Grow Your Own Food for Dirt Cheap

Like any level-headed woman, I was skeptical when I saw the following headline:


The $600 Garden Vegetable You Can Grow!

Okay, DailyGreen, now you’ve hurt my feelings. We all know there is no such thing as a $600 vegetable, unless it’s a 700-pound zucchini. Take your lies and leave.

Still, I figured the article was worth following up. Although most of us don’t have a 1,600 foot garden, Roger Doiron (founder of Kitchen gardeners International) brought up some good points about saving money, the planet, and our own time by growing some of our own food. He grew 834 pounds of produce, spending $282 on seeds, supplies, compost, and the like over the course of one year. His return on investment was 678% and he saved something along the lines of $2,000.

Most of us don’t need 45 tomatoes in one month, but Doiron’s experiment goes to show that a low-maintenance garden can save us cash and time spent driving to the store. Moreover, we don’t have to wring our hands over pesticides and it’s also a great excuse to get some Vitamin D outdoors!

According to Doiron, the vegetables he saved most on included the following:

• Tomatoes (158 pounds, $630 value in one year—even if they are actually a fruit!)

• Potatoes (142, $211)

• Onions (54, $81)

• Cucumbers (34, $68)

• Basil (4, $32)

• Asparagus (9, $27)

DailyGreen was nice enough to include the article, 8 Perennial Vegetables Anyone Can Grow. To get started, here are a few tips to start your own garden (even if you live in an apartment) for dirt cheap.

1. You can buy seeds, but you can also save them from produce you get at the store or farmers’ market. Not every seed will sprout, but the ones that do got there for free.

2. Don’t bother with store-bought fertilizer. Make your own compost with the Bokashi Bin, which you can get for $55 and store under your kitchen sink. Nobody would guess by the smell (or lack thereof) that you compost indoors. Use this stuff to feed your plants.

3. Rather than running your water bill, store a bucket or pitcher next to the shower. Save the water you would normally waste while waiting for the perfect temperature and feed it to your garden.

4. Get a rain barrel from a garage sale and collect water for your garden.

5. When your vegetables grow and you use them in the kitchen, save the scraps to make your own vegetable stock, as shown here.

---

Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and researcher for College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching single mother scholarships as well as scholarships for students with medical conditions. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop