Gardening | Budget Meals, Inc.

Posted by Carol on Aug 9th, 2012 in Book

Contributed by Mark Zacek

Do you remember in the go-go Nineties how the catch phrase for conspicuous consumption was ?living large?? We live in very different times now. ?Living small? is a more appropriate response to today?s economic realities. Many people?s vision of living small is self-sufficiency. But what does self-sufficiency really mean? You may have a romantic vision of ?returning to the land,? thinking of self-sufficiency in pioneer terms. Like Ma and Pa of Little House in the Big Woods. Now that was real self-sufficiency. Or was it? After all, Pa sold furs to buy calico for Ma and gun powder for himself. If Pa was not able to grow, hunt, or make everything his family needed to be truly self-sufficient, what chance do we have? In fact, true self-sufficiency is impossible and even undesirable. After all, if we were truly self-sufficient, we on our ?-acre suburban properties would be out foraging for firewood every day.

I suspect that for most of us, self-sufficiency simply means, what can we grow or provide for ourselves that we normally would be buying? Vegetables? Fruits? Eggs? Wool? Meat? Fertilizer? Compost? Those who live on a farm need no instruction from me on how to provide for their families from the fruits of the land. And those who are truly committed to a more stringent definition of self-sufficiency (alternative fuels to power the house and car, for example) will require resources beyond the scope of this book and can readily find them on the Internet or in a library. But many of us can be far more self-sufficient than we realize on our yards of half acre or less. While this will not result in complete independence from consumerism, it can be healthful, emotionally enriching, and a meaningful statement to our community and our families.

Some of the advantages of a home garden are obvious. There are few things more satisfying than walking out the back door, plucking a red-blushed peach from the tree, and biting into the succulent fruit with the sun-warmed juices dripping down your chin. I always have a childish delight in showing my children the glories of nature by simply pulling up a potato or carrot that has taken the place of that piece of potato or tiny seed that we planted together a couple of months before.? I have the fondest memories of my grandfather and I planting and harvesting vegetables together in his beautiful Montana garden. (Wonderful as my garden carrots are today, they can never taste as good as the carrots of my memory in my grandfather?s garden. Maybe my children will feel the same about the carrots we have planted together). I never lose my wonder that the table scraps my hens are happy to devour turn into the eggs, sometimes still warm from the chicken, that I scramble or poach every morning.

Freshness, flavor, healthfulness, and togetherness; a home garden can provide all this. The flavor of just-ripened hand-picked fruits and vegetables of varieties grown for flavor rather than appearance and pack ability is a great advantage of the home garden. The flavor that comes from heritage tomato varieties, for example, has only recently been reclaimed after having nearly been lost in recent decades. The shapes or color of these varieties are thought not to look enticing on store shelves. And these fruit are also too delicate to survive modern transit. A home gardener of course will trade the flavor of any of the approximately 600 varieties of heirloom tomatoes for the supermarket product. The only transportation that concerns the gardener is getting the fruit from the garden to the kitchen without eating it on the way.

A home garden is likely to be inherently organic. Few gardeners spray with chemicals for bugs, preferring to surrender a portion of their crop to them, pick them off by hand, or spritz them with a soap solution. To nourish the soil, home gardeners often have their own compost piles composed of scraps from the kitchen and garden that are then recycled back to the earth in a perfect life cycle. The healthfulness of the fruits of the home garden cannot be exceeded by any other source.

The psychological health benefits of the garden can be just as important as the nutritional benefits. The feeling of warm, rich, friable soil between the fingers is balm to a gardener?s soul. The informal instructions of a parent to a child in the garden are hours that will reap their own harvest in years to come. The patience and enthusiasm that parents cultivate in themselves will be key to growing a love of gardening in their children.

A well-tended vegetable garden and/or a neatly pruned grove of fruit trees are beautiful additions to your yard and sources of justifiable pride to the gardener. A fruit and vegetable garden can show the same care of arrangement as a well-designed flower garden. Kales, lettuces, and many other vegetables can be regarded as ornamental as well as fruitful. Herbs have been used for centuries in intricate geometries for knot gardens. Rosemary, thyme, lemon balm, and marjoram earn their place in the kitchen as well as in an artfully arranged herb planting. If you are planting a garden for beauty as well as productivity, consider banishing the rectangle or square from your garden shape. Multiple gardens of contrasting shapes and levels lend visual interest to your landscape. Small plots can be linked by fruit trees or flowers beds into one overarching design. Think vertically with multiple levels of raised beds and small arbors and staked vegetables, which increase the productivity of small beds as well as adding tremendously to the visual appeal.

You may be thinking that this all sounds lovely, but is it really making any difference for self-sufficiency or thrift? A beautiful garden is soul-nourishing as well as body-nourishing, and that brings its own justification. The beauty created by thoughtful design is likely to be little more expensive than a casual, rectangular garden. The internet is loaded with information for creating beautiful, low-cost vegetable gardens. However, low cost is relative. Are you truly going to save money by growing your own vegetables rather than buying them? Is it thrifty? If you really are striving for a significant measure of self-sufficiency, the garden must be of substantial size and will require an investment (preparing the space, building the soil, providing structure for raised beds, purchasing garden equipment). Considerable self-sufficiency does not

necessarily mean thriftiness. When your garden is at its peak, the fruits and vegetables in the stores will also be most plentiful and therefore at their lowest prices of the year. A chicken?coop, chicken run, and flock are not inexpensive to operate responsibly.

In my experience, and I think that this is a commonly held truth, you build a garden for reasons that are more philosophical (e.g. self-sufficiency, nourishment of the soul, instilling values within the family) and nutritional than for thrift. Of course, once you have made that initial investment in building the structure of the garden and equipping it, subsequent gardening years will be considerably less expensive. And then, after that initial investment and a few years of soil building, you just may have it all:? freshness, flavor, healthfulness, togetherness, and thriftiness.

Having said this, it is perfectly acceptable to start small when it comes to gardening, particularly if you have never had much of a green thumb. You could start with a container herb garden, for instance, or you could devote a patch of ground to planting your favorite fruit or vegetable. For the best rate of success, start with those fruits and vegetables that are easiest to grow. Starting such plants from seeds is the most economical option.

With some dedication and perseverance, you will see the fruits of your labor. Then you will not only save money on the food you grow, but you will enjoy the satisfying emotional reward of knowing that you were able to grow something delicious all by yourself. Involve your children, and you will find them reaping the very same rewards.

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If you enjoyed reading this, won?t you please purchase a copy of our book Beyond Couponing, or view our Webcast.? The profit that we make from these helps us to help others and pay for our office.? We are in desperate need right now and would appreciate anything you can contribute.? Carol

Source: http://blog.budget-meals.org/?p=503

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