This year, I shall plant a garden. I’ve messed around with gardening before, but I’ve never been very careful or thoughtful about it. So this year, with the spring weather starting up, I’m going to try my best to do scientific gardening with a careful eye to return on investment. What I mean by that is that if you fall for the seduction of the garden center, you can easily drop hundreds of dollars and you’d be lucky to recoup that in produce. I can’t shake the idea that if this is worth doing, it should improve the quality of my family’s diet AND be more economical than the alternative.
For me, a main motivator for growing my own plants is that I hate dealing with produce at the grocery store. Lettuce either lasts too long and you wonder what kind of frankenfood it is, or the onions you just bought have a lovely rotten spot rendering them unusable. The other thing is if you want fancy vegetables–like leeks–they cost a fortune. And tomatoes from the grocery store are only good enough to be an addition to a dish, not a dish themselves.
I have to admit, the selection of seeds makes you want to buy a ton of different things. I tried to stay focused and keep an eye to things we’re in the habit of eating, or would be in the habit of eating. I got seeds from 2 different sources:
Dollar Tree (Bless their Dollar Tree hearts, they had a little display of seeds, 4/$1)
- Lettuce, Grand Rapid Leaf
- Tomatoes
- Eggplant
The local Grange Supply store (they had chicks–the tweety kind–out for sale and it was very tempting, but I held firm–I need to keep plants alive first). These are all from Ed Hume, a popular gardening brand here in the Pacific Northwest of the US.
- Leeks @ $1.79 (I paid full price for all of these)
- Zucchini (or courgettes, if you wish) @ $1.89
- Scarlet Runner Beans @ $1.89
- Snap Peas @ $2.29
- Tomatoes @ $1.89
I also got, at Lowe’s, a packet of Yukon Gold Potatoes and a packet of onion sets. All the websites say not to use grocery store potatoes for seed but I’m going to do a comparison between them and the ones grown specially for seed. I don’t know why, when I am constantly finding potato plants in my potato basket, I’m not allowed to stick them in the ground and let nature take over. So we’ll see…
I will give updates on these later, but I intend to compare the Dollar Tree 25-cent ones with their more expensive counterparts.
Some gardening links:
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Dude. I need your email address.
I’ve had great luck with window box gardens… but our actual in the ground garden in MD, only really fed the rabbits and ground hogs.