Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Would You Pay $25 a Pound for Vegetables?

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My husband and I have been trying to garden for a year now.  I say trying because we recently relocated to Tucson, Arizona, and gardening here has a STEEP learning curve.  However, it’s something we both enjoy, so we’ve kept at it, and we’re finally starting to see some rewards. Due to our gardening failures while learning to garden in a new climate, we’re currently paying about $25 a pound for vegetables, but I’m okay with that because I know this hobby will likely pay for itself eventually.

Those Gardening Expenses

Vegetables for $25 a pound?
$25 a pound for Vegetables?

Starting our garden has not been cheap.  We had to create three garden beds, which included the dirt, the pavers for the sides (they’re slightly raised garden beds), and the soil amendment.

We planted in October when the temperatures finally dropped into the 80s, but we planted the wrong vegetables for the season, and we planted in a shady spot when we should have planted in full sun.

All we ended up with last winter was one kale, one Swiss chard, and two lettuce plants.

In the spring, we planted tomatoes that were just starting to blossom when the summer hit with 100+ degree days and scorching sun.  We covered the tomato plants with a homemade sun shade, but we only got 6 cherry tomatoes.  All summer long they didn’t even flower.

Next, we amended the soil further and planted watermelon and cantaloupe starts.  Every time a baby watermelon developed, one of the many birds in our yard ate it.  This continued until September when the birds finally went away.  Since then, we’ve gotten 4 watermelons.

Now, it’s fall, and we are finally getting some produce.  We have baby bok choy that are growing strong, 4 Swiss chard plants, and 8 green pepper plants that have more than 20 peppers on them in various states of growth.

Hopefully our costs will drop or moderate as we learn more about how to garden in the desert.  However, so far, we’ve easily spent $200 for the few veggies we’ve been able to harvest.

Sticking It Out Through the Learning Curve

For someone like me who doesn’t like to spend money frivolously, these gardening expenses bother me.  But there are two reasons we keep trying to garden:

My husband really enjoys it.  I think my husband has discovered his inner farmer.  He loves spending weekends outdoors, puttering in the garden.  Every evening, he comes home from work and waters and takes care of the garden.  It’s a great hobby for him.

The costs should equalize–eventually.  As we learn more about gardening here, we should be able to produce more vegetables.  We won’t have to create the raised beds again.  Our only expenses going forward will be soil amendment each season (so necessary with our desert soil), seeds, and water.  The longer we garden, the lower our costs should be.

Even though it doesn’t feel like it now, gardening will eventually be a hobby that at least costs us only a small amount out of pocket or that pays for itself.

Do you garden?  How steep was your learning curve?  Do you find that the garden pays for itself eventually?

 

Stretching Your Produce Budget Further

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Anyone who has made a simple budget has struggled with making their food budget fit with the rest of the budget.  If you attempt to eat healthy, one of the biggest components to a food budget is the produce.  Stretching your produce budget can be somewhat difficult.  Growing seasons are short, and the cost of produce keeps going up.  But, there are a few things we can do to stretch that produce budget, and make it a bit easier on your overall budget.

  1. Stretching your produce budgetStock Up on Sale: buying your produce on sale allows for you to stock up when the item is cheaper, then store it until you need it.   Canned produce is really easy to store.  Frozen only requires a freezer.  And if it’s the fresh stuff, there’s a few things you can do to store a surplus when you do pick it up in season and on sale.
  2. Canning for stockpiling: When you’ve got a surplus of produce, one of the best things you can do is can it to preserve it for another day’s use.  Canning only requires a few pieces of equipment, and a little time learning the process, then you can be off to the races filling your pantry shelves with preserved fresh produce to use later in the year when produce is much more expensive.
  3. Freeze it: Every year, around the end of summer, corn pops up in the backs of pickup trucks and in the farmers markets.  Compared to the rest of the year, it’s really cheap, and it tastes so good!  Unless we want to eat nothing but fresh corn, though, the season is fleeting, and we’re left with no other corn but the commercially canned or frozen corn you can get at the supermarket.  It’s just not the same.  Last year, we bought a whole bunch of corn (4-5 dozen), shucked them all, then cut the kernels off and combined them in a huge stockpot with some butter, a little bit of salt, and a little bit of water, and then cooked it for a little while.  Once it was done, we let it cool off, and then filled quart size freezer bags with the corn and froze it.  Now, if we want a little taste of that sweet summer corn, we just grab a bag, heat it backup and eat.  We did similar things with pumpkin, squash, zucchini, and a whole bunch of other summer fruits and veggies.  All it takes is a little bit of prep time and the freezer room to enjoy the flavor of fresh produce all year round.
  4. Grow it: If you already grow a garden every year, this might seem like a no-brainer of a tip.  But, growing your own garden can be an excellent way to stretch your produce budget out.  Last year, we enjoyed an abundance of tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, onions, jalepenos, cucumbers, and even an eggplant or two from our tiny container garden.  This year, we’re planning on consolidating down to a smaller selection in hopes that we’ll have some extras that we can can as well.
  5. Find a Farmer’s Market: Buying your produce from a local farmer can often be just as cheap as buying at the supermarket.  In some cases, if you order ahead, you can get a deal on bulk orders of produce which is great if you are planning on canning any of it.  It’s also fresher since it only had to make the trip from the farm down the road instead of the farm across the country.  It’s not always a great way to stretch the produce budget, but if you want high-quality produce that will last longer before spoiling, it’s a good place to check out.
  6. Pick it Yourself: A reader on twitter commented that I’d forgotten to add the u-pick farms.  I hadn’t really forgotten them, as they just don’t exist in my neck of the woods and the cost to drive to the nearest one would negate the savings.  But, if you have a u-pick farm nearby, it’s an excellent way to get out of the house, pick a ton of fresh produce (fruits usually) and save a pretty big chunk of change.  Many of the farms only charge about 1/3 of the cost at the grocery store!

Extending your produce budget is important, not just when there are droughts, but as a way to provide healthy options for you and your family to eat year round.

What do you do to stretch your produce budget?

Composting; You’re Doing it Wrong

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Each and every year, for the last several years, I’ve said that I plan on finding a space for a compost heap and create one.  Several years ago, I went so far as to take all of the grass trimmings and garden trimmings and dump them into a pile in the back yard.  And that’s where they sat, untended, and somewhat forgotten.  I’m still hoping that this year is going to be the year that I get off my duff and actually create the compost pile that creates actual compost.

Every year, we end up buying several bags of garden dirt for our container garden, and it would be really nice to be able to just walk into the back yard, and load up the wheelbarrow with fresh dirt from the compost pile and add that to the dirt we already have before planting our garden.  A few days ago, I spotted this TED talk, which threw my idea of compost for a little loop.  You’ll have to watch it for the full rundown, but basically, the speaker is saying that we’re doing compost wrong.

How should we be doing compost?

Mike McGrath, the speaker, suggests that the commonly held belief that you just grab all the clippings, leaves, junk mail, and kitchen scraps is wrong.  According to him, those things don’t really compost all that well because they don’t break down very easily.  Instead, he suggests that your compost pile should consist of mainly the leaves from the trees when they are shed in the fall.  All the rest, your kitchen scraps and paper bits, he suggests would be better off in a vermi-composter, or worm farm.

Compost WrongIf it’s Not Broken, Why Fix It?

The method of throwing pretty much everything into a compost bin or tumbler is a pretty old method.  It’s the way that people have been doing it, and suggesting you do it, for years.  It obviously works to some degree, or it wouldn’t have reached that point.  The first few times it failed, people would have decided it wasn’t a very good way to dispose of refuse and would have moved on to something that worked better.  In short, it doesn’t appear to be broken, so why should we go and fix it, as Mr. McGrath suggests?

I think it’s about efficiency.  If you want to take your refuse (lawn trimmings, leaves, kitchen scraps, etc) and break it down into usable compost (a.k.a. super-dirt), doing so as efficiently as possible make some sense.  Of course, most people usually choose one or the other method (everything in a pile, or vermi-composting) so I haven’t been able to find any good examples of someone doing both.  I don’t think that McGrath would have any opposition to a person adding worms directly to a compost pile.  It’s probably not as efficient as having an actual vermi-composting setup where you can harvest the castings and throw them in with the leaves.

How do you Compost?

Here’s the place in this post where you get to help out the readers of Beating Broke.  Do you compost?  How do you compost?  What do you think of separating the leaves and the kitchen scraps into two systems? Too much work?  Ideal?