Welcome to the GRS Garden Project. Every month, my wife and I track how much time and money we spend growing food. This is the report for April 2011. (Here are the results for 2008 and the results for 2009. We rested in 2010.)
After a long vacation in February and a wet, dreary March, Kris and I finally were able to do a little work on our vegetable garden in April. Sort of. The weather remained chilly and damp throughout the month, so we didn’t get as much yardwork done as we’d like. (The average high temperature for April 2011 was 4.5 degrees below normal. The average low was 2.1 degrees below normal. Rainfall was 5.04 inches, almost twice the average for the month.)
Waiting for the sun
Though we couldn’t really plant anything until the last day of the month, Kris has been itching to get in the garden, so she’s been doing a lot of maintenance and clean-up. She and I put a total of twelve hours into our food-producing gardens in April (though eleven of those hours were hers). Most of these hours were spent pulling weeds, digging out old overgrown herbs, and getting the gardens ready for planting. (We opted against using the rototiller this year, so it took longer to prepare the plots.)
A big, furry weed in the middle of the chives.
In mid-April, we attended the neighborhood plant swap, where we were able to pass along plants we no longer need (or want) while picking up others that might be more useful. Kris brought home parsley, tomatoes, and lovage (a celery-tasting herb). She also scored lots of perennial flowers. (But we don’t track flowers in our garden project, thank goodness. That’s purely for fun.)
At the plant swap, Mike and J.D. enjoy some fleeting moments of sunshine.
At the plant swap, our friend Craig gave us three kinds of lettuce seeds and some plant-marker stakes made out of old mini blinds. (What an awesome idea!) Though we never have success with lettuce, Kris planted some indoors, and we’re giving it a go. She also has some basil started in a window box.
Blossoms and sprouts
Meanwhile, most of our fruits and berries have begun to blossom, and our early crops are finally starting to show some life. The apple trees, for instance, are in full bloom, as my allergies can attest:
In January, we cut back our blackberries and raspberries hard. (“You’re not going to get any fruit on those this year, you know,” my real millionaire next door told me. “I know,” I told him. “It’s a price I’m willing to pay.”) Now, though, the caneberries are sending up lots of new growth.
The grapes and blueberries currants are blooming, too. The peas are up, though they’re behind, and we’ve harvested a few spears of asparagus.
The peppers are in a container this year so that they can have warmer soil than the rest of the garden will get. We’re hoping this will make them more productive.
Kris’ frugal greenhouse: A garbage bag over the pepper pot
The tomatoes are currently in Kris’ mini greenhouse. They’ll stay there until the garden soil warms — our night-time temperatures are still in the low forties, about five degrees below normal — or until they get too big, whichever comes first.
In short, we’re being patient. When the weather turns warm, we’ll be ready to plant things out. If we’re lucky, by the end of June, we’ll be writing about sunny days and sweet, delicious berries.
Monthly Totals
At the Oregon Master Gardeners plant sale, Kris spent $28.25 on plants for the vegetable garden. She bought:
- nine tomato plants
- one cucumber
- four chili peppers (I picked out two of the plants)
Kris also bought some herbs. “But they’re decorative herbs,” she tells me. “They’re for the flower garden, not for the herb bed.”
I also spent $15.98 on a bag each of potting soil and compost, bringing our total expenses to $43.23.
All we harvested in April was about 263 grams of asparagus. Asparagus goes for $2.99 a pound at the local natural-food store, which means we’ve reaped about $1.73 in “revenue” from our garden so far this year. We won’t really start getting our money’s worth until June, when the strawberries begin to ripen. (I can hardly wait!)
Yearly Totals
Here are this year’s totals through the end of April. (Note that I’ve started a Google spreadsheet to keep track of this data. Posting a screenshot of this is much easier than updating an HTML table by hand.)
Final word
This garden project is not a formal experiment. Kris and I are long-time hobby gardeners, and we have set ways that we do things. This year, we’re trying to incorporate some new ideas from GRS readers, but most of the time we’ll do things the way we have for more than 15 years.
We’re not trying to be 100% organic (though we are mostly organic through our normal practices). Nor are we trying to be 100% frugal. Instead, we’re trying to see just what our garden costs and produces based on our normal habits. We hope the results of this experiment will help us find new ways to economize and to improve our crops.
You can read about my goals for this series in The year-long GRS project: How much does a garden really save?
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This year I am growing butternut squash, leeks, sunflowers, sweetcorn and carrots. I have never had success with carrots (we live in an area with very heavy clay).
The compost is free because it’s just our garden and kitchen waste broken down. The wood for my raised bed was free (wood magically appears in large ugly heaps in my parent’s garden). Seeds cost me about £5 total.
The biggest expense for me in the garden is my train ticket! I live in a horrible student hall in central London so I have to pay £5.80 a go to get back to my parent’s garden in Slough. I do get 1/3rd off my rail fares though.
Gardening for me isn’t about making/saving money, it’s about spirituality. Gardening is good for the soul and helps me re-order my head. It helps me to deal with set-backs and problems (slugs/birds/whatever eating my crops, my cat messing up my beds etc).
I’ve had the opposite problem from you this year- it’s been insanely hot and dty all April and through the beginning of May. So much so that forest fires have been started in my home county!
I’ve been growing my own food pretty much constantly since I was 15 and I’m 21 now. One of the reasons I’m trying to get rich slowly is so I can one day afford to live in a place with a garden! Or even better, a smallholding
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We only have containers on the balcony because we live in a condo. The chives came up quite a while ago and we have been enjoying it until…we saw some aphids on the chives!!! We have been battling aphids for the last 2 years and they wreak havoc on all our plants. So I threw out everything and will start over from scratch this year.
We probably go with the usual herbs this year – chives, basil, mints, and??
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I grow peppers in containers on my deck, quite successfully. But my containers are larger than yours and I only put one plant in. I think you’re going to find those 4 plants crammed into one container are way too dense. They’re going to overshadow each other and not get adequate sunlight. You would get better results with just two pots with one plant in each container, than those 4 overcrowded plants in one pot.
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Someone gave me lovage this year, I wasn’t convinced I’d ever use it but I might give it a try — what do you guys do with it? (Or, if you’ve never grown it – what do you plan to do with it?)
And I’m sure you already thought of this but — just make sure those plant markers aren’t made from the old mini-blinds that shed lead if you’re using them around vegetables and herbs.
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We had a wet late Spring on the east coast, too, probably about 10-12 days later than usual. It’s starting to warm up now so I’ve started getting my seeds in the ground. So far I have about a 1/3 of what I usually grow in the soil. My asparagus don’t look nearly as good as yours do. The bed was getting old so I added 10 new plants this year.
Following the lead from native americans, this year I tried enhancing the soil with fish bones. I’m also adding compost tea to my new experiment list.
Each of the laying chickens have been doing their job reliably. I’ve been using eggs in many new tasty recipes. Chicken manure now has its own dedicated compost bin near the garden. When its ready, it can go right into the garden
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Ooh, thanks for the mini-blind idea! That’s brilliant.
Our garden is a mess this year. I foolishly convinced my husband to start planting a month ago. We’ve had six inches of rain and several freezing/near-freezing nights since then. Not a single herb plant germinated, and I think four of five tomato plants died. We’ll probably be doing some replanting this weekend.
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I’m so jealous! We have a small yard that I’d like to turn into a garden… hopefully soon.
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Thanks for the update!
I can’t indulge my gardening bug this year, so I’m enjoying seeing others do so.
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I’m so glad you’re sharing these posts! We’ve been vegetable gardening since we moved to portland a couple years ago, and still have a lot to learn.
One of the things we’ve learned makes the garden most financially successful is 1) buying plants that are known to do well in your area, and 2) buying plants that are typically more expensive at the grocery store. We don’t bother growing carrots or potatoes, because they’re very cheap most of the year, but we plant lots of tomatoes and pepper plants, since those tend to be more expensive.
I noticed you planted some pepper plants – last year we had great success with a russian heirloom called “healthy pepper” that we ordered from Territorial Seed. It was bred for cool, cloudy summers, and it lived up to its description. While the other bell peppers barely produced, this one was loaded with peppers all summer long. You should try it!
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Ours is also starting slow but we are hoping for better weather.
http://javafoto.com/wp/2011/04/seed-farm-status/
Never tried asparagus. Did you start them from seed?
Good idea on the blinds! I see them at Goodwill from time to time.
In the meantime, we are fighting our HOA who is against vegetable gardens
.
Strawberries, blueberries, and perennial herbs are looking good.
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While I understand you and your wife enjoy gardening for the sake of gardening, I am curious as to why you don’t include the cost of your time when you do your spreadsheets? Even at the minimum wage, the results would be different, though I have to admit, vegetables you’ve grown in your own garden are priceless.
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Hi Catherine,
To me, it doesn’t make sense to charge minimum wage in this calculation simply because if I weren’t working in the garden, I wouldn’t be doing some other income-producing activity. In fact, if I didn’t spend so much enjoyable time in our yard, I’d likely spend more money doing other activities elsewhere. It’s hard to calculate the physical and mental benefits of a hobby such as this one, so we simplify by only comparing the tangible products. Similarly, we don’t count the cost of gasoline or shopping-time when we price the food from the store. Yes, we are making some simplifications, but we think they’re reasonable given the purpose of our project. Thanks for reading GRS!
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I admire anyone who grows their own food. My sister does–half of her 2-acre backyard is fenced in and pretty much every usable inch is planted in something edible or beautiful. I, sadly, am not as inspired. The pots are still sitting from where I attempted two years ago to grow peppers and tomatoes. I had a harvest, but the interest waned.
Whatever did you do with that gorgeous big furry “weed” that appeared? If the weeds in my yard looked like that, I’d be happy!
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I’m reading Dan Ariely’s Upside of Irrationality right now. In it he talks about how we enjoy things more when we put some effort into them. His example was cooking a meal from scratch.
I suspect the happiness quotient would go way up if they measured people making home cooked meals from their own garden.
BTW, I’m very jealous of the asparagus. I just put in a bed this year and can’t wait for harvest next spring.
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This weather has pushed back our garden as well, I am planning to work on it this weekend so this was a timely post for me. I have planted a basil plant (in a container) that I just moved outside. I still have set up the garden and buy some other plants. Because I am still new at gardening I buy plants and not seed. Though it is not frugal, it makes it easier on me and that is important to me while I learn. Maybe in a few years I’ll try seeds.
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I see someone else already mentioned it (and I hate after a lovely post like that having my comment be on one tiny portion).
If those are vinyl mini-blinds, just don’t use them. It was a big issue in the 90s and it looks it still is an issue: http://www.state.nj.us/health/iep/lead_miniblind_alert.shtml
I just wouldn’t take any chances on adding lead to my soil!
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Thanks for the heads-up about the lead possibility. The plant stakes our friend made are from old metal, not vinyl, mini-blinds. I’m not seeing that these are included in warnings, since the lead was added as a stabilizer for the plastic. If you find conflicting info, please send it along.
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Thanks for continuing to make posts on the subject of gardening. Most of this is beyond my experience, but today I got “Square Foot Gardening” from the library. Hurray!
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I love the updates! We’ve done some haphazard gardening in the past, but I think we haven’t put in the work to condition our soil properly and thus don’t get great yields. We’re going to be out of town for most of July. So, we’re just planting a few things. We have some seeds leftover from last year, and we’re putting them in pots with a “we’ll see what happens philosophy.” We’ve got jalapenos, red peppers, peas, and lots of flowers. I think we’ll also buy a tomato plant or two because we love tomatoes.
I hope someday to have a garden more like yours. But we’re still young, don’t own a house, and move around a lot. If we ever settle into living in one place, I’m sure we’ll develop more of a garden.
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A frugal gardening tip: No need for boughten fertilizers if all your soil needs (like many soils in humid areas) is nitrogen. There’s a perfect, abundant source in what we all do first thing on getting up in the morning. Works wonders.
Also, never put fertilizer on your garden without checking to know what your soil needs vs. already has in abundance. Plants need more of only the “limiting factors” (that is, the nutrients that are scarce) — more of the already abundant nutrients won’t do anything for them.
Finally, never buy a testing kit at the store; instead, use your state’s ag extension service for free (and much more accurate) soil testing. There’s an entire department in most state agriculture agencies devoted to nothing but home vegetable gardening. Use it!
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The past two years we had a community garden plot, about 720 sq ft. We’ve since bought our own house and moved and are starting from scratch. Every bed has to be dug, a fence put in (we’re in the woods, with lots of critters) and we’re loving it. We have more space than we could ever use. We’ve managed to get seven 8×3′ beds dug and one 12×3′ bed for asparagus. Putting in roots here for the long term is a lot of fun, even if we can’t reap the rewards for a while. We hope to get at least 4 more beds dug by June, but it’ll be tight.
I don’t keep track of how much time we spend in the garden, since we would otherwise be goofing off or slacking, and certainly not going to the gym or spending quality time together. Our time in the garden together is some of the best we’ve ever spent with each other, and getting exercise, sunshine, and food out of it is just bonuses.
I keep track of expenses and harvests out of curiosity and to satisfy my love of spreadsheets. 
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I’m gardening for the first time this year. I live in an apartment but my downstairs neighbor and I are sharing a small plot, plus I have an additional container garden. I’ve been trying to track/journal my progress on folia a gardening social network (I’m EmilyLouWho there). I like that it tells me when to expect plant milestones such as sprouting or harvest. I’m pretty sure folia is the key to my not severely neglecting my little seedlings. I tried starting from seed: tomato, basil, parsley, cilantro, and rosemary. Only the tomato and basil (and kinda parsley) took off. I ended up buying some larger herb plants at a sale last week and put those out in the planter, everything else is still on my bedroom windowsill. I can’t wait to kick them outside.
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Here in Mongolia we had snow last Wednesday, but it’s melted now and will hopefully stay warm for at least the next few months so we can get our garden going.
On our housing compound here in UB, there’s a small quonset shaped area that has 14 raised beds available on a first-come, first served basis. We’ve worked a plot and a half the past two years with moderate success growing salad greens, carrots, radishes, basil, chives and a few ears of corn! We were given many of our seeds from those who moved on and bought some ourselves. It’s basically a hobby for me and about the only form of recreation we indulge in. We spend at most around $100/year on soil, seeds and fertilizer, but always have things left over for the next year, and have been given supplies by others. For me, it’s a joy watching what grows and working in the soil; the harvest is just a bonus.
Based on what others here have successfully grown, this year we’re added peas and a quick growing summer squash to the mix.
It’s a challenge to get all the way from sowing to harvest. Invariably, just as things get going really well, we are likely to have a cold snap, and as our quonset garden’s door doesn’t close well, we may overnight see a flourishing crop devastated by frost.
Anyway, we enjoy just getting out and doing what we can as there’s not much other outdoor recreational opportunity nearby. Balcony container gardens do fairly well and we had some lovely flowers the past two years. It’s often windy though and sometimes there’s hail so we just take it day-by-day and enjoy it while we can.
Bugs, such as aphids and fuzzy white flies are real pests but as we only have insecticide from China available locally, we’re looking at other ways to deal with them. I recently ordered a bottle of neem oil which I’ll mix up with water and liquid dish soap and try this weekend on our container rosemary and see how that works.
I really love your garden posts and all the comments from readers. Lots of ideas that we’re saving for when we retire in a few years and can actually settle in one place and really get our hands in the soil!
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I love reading your updates on the Garden Project. I’ll be 29 this year and my parents always had a garden. Growing up I hated helping and vowed I would never had one. A year and a half ago I bought a house and last summer I started out with two tomatoes plants. This year I have a 12X6 plot with onions so far. I don’t want to go too far because I don’t want to get overwhelmed and discouraged by the work, but I’m so glad I am gardening my own veggies. I plan to put tomatoes (that my Dad started, I’m not getting into that yet…) as well as lettuce and kolrabi. We have rasberries out back also that were here when we moved, which I am so happy about! We had a VERY cold and VERY rainy April also. The onions went in the 2nd or 3rd weekend of April and are about 2-4 inches tall now. I also planted flowers this year, which I hadn’t done since we moved in. I’m getting there! Thanks for all the info and good luck!!!
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For those who love to garden, and I mean, *love* to garden, the time spent in the garden is of inestimable value.
@Catherine – instead of trying to calculate the cost of time in wages, I prefer to calculate my savings from not having to seek professional therapy.
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I was impressed with the relativelly few amount of hours you spent in the garden. I assumed gardening would require about double that. Inspiring.
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Just built my first raised bed yesterday. It’s 4X8. I will be using the square foot method. I hope it goes well. My first vegetable garden. I planted most things from seed but my peppers were from seedlings I purchased.
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I’ve been reading grs for quite some time and I especially like the garden project. I just joined a community garden this spring so now I have my own 4×8 plot. The midwest has been having an awful spring with lots of rain and cold. With the asparagus, did you start from seed or do you use starter plants?
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Since we are only in our second year of gardening we definitely aren’t close to breaking even. Things like raised beds, apple trees and berry plants are a long term investment. It’s also important, if you are growing organically to calculate the potential worth of your yields accordingly. Last year I was discouraged at how much time and money I was putting into my garden when compared to the market value of the vegetables I produced. But when I compared it to the market value of organic produce, which can be pricey in our area, I felt like I was getting more for my money. I’ll feel really good when I get my own strawberries and blueberries since those are especially pricey around here. I don’t usually buy organic produce because we can’t really afford it, but I love knowing that our daughter is getting garden fresh organic produce when I grow my own.
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This will be my first garden project, and also my wife’s and my first garden together. We eat a lot of cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers, so the main idea was to get those three planted. Of course we are looking forward to some herbs as well.
I started in February with seeds in one of those starter kits you can use inside. There are 72 boxes, and many of them had 2 seeds so we should have a nice amount of plants to choose from and even give some away!
We planted sweet and hot peppers, spinach, lettuce, yellow and green summer squash, cucumbers, watermelon, two kinds of tomatoes, and green beans. For the “wouldn’t it be fun if” category, I planted 3 coffee beans and 2 mandarin orange seeds. For herbs, we planted mint, oregano, marjoram, basil, cilantro, and parsley.
Of the seeds we started, the sweet peppers have all sprouted and are a few inches tall, and the squash is doing extremely well. Everything else is just barely coming up, if at all…
Separately, we have a blackberry bush that I transplanted from my parents’ house last summer that I cut *waaaay* back and is now flourishing. We also have four napa cabbage plants that I’m excited to see doing well.
The plot we have has been tilled under twice: once in November and once a couple weeks ago. I had been putting yard and food waste on it for composting, and we need to turn it over once more before transplanting the sprouts.
I’m not sure if I have a green thumb or not, but the GRS garden project is what inspired me to give it a try. Here’s hoping we all have successful gardens this year!
-j
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As you know it has been a wet and cold start of the season so mostly it is just fennel and the onion family out in the garden right now. This year though I have a grow box to get my tomatoes, and peppers to start from seed. Maybe that is something Kris might want to make as it allows you to start those warm loving plants early for swapping (or selling) and you do not need to buy starts. Also this year is the first year that the cherry tree is flowering, not expecting too many for harvest (brds, bears, raccoons, etc.) but it makes me happy.
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That’s something I plan on doing too, David. I started extra specifically to be able to give away, and we also want to sell a few tomatoes in our neighborhood. I want to harvest pepper seeds to try to sell some plants next year.
-jason
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I’m doing the same thing on my blog. This is the first year I am keeping track of what I grow and it has been a great learning experience. I have gardened for years but apparently rather unproductively. Right now we are getting chard, basin, chives, carrots, peaches, tomatoes, onions, and zucchini from our garden. We are in Phoenix, AZ so we can garden year round.
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We live in the far north of BC where we usually still get snow up until the end of May, so everything I’ve planted so far has been planted inside. Last year I only did tomatoes, but so enjoyed it that this year we are doing a few more things. We have lots of tomatoes, peas, basil, parsley, spearmint, marjoram, thyme, chives, and oregano. This is always supplemented by the produce we get from my fiancee’s grandparents’ farm – where they grow 3 different kinds of potatoes, yams, lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, 2 kinds of carrots, onions, and beets. We live in a rented townhouse so everything has to be in containers, but with having to start everything inside anyway, it’s actually more practical. Right now we have our dining table covered in pots and I’m just itching to see it all go outside to flourish. The only problems I’ve had so far is that I only got ONE seed to sprout for both oregano and marjoram, and the chives seemed to take a really long time to sprout, which makes me feel like they’re a bit behind where they should be. I’m not tallying up the costs, it’s just something I really enjoy doing. One day when we have our own place with a garden I’d love to do what you and Kris are doing…and maybe even add some chickens and goats to the list. I love the idea of being mostly self-sufficient.
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What a beautiful furry weed you were able to grow in your chives!
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I notice you spend money for soil/compost. Why not have a compost pile? I live in town and garden on my roof terrace. Even so, my garden waste and kitchen scraps give me enough compost for my needs. I produce much less trash and am very happy not to have to haul bags of compost home from out of town.
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Oh how I love the GRS!
I should compare as well…but have already started, so I cant do it this year.
So far this year, we spent less than $20 to get a flat of veggie plants and a couple of seed packets.
Last year, when we built the garden and got the good soil, it was over $300! I know that the garden will be around for many – many years so it will just take some time to recoop the costs.
Ever thought about raising your own chickens? We are giving it a go this year and so far, it’s so much fun! Just waiting for those eggs to start coming!
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More details on the garbage bag greenhouse! Looks perfect for when it gets a little cold outside!
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This year has been rainy and cold here in Iowa and evybody has been behind. We finaly had a warm dry week the first week of May and LOTS of field work (and garden work) got done. Was 98 and windy on 05/10 in central Ia. Is 48 and mist at 8 a.m. on 05/14. Hard on plants and looks like it may be a tough year. Keep the post comming evryone. Good luck to all this year!
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