Gardening to Save Money

Being blessed with a lot of rich soil, this year we planted a fairly large garden to help trim the grocery budget. Not only will it save money, but there's just something about produce fresh from the garden. All the hard work, watching over and nurturing plants, there's just a sense of satisfaction that comes with growing your own food.

Early in the season I bought two mini-greenhouses off eBay for $40. They are well made, and seem like they will last several seasons. I used them to start most of the garden from seed. Most things came up really well, only a couple did not and it was probably that I tried to start them outside when it was a little too cold. I did also buy some tomato plants, a jalapeno plant, two green pepper plants, and some summer squash already started.

And I couldn't resist, I also bought the Topsy Turvey tomato planter. I put one tomato plant in that and two others the same size in the ground. Guess which sprouted the first tomato? Yep, the upside down one! I'm not as impressed with the upside down strawberry planter. I think it could work for some fruits and veggies, but my strawberries just aren't doing that great.

One other thing we did was stagger plant some things like peas and green beans so we have more than one harvest, and not stuck processing too many at one time. I plan to freeze or can a lot of what comes out of the garden to use through the year. I really hope to trim down the grocery budget with this. 

And of course we had to have the one novelty plant. I am growing three giant pumpkin plants. I didn't follow all the advice for growing the record breaking pumpkins, some of them top 1,000 lbs! But I did buy seed of the same stock as the champs and even if it's only half that size we're going to love it!