Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Would You Pay $25 a Pound for Vegetables?

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My husband and I have been trying to garden for a year now.  I say trying because we recently relocated to Tucson, Arizona, and gardening here has a STEEP learning curve.  However, it’s something we both enjoy, so we’ve kept at it, and we’re finally starting to see some rewards. Due to our gardening failures while learning to garden in a new climate, we’re currently paying about $25 a pound for vegetables, but I’m okay with that because I know this hobby will likely pay for itself eventually.

Those Gardening Expenses

Vegetables for $25 a pound?
$25 a pound for Vegetables?

Starting our garden has not been cheap.  We had to create three garden beds, which included the dirt, the pavers for the sides (they’re slightly raised garden beds), and the soil amendment.

We planted in October when the temperatures finally dropped into the 80s, but we planted the wrong vegetables for the season, and we planted in a shady spot when we should have planted in full sun.

All we ended up with last winter was one kale, one Swiss chard, and two lettuce plants.

In the spring, we planted tomatoes that were just starting to blossom when the summer hit with 100+ degree days and scorching sun.  We covered the tomato plants with a homemade sun shade, but we only got 6 cherry tomatoes.  All summer long they didn’t even flower.

Next, we amended the soil further and planted watermelon and cantaloupe starts.  Every time a baby watermelon developed, one of the many birds in our yard ate it.  This continued until September when the birds finally went away.  Since then, we’ve gotten 4 watermelons.

Now, it’s fall, and we are finally getting some produce.  We have baby bok choy that are growing strong, 4 Swiss chard plants, and 8 green pepper plants that have more than 20 peppers on them in various states of growth.

Hopefully our costs will drop or moderate as we learn more about how to garden in the desert.  However, so far, we’ve easily spent $200 for the few veggies we’ve been able to harvest.

Sticking It Out Through the Learning Curve

For someone like me who doesn’t like to spend money frivolously, these gardening expenses bother me.  But there are two reasons we keep trying to garden:

My husband really enjoys it.  I think my husband has discovered his inner farmer.  He loves spending weekends outdoors, puttering in the garden.  Every evening, he comes home from work and waters and takes care of the garden.  It’s a great hobby for him.

The costs should equalize–eventually.  As we learn more about gardening here, we should be able to produce more vegetables.  We won’t have to create the raised beds again.  Our only expenses going forward will be soil amendment each season (so necessary with our desert soil), seeds, and water.  The longer we garden, the lower our costs should be.

Even though it doesn’t feel like it now, gardening will eventually be a hobby that at least costs us only a small amount out of pocket or that pays for itself.

Do you garden?  How steep was your learning curve?  Do you find that the garden pays for itself eventually?

 

Composting; You’re Doing it Wrong

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Each and every year, for the last several years, I’ve said that I plan on finding a space for a compost heap and create one.  Several years ago, I went so far as to take all of the grass trimmings and garden trimmings and dump them into a pile in the back yard.  And that’s where they sat, untended, and somewhat forgotten.  I’m still hoping that this year is going to be the year that I get off my duff and actually create the compost pile that creates actual compost.

Every year, we end up buying several bags of garden dirt for our container garden, and it would be really nice to be able to just walk into the back yard, and load up the wheelbarrow with fresh dirt from the compost pile and add that to the dirt we already have before planting our garden.  A few days ago, I spotted this TED talk, which threw my idea of compost for a little loop.  You’ll have to watch it for the full rundown, but basically, the speaker is saying that we’re doing compost wrong.

How should we be doing compost?

Mike McGrath, the speaker, suggests that the commonly held belief that you just grab all the clippings, leaves, junk mail, and kitchen scraps is wrong.  According to him, those things don’t really compost all that well because they don’t break down very easily.  Instead, he suggests that your compost pile should consist of mainly the leaves from the trees when they are shed in the fall.  All the rest, your kitchen scraps and paper bits, he suggests would be better off in a vermi-composter, or worm farm.

Compost WrongIf it’s Not Broken, Why Fix It?

The method of throwing pretty much everything into a compost bin or tumbler is a pretty old method.  It’s the way that people have been doing it, and suggesting you do it, for years.  It obviously works to some degree, or it wouldn’t have reached that point.  The first few times it failed, people would have decided it wasn’t a very good way to dispose of refuse and would have moved on to something that worked better.  In short, it doesn’t appear to be broken, so why should we go and fix it, as Mr. McGrath suggests?

I think it’s about efficiency.  If you want to take your refuse (lawn trimmings, leaves, kitchen scraps, etc) and break it down into usable compost (a.k.a. super-dirt), doing so as efficiently as possible make some sense.  Of course, most people usually choose one or the other method (everything in a pile, or vermi-composting) so I haven’t been able to find any good examples of someone doing both.  I don’t think that McGrath would have any opposition to a person adding worms directly to a compost pile.  It’s probably not as efficient as having an actual vermi-composting setup where you can harvest the castings and throw them in with the leaves.

How do you Compost?

Here’s the place in this post where you get to help out the readers of Beating Broke.  Do you compost?  How do you compost?  What do you think of separating the leaves and the kitchen scraps into two systems? Too much work?  Ideal?

Time to Plan Your Garden

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Spring is finally here.  The sun is shining a little brighter (and warmer too), and the ground is starting to warm up.  And with all of that, those of us who garden are beginning to get a little antsy to start putting seeds and plants in the ground and begin growing them.  In many parts of the states, it’s still much too early to start planting though.  So, what is a anticipatory gardener to do?  It’s a great time to begin planning the garden and preparing for the planting season.

Maintenance and Clean-up of your Garden

I like to start with the maintenance and clean-up of the garden area as soon as I’m able.  I get to go outside and, while I can’t plant anything, I can begin to prepare for doing so.  There’s always some leaves that fall after I rake for the last time in the fall that can be collected.  We do most of our growing in containers, so it’s a good time to make sure the dead plants from last year are removed (fall quickly became winter last year and I didn’t get a chance to remove them) from the containers.  If you’ve got any gardening structures, like lattices, nets, etc, you can give them a quick once over to make sure that they’re all still in usable condition and don’t need any repairs.

Plan Your Garden

What Will You Grow?

For several years, we’ve been playing with and experimenting in our garden.  We’ve been planting some new varieties of plants that we haven’t before (last year we had Eggplant and Brussels Sprouts) and planting some things in different locations than we have before.  This year, we might do the opposite and refine what we grow a little bit.  There are a few staples that we’ve grown every year that we’ll grow again, like Tomatoes, Potatoes, Green Beans, and Cucumbers.  We added some Snow Peas to the garden last year and they did really well, so we’ll be planting more of those this year as well.  A couple of crops that we have grown in the past, but all depend on space are Carrots and Onions.  We’ve never had a whole lot of success with them, so they might get scrapped to leave more room for more of the other plants.  We’ve also got a few smaller containers that we’ve discovered are a little small for most of the stuff we’d like to grow, so we might throw  some herbs in those and see what we end up with.

Start Your Seeds Indoors

This is one thing that I’ve really struggled with over the years.  For whatever reason, I always end up with most of my seedlings dying before I can transplant them, or with them dying shortly after transplanting.  It is much cheaper to buy seeds and then start them indoors for transplanting, than it is to go and buy plants at the nursery, though, so I keep trying.  I’ll do so again this year, and we’ll likely supplement with a few plants from the nursery just to be sure we get some strong plants.  The growing season (outdoors) here doesn’t really start until late May or early June, so I generally try and hold myself back from planting seeds indoors any sooner than mid to late April.  Even that is probably pushing it, and probably should be pushed out to early May.

I find that giving some thought to the garden before you get to the planting stage acts a little like a budget.  If you’ve got a plan for what you want to plant, and when, you have something to stick to and keep yourself from going overboard with plants you won’t have room for, or that won’t do well in your garden.  It saves you money, and work.

What do you do to begin the gardening season?