Money Monday: April 27, 2009

Last year, I faced some pretty bitter disappointments in the fresh food department. I waited in vain for the price of corn to drop from fifty cents an ear. I wanted red and golden bell peppers, but I didn’t want to pay four to five bucks a pound for them. I lusted after the big, juicy beefsteak tomatoes (because I have a recipe for roasted tomatoes stuffed with a béchamel sauce and I can eat those until I fall over in a food-induced coma), but again…holy smokes, the prices!! (Not to mention the ‘eh’ flavor when I did actually cough up the dough for them.)

From leeks to watermelons, it seems that most of my favorite fresh-crop treats were just too expensive for my budget – and that was when we had a lot more money flowing through the old Den of Chaos!

So…this year…we replaced the finest crop of organic weeds in San Joaquin county (behind the broken spa that I refuse to fix because I have already spent $200+ having it repaired three times and Enough Is Enough Already)…



…with a garden.



We’re (hopefully) growing corn, sunflowers, pumpkins, cantaloupes, watermelons, zucchini, summer squash, leeks, candy onions, and carrots in those two beds. Obviously not a ton of any of those, although I admit to being tempted to simply cover all of it plus perhaps another acre or two with corn because I loves me the fresh corn.

What can I say? It has sweet, starchy goodness. And then you put butter on it, and possibly salt as well. Starch, sweet, butter, salt – it’s like, all the best foods in one convenient serving!

Anyway. Inside, I’ve got some cherry tomatoes in the Aerogarden, which is also serving to start my herb garden – the black things on either side of it are loaded up with lavender, mint, rosemary, sage, thyme, parsley and oregano seeds.



The little pots there with greenery? Heh. OK, this is me being a little bit on the nutty side: I had bought two bell peppers at the dollar store, one red and one gold. They were awesome. So I pulled the seeds out of the compost bin, planted them, watered them, talked to them, played Canasta with them, and read them bedtime stories, and viola! Bell pepper plants! When they’re a bit sturdier, I’ll replant them outside – we have plenty of drip-system-accessible dirt still available in other parts of the yard.

This is actually a perfectly decent way to get started with your gardening endeavors. Save a few seeds from what you eat and plant them in small pots, then transplant whatever deigns to grow to your garden. If you’re already eating it from the supermarket, chances are good you’ll eat it from your garden as well (you laugh, but the first time I had a garden, I planted things I do not like and pretty much refuse to eat because, uh, well, it’s a garden, it’s supposed to have radishes…), and you’ve saved anywhere from $1.25 to $2.50 depending on the cost of a packet of seeds in your area.

Once the herbs are well-sprouted and ready to survive the tough outside world, some of them will go in this bed…which is currently keeping the beefsteak, early girl and yet-more-cherry tomatoes out of the way and watered while we continue work on the Den Farm:



What doesn’t go in there will go in the weed patch planter in front of the house – currently a pathetic assemblage of half-dead plants because the front watering system has been OFF for weeks and does anybody listen to me, no, because I have been saying for some time now that the front lawn is looking awfully dead-ish and dry-ish and are you SURE the front sprinkler system is working, dear?.

You can imagine how hard it is to resist the snark when he suddenly announced yesterday that ohmygosh, the front system has been OFF, all this time, even though it was ON, because of {blah blah blah something about plumbing-stuff}.

The next thing to go in will be a small strawberry “tower” (it’s a prefab thing we bought many years ago and then found while cleaning out the garage recently…one of those ‘oh yeah, I remember this thing…huh…why didn’t we ever use this, again…?’ finds), and a couple of dwarf blueberry bushes, which may or may not actually produce berries this year…but, housing market being what it is, I expect we’ll be here long enough and can wait a year or two for our blueberries.

Obviously, this isn’t going to supply all our needs. While we do have a lot more space we could have dedicated to food-growing, and while I’ll admit that the idea of going all self-sufficient has a certain appeal (especially if I can set aside the knowledge that this is backbreaking work requiring a great deal of careful attention, focus and daily oh look, a squirrel!!!…darn, I appear to have spaced and all my plants have died because I got distracted…), we wanted to start small-ish and see how it goes.

So I went through the grocery list and picked out the things that I had balked at buying because I felt they cost too much – hence, things like potatoes, broccoli and celery didn’t make the list, while corn, watermelon and blueberry bushes did.

In some ways, it feels more symbolic than anything else. I suspect the first year of a Garden As Such always does, given the constant $15 here and $50 there spent on things like drip system tubing and fill dirt and soil conditioners.

It’s also great for bringing up insecurities. I now get to worry my socks off about whether or not I’m killing everything we planted. Oh sure, I’ve poured over the instructions and scoured the Internet and anxiously measured the quarter-inch of soil covering those BUT these need half an inch, a hill for this, a trench for that…but let’s face it: I’m going up against an army of plant-chomping bugs, a lovely assortment of funguses and mildews, a drought and my own inexperience.

There’s every chance I’m going to raise a bumper crop of nothin’ over here.

But the way I figure it, even if the “crops” don’t turn out the way I’d like this year, I’m still making an investment in hands-on education. If this year fails, I’ll find out why and go on from there.

Eventually, I’ll be good at this. Eventually, I’ll be able to reliably grow produce in my backyard. Shoot, eventually, I might even be good enough at it that I can actually provide for my family’s basic vegetative needs right in my own backyard.

For the advanced vegetative needs, well, there’s always cable television.