Comments on: Garden as income stream

By: Uncle B

Uncle B — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:34:48 +0000

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!

By: 30 Quick, Green, and Frugal Meal Planning Resources — It's Frugal Being Green

30 Quick, Green, and Frugal Meal Planning Resources — It's Frugal Being Green — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:08:43 +0000

[...] Garden as an Income Stream @Funny About Money [...]

By: Carrie

Carrie — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:48:58 +0000

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

By: SimplyForties

SimplyForties — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 03:37:31 +0000

I guess we get what we pay for!

By: funnyaboutmoney1

funnyaboutmoney1 — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:14:01 +0000

@ 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}

By: frugalscholar

frugalscholar — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:38:07 +0000

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.

By: SimplyForties

SimplyForties — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:00:21 +0000

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!