Frugal Friday: The Frugal Gardener

I love red peppers. I love to roast them and roll them up inside chicken breasts, I love to chop them up raw and toss them with salads, I love to use them in place of green peppers in recipes like chili and spaghetti sauce. But I don't love paying $1.50 for a single pepper. That's just nuts.

Our family eats a lot of fresh produce. We have salads a couple times a week, with $2.50 romaine, never mind the $1.50 a pound tomatoes and the carrots and cucumbers and onions...so while it was still chilly, Michael and I decided that this year, we'd grow a garden. It seemed the easiest way to lower our grocery bill without changing our eating habits. I'm not much of a gardener, so this required research. I knew our clay soil was pure crap, and tilling and amending and de-stoning it would be pure hell and I'd give up before I even got started, so I looked into building raised beds. I found this site that gave really great instructions on building simple beds, and used those instructions to slap together these:


Each bed is 4'x 8', and cost $12 in materials to build (3 pieces of 8x8x2 lumber) and $17 to fill (1 block of peat and 10 bags of top soil). While that is quite a bit to spend up front, this is money I don't have to spend again when I plant next year, and the years that follow. They look naked right now, right? Well, you have to look closely:


That's a baby mustard green. I also have spinach, carrots, broccoli, collards, turnips, and lettuce poking through the soil already (all started from seed--the frugal way to go), and in the basement under lights, I have these:


Two types of tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers and jalapeno peppers, marigolds (for the creepy-crawlies) and beans to climb up my bean trellis. Outside of this picture are squash--yellow crookneck and zucchini. And herbs--parsley, cilantro, basil, and thyme. I have an oregano plant left over from last year's pot on the porch that I'm transplanting into the garden. I was alerted to this site about outdoor winter sowing of seeds a little late for this year, but next year I plan to use that technique to save on electricity. And that site also has some great information and links about seed saving, which I plan to try as well.

So, that's my garden. As much as went into the start-up costs, I think I should see all of it returned by late summer in savings at the grocery store.

Now for Free Gardening:

Yesterday, Michael and I mulched our beds and added 24 plants to the entry garden without spending a dime. How? Our county has a mulch yard. You just bring a truck and a shovel and take all the mulch you want, for free. Check with your county's extension office (contact information can be found here) to find out about any free resources available for home gardeners.

And the plants? We just dug up some perennials and split them. Eight years ago, our builder installed three of these near the front door:

Those three plants are now over 40 plants. Don't worry if you don't already have some plants to dig up and split. You can stretch your gardening dollars by purchasing a single perennial from the garden center and splitting it (into two? four? Maybe more, it really depends on the roots and type of plant) before installing in your garden. I just use scissors or a small spade to cut through the roots.

The next item on our frugal agenda is setting up rain barrels. More research coming.