A strange confluence of circumstances happened when I decided to dig up the old driveway and put a garden in. My friends and I were young hippy-dippies, all into back-to-the-earthing and self-sufficiency, and so this seemed like a “natural” thing to do. It was very much in fashion, anyway.. Living next door to us was an elderly woman who had decided the only way to deal with her chronic migraines was to restrict her diet to nothing but raw fruits and vegetables that had never been sprayed either with fertilizers or with pesticides. This was before the word “organic” meant what it means to us — about 30 years before the present organic craze. There were no farmer’s markets, and grocery stores absolutely did NOT carry anything that was free of poisons and artificial fertilizers. In the entire city, we had one tiny co-op that carried wilted, sad-looking, often blighted but allegedly untainted produce.

So what this woman would do is go around the neighborhood and scrounge vegetables and fruits from people’s yards. If you didn’t say she could have them, she was likely to help herself anyway. And if you were kind enough to agree to give her some, she would keep coming back and coming back, behaving as though she had blanket permission to take anything she liked. One day I looked out the back window and there she was, pulling up an entire row of lettuce — not just picking the leaves, but pulling the plants out of the ground!

This garden was one helluva lot of work. It had taken a year of digging compost and kitchen waste into the concrete-like dirt just to get it to where plants would grow and thrive. In addition to cutworms and big fat hungry caterpillars, we also have hordes of grasshoppers, which at certain times of year will mow a garden down to the ground in a day and a half. To protect the garden without spraying, I built frames that supported canopies of cheap nylon bridal veil fabric, which I’d sewed together into broad sheets and then secured to the ground with lengths of stiff wire cut from wire coathangers, and I ran soaker hoses up and down the rows under this stuff so the plants could be watered. It was an absolutely HUGE job and it required constant care.

So needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled to see my neighbor unearthing the damn thing.

We ended up building a fence around the back yard to keep her out. That was not cheap. Didn’t help the garden, either, since it cast so much shade back there that not much would grow. Eventually I built a brick-on-sand patio over the area.

I don’t guess I want to do that again…

I’d love to be able to harvest rainwater. The other day I saw a story about a guy who had hooked up his rainwater barrel to his drip watering system! Hot diggety.

But what I’d most like to know is how to get all those darn rocks out of the poolside planting bed. Every growing season I pull out all the spent plants and cultivate the ground there, pulling out a couple of containers of old gravel. Within a few months, more of the stuff has worked its way to the surface. Leafy plants such as chard and lettuce don’t seem to mind the stoney soil. But root veggies like carrots and the beloved beets don’t thrive in it.

Regards,
Mike the Gardener

I see gardening as a way to relax and unwind from a high stress day of managing a large banking website. (see my link)

As you mention in your post, your math only includes raw costs, but if you include opportunity costs lost to not working, you’ll come out with much lower numbers.