetarian diet I can supply from my own organic backyard garden.

Blueberry bushes are a great choice for edible landscaping. I consider them pretty low maintenance, but they do need an annual pruning and fertilizer, and to be kept well-watered because they have shallow root systems. It’s been a bit too hot here for ours this year. These 100+ degree days just dried the berries right on the bushes so they never really ripened.

You don’t say where you live, but I’d check to see if there are any blueberry farmers nearby. If so, your climate is sure to be suitable for them to grow in your yard as well.

Do you account for water usage in figuring the cost of your garden?

The rest of the (smaller than expected) garden is limping along. We had some water interruption while on vacation and it’s been slow to recover from that. The tomatoes should be ripe in 2 to 3 weeks, basil, parsley, cilantro and mint have been contributing fabuslous flavors to our salads and pasta. The first corn will be eaten tonight – yum!

Thanks for sharing your garden travails – it’s always fun to learn what everyone else is doing.