Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D.’s wife Kris has posted this month’s report on the great gardening experiment. I love these posts! It’s such a hoot to watch their progress and to view all the photos Kris and J.D. put online. One of the insights their experience (and, thanks to their inspiration, my own) has brought is that a garden, properly managed, amounts to a de facto income stream. Yea, verily: an under-the-radar, nontaxable income stream!
This winter (the best growing time in Arizona), I’ve managed to grow a surprising amount of food in a very small space. The only places I have to grow vegetables are a small flowerbed next to the pool and a half-dozen big pots set in the few backyard spots that get direct sun most of the day. But I’ve been harvesting chard and beet greens all winter. The carrots are now ready to eat, and the beets, while less than perfectly successful, will suffice for a few meals.
The trees also qualify as garden citizens. I’ve been scarfing candy-sweet oranges—six to ten of them a day—since last January, and some fruit still remains. The Meyer lemon bore amazing juicy lemons the size of grapefruits, a bunch of which remain to be squeezed and frozen. The lime tree bears almost year-round.
Think of it: one dinky little lemon costs 50 or 60 cents. I’ll have enough juice in the freezer to stock the kitchen until the tree comes back into fruit. Though the freezer is full of grocery-store frozen veggies, I hardly eat the stuff, because I have so much fresh produce growing in the backyard.
Preparing garden vegetables for the freezer is surprisingly easy. The other day I put up a passel of beets and beet greens for future use.
Wash the fresh-picked vegetables well. 1. Bring a big pot of water to the boil.
2. Meanwhile, fill the sink with cold water and add a bunch of ice to make it really cold.
3. Dip the clean vegetables into the boiling water.
4. Watch closely. Let them seethe just long enough for leafy things to turn bright green, or for a couple minutes for things like beets and carrots. Don’t overcook.
5. Using a slotted spoon or strainer, dip the vegetables out of the hot water and quickly plunge them into the icy water.
6. As soon as the heat is chilled out of them, lay them out on paper or fabric towels. Cover with more toweling. Pat dry.
7. When the produce is as dry as you can get it, divide it into storage bags, label the bags with the contents and date, and stash them in the freezer.
Some foods may be better cooked before freezing. For example, a fair amount of butternut squash, baked with honey and sweet spices, resides in the freezer just now. Ditto scalloped potatoes. The beauty of fully cooking the produce is that all you have to do is defrost the stuff and it’s ready to eat. The upside of blanching and freezing it is that you have produce ready to prepare in any number of different recipes.
And the real beauty of it: the freshest of all possible food sitting in the backyard at all times!
To expand on the idea of garden as income stream, I’d like to suggest that to make this work, we need to keep the basic cost of the garden under control. It’s easy for the cost of a backyard garden to outstrip the cost of the best organic produce from Whole Foods. This winter’s farming project points to a few guidelines:
1. Avoid gardening in pots, if at all possible. If you have a patch of ground, use it.
In the first place, most plants prefer to grow in the ground. But more to the frugalist’s point, even if you can get the pot on the cheap, you still have to fill it with dirt. In my part of the country, soil is clayey (sometimes concrete-like…) and doesn’t drain well in a pot. Because potted plants need excellent drainage, you either have to fill the pot with store-bought potting soil (!! expensive) or mix potting soil, home-made compost, and dirt from the ground about a third/a third/a third. The ground is happy if you just spade in some compost or manure.
2. Use seeds.
Plant sets are expensive. Seeds are cheap.
If you live in a place where winters are cold, start your own plant sets in the house before the ground warms up. No fancy equipment is needed for this project: visit Simply Forties and check out Mary’s idea of using TP rolls as plant pots for baby veggies.
You can buy seeds for neat varieties of many vegetables. And in many cases you can get seeds from grocery-store vegetables to grow. Out in the back yard just now, a horde of green things that came out of a Safeway butternut squash are hollering “Feed me, Seymour!” With any luck, these and the cantaloupe plants growing next to them will provide a fine harvest later in the summer.
3.Make friends with other gardeners.
Not only will you learn a lot about growing plants, gardeners often share extra plants with their friends. This is a great way to get free plants (free food!) and a great way to find new homes for extra little critters that grow from seeds or tubers in your own garden.
4. Make your own compost.
After the demise of my composter, I started a new batch in an aged plastic plant pot, which provides drainage for extra moisture. Putting an old plastic pot saucer over the top keeps it warm, fosters anaerobes, and allows me to flip compost over once every week or two. It already has is almost ready to use in the ground. You don’t need to buy an expensive lash-up for composting. A hole in the ground and a pitchfork make a fine low-tech composting system.
Faced with penury, my plan now is to use some space in the Investment House’s backyard to enlarge the agricultural enterprise. M’hijito, a talented gardener, has agreed that this will be OK, and so I hope to get some beans and melons going over there this summer. And with any luck, the Funny Farm here at my house will produce carrots, tomatoes, butternut squash, cantaloupe, basil, onions, and the usual parsley, thyme, sage, mint, tarragon, and marjoram.
Every bite that we don’t have to buy at a market represents a savings ranging from a few cents to a few dollars. This savings is accentuated if you incline to buy organic. So, if you can keep the cost of operating the garden within reason, over time the garden itself creates an in-kind income stream.
I’ve just gotten back from vacation and am trying to catch up with my reading! Unfortunately very few of my seedlings made it through my absence. I think my friend, who had agreed to daily spritzing, came by exactly once. Alas, I have replanted and, hope springing eternal, still plan on a good summer crop of everything! Your chard looks so fresh and wonderful!
My husband wrote some posts a while back about compost: he picks up bagged leaves after the gardeners put them out with the trash!
Also, I am way too lazy to prep greens the way you do. What I do instead is make soup base: onions, carrots, celery, greens (or whatever) cooked in small amount of liquid. Freeze. You can make this into all sorts of soups by adding more liquid (broth? water?), tomatoes, beans, meat, pasta, rice, potatoes … The best thing is that dinner is almost done.
@ frugalscholar: Soup base! yum…good! I’ll absolutely try that. Sometimes I cook chicken thighs for Cassie a blanc, which results in a pot of thin chicken broth. This would make a handy liquid to add to the proposed soup base.
@ SimplyForties: I hope you get some seedlings to grow. They’ll probably come up. It’s funny how people just DON’T believe you when you say certain plants need to be watered every day. My mother-in-sin, who lived about 50 steps down the way from me, volunteered to water a strawberry pot full of herbs when her son & I split for a week in the summer. Around here, if you miss watering a potted plant just one day, it will fry. Yes, sure, yes: she understood that, and yes, yes she’d water it every single morning. And yes, when we got back it was a pot full of dessicated sticks. {sigh}
I guess we get what we pay for!
Very useful post. I linked to it in my 30 Quick, Green and Frugal Meal Planning Resources list.
http://www.itsfrugalbeinggreen.com/2009/05/30-quick-green-and-frugal-meal-planning.html
Bought a pressure canner about twenty years back – best investment I ever made! Fed my family year round from the garden with the help of the canner, some drying, and some freezing. I canned fish, chicken, even pork when it was on sale, I bought cheap veggies, spent week-ends canning like a madman, to get food bargains unheard of and mostly unbelieved by friends and neighbors. I grew beens, canned them as baked beans, did potatoes, ( a real art-form worth learning) rhubarb, peaches tomatoes of all sorts and colors, beets, but not rutabagas, they freeze best, I pickled and sauerkrauted, It was a lot of work, but the returns were much bigger than bonds, or interest on bank accounts, and the sense of security looking a shelves and shelves of next winter’s food, was very satisfying. Never made wine, never got around to it in serious quantity anyway, but did develop a few favorite beer recipes to perfection, along with the home-brewing techniques required, and saved vast fortunes this way , while enjoying clean chemical free import quality beer until diabetes robbed me of this great pleasure. The first few batches of anything, canning, pickling, sauerkrauting, brewing or any endeavor are not the best, the last are! My garden has been anything from 30′ x 30′ down to todays, post-heart attack and stroke size of 10′ x 10′ and growing, and has never let me down, I always learned something new and profitable to me and my family every year for the last couple decades – Keep on gardening, it pays the biggest best dividends of all!