Yesterday it was looking a little yellow, the season being August. When it’s hotter than a three-dollar cookstove around here (the norm for the low-desert climate from May or June through mid-October), plants living in pots have to be watered every. single. day, no exceptions. And they need to be watered early in the morning, before the sun starts its daily baking process.
But…in August we get some humidity. This means that not all the water evaporates out of some pots, so plants that don’t like wet feet can show symptoms of overwatering. Like, for example, yellowing leaves.
So I decided to hold off watering the squash for a day, though left the shade cloth over it.
This morning—twenty-four hours later—it is stone dead. A stiff squash. A squash that has gone to meet its maker.
A couple of its viney arms were still clinging to life, having rooted in the sandy quarter-minus crushed granite that is my yard’s desert landscaping. Briefly I considered snipping those free from the dead mother plant and just continuing to water them. But really: what for? The original point of this exercise was to see whether seeds from a particularly delicious grocery-store butternut would grow in the back yard.
Most frugalists and gardening enthusiasts seem to feel that growing vegetables in the backyard (or on your apartment balcony) is a good cost-saving strategy. But I wonder.
After having tried to grow vegetables, with moderate success, for the past three years, I’m beginning to think the cost of preparing not-very-fertile soil (or of buying big pots and filling them with commercial soil, or a combination of commercial soil, clayey dirt, and compost), fertilizing, composting, and watering outweighs—maybe even far outweighs—the cost of buying organic vegetables in an upscale grocery store.
Consider: before the great bee fiasco of aught-eight, I had a composter given to me some years ago by La Bethulia. The price of this doughty contraption at Gaiam, where she bought it, is around $200. You can get something very similar at Amazon.com for $123. This was what got me started trying to grow veggies in the backyard. I once had a very successful organic garden, back when I was a young thing. But that was in another time and another place.
Gifted with the Gaiam composter, I decided to try again. And again. And again.
A small, rocky flowerbed by the pool has served to grow a few hardy herbs, chard, some puny carrots and beets. Except for the thyme and the chard, few of the plants thrived. A previous owner filled the bed with gravel, which I shoveled out and carried away…but no amount of shoveling has ever gotten rid of all the stones. As the weeks pass, more pebbles work their way to the surface, so at no time is this old planting bed free of rocks. Digging compost and commercial soil into the dirt doesn’t help significantly. Tomatoes absolutely will not grow there. Nor will they grow in any of the other four flowerbeds in the backyard. Within weeks of being introduced to this spot, pea vines poked their little green heads out of the ground, looked around, and then keeled over and died. The chard, though, did very well.
So did the water company: $128 at this time last year; $108 last month; $80 bills during the (very wet!) winter.
Knowing this spot was too small for the butternut squash I’d decided to grow from seeds scavenged out of a grocery-store specimen, in the spring I bought a big plastic pot at Costco—price was $21.65, according to Quicken. At Home Depot, I spent $18.33 for another pot and dirt to accommodate some cantaloupe seeds. Couple weeks later, another $3.98 covered some hose connectors. I had fertilizer, hoses, and sprinklers on hand.
Not counting the last three items, we’re into the squash and cantaloupe for $43.96, plus the cost of the water, which I expect by now has come to around $30 or so. These plants have to be watered every. single. day if they are to survive 115-degree heat. Even if we figure a more conservative $20 for the water, the squash, the cantaloupe, and some nearby potted tomatoes (whose fruit fried on the vine), chives, onions (dead as onion-flavored doornails), parsley (gone to seed), and basil (the only plant that’s really thrived—also by dint of once- or twice-daily watering) have run up a bill of $63.96.
So far, the squash has set two infant fruits, one of which withered and died on a day when I didn’t get outside to water before noon. One five-inch-long butternut squash survives. The plant still makes big, nifty yellow flowers, but none of them come to anything. The cantaloupe has brought forth nary a melon. The tomatoes set some fruit, but they turned to tomato soup on the vine as soon as the weather heated up. I harvested two of these, neither of which was very good to eat. Onions cooked in the pot. Chives are hanging in there, just. The basil, as basil is wont to do here, has run amok, and that’s nice. But…uhm…how much basil, really, can you eat?
What we have here, folks, is a $64 butternut squash.
One, count it, one (1) squash
IMHO, you could buy a heckuva lot of fancy organic squash at Whole Foods for sixty-four buckolas.
Well, don’t take my word for it. Let’s examine the experience of more gifted gardeners living in a balmier climate. I recently came across The Boston Food Garden, the chronicle of a gardening couple who, by the looks of it, have had good success with their project.
By May 26, they’ve spent $208 on this summer’s garden. These are evidently experienced gardeners who probably have learned the most efficient ways to plant, likely already have prepared their own compost, and who probably own a collection of gardening tools. A little over a month later, on June 19, they harvest $25 worth of vegetables. They’re beautiful—nay, enviable veggies. They’re organic. They’re a real accomplishment. And it will take our couple 8.32 such harvests to recoup their $208.
Will they get eight and a third harvests during a Massachusetts growing season? Sure, if the garden yields about four harvests a month, assuming a New England September brings an end to veggie lifetimes. It might produce that much; maybe even more. But meanwhile, they’ve put in an enormous amount of work…and again, we don’t know what they’ll spend on water, fertilizer, composting, and various organic schemes to beat back marauding insects. Nor do we know how much time they will spend in the garden, or the potential earning value of that time. All those things will add significantly to the initial $208 investment.
Okay, okay! I concede that in addition to the satisfaction of growing your own (which is worth a lot) and the opportunity to grow some unusual and heirloom varieties unavailable at even the swellest of Whole Foods or farmer’s markets, the home gardener does her part to save the planet by cutting the amount of diesel and airline fuel needed to haul food to market. And that also is worth a great deal.
But still. From a purely selfish point of view—how much it costs you as an individual to buy food at a store vs. how much it costs to grow it in the backyard—you could buy an awful lot of organic butternut squash for $64, and an awful lot of fresh strawberries, peas, and greens for $208.
Thought this was gunna happen. Yesterday the City’s water department sent me a second bill for this month, bringing the total hit to $214.
Cute.
Earlier this month I learned that someone had turned off the water service to my house and restarted it in their name. The CSR at the water dept thought I was a new tenant in the house. I explained that I’ve lived here for five years and have no intention of moving soon. She said they’d fix it.
So last week along came a bill for $130. That’s about normal: though it’s the highest bill I’ve ever had in this house, it’s only five bucks more than last July’s, and the water rates have gone up twice over the past year. Yesterday—Saturday, of course, when no one’s in their business office—I got a bill on a different account number with the same read date, dinging me for another $87.34!!!
The $130 bill is unitemized: where it’s supposed to list the number of gallons used this month and last month, it says “0.” The $87 bill shows I used 2992 gallons, about 15 percent of the normal amount for the dead of summer.
I suspect they’ve added the “someone’s” water bill to my normal bill.
Happy day. Now I get to spend half of Monday morning doing battle with those people, and probably getting nowhere. If they give me any guff, I’m calling the state AG’s office and reporting that someone stole my identity to get free water.
The water bill is normally astronomical at this time of year. We’ve had day after day of 115- to 118-degree weather. Every plant in the yard has to be watered every single day, and some potted plants have to be watered twice in a day to be kept alive. I’m determined to see the butternut squash through the summer: it has some tiny baby squash, and if it survives, we may get some fall produce from it.
The tomato plants are still alive, but their fruit literally cooks on the vine. The three vine-ripened tomatoes I’ve salvaged have tasted sweet but the pulp is strangely dry: unjuicy tomatoes. La Bethulia was right that chard will live in the heat…but it’s very, very unhappy stuff. The basil and the thyme are OK. Everything else is suffering terribly.
I could have bought a year’s worth of fancy vegetables at Whole Foods for what the water company is charging me this month!
Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him.
Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack of work here, and partly because the rabid Sheriff Joe’s publicityracist anti-undocumented worker campaign has resulted in so much harassment for Latinos that people who jump through all the immigration hoops to enter the country go to friendlier locales. Gerardo himself is very smart and very good at what he does. But some of the characters he’s hired lately have been annoying. He does a lot of the work himself, and so he’s not riding herd on these guys—and they’re guys who need to be watched every minute. The result is not always ideal.
Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, the dratted palm trees around the pool have gone into a reproductive frenzy. Why people plant palms around swimming pools (or anywhere, for that matter) beats me. They’re one of the messiest trees around. They grow out of the top, sprouting a new topknot of fronds each spring. The previous year’s growth then dies, creating an ideal nest for cockroaches. At the same time, the plant springs a crop of long flowering wands, which drop millions of tiny, crisply sharp blossoms all over the ground and into the pool. The things are too small to be caught by most pump pot and skimmer baskets, and so they get sucked into your pump. Not good. Worse: the fertilized flowers produce BB-sized seeds. These rock-hard little fellows also drop into the pool, where the pool cleaner picks them up and chokes on them, resulting in a nice repair bill.
So, once a year you have to get a guy to come round and trim the palm trees, at rates ranging from $25 to $45 apiece. Some people have them taken out, but in a yard like mine, where the pool is built within a couple feet of the wall, removing the stumps would pose quite a challenge. Besides, in such a confined area there’s not much else you can plant that will cast even a modicum of shade.
Gerardo was doing the job for $25, very cheap. So I cringed at the thought of having to track down someone else to do the palms and, BTW, the monthly yard work.
At this time of year, dozens of itinerant workers roam the neighborhoods looking for palm tree work. They litter your front door with cards. So I picked one whose name I vaguely remembered from last year: Joel G.
I’m impressed:
1. He’s Mexican. Several amazing experiences have left me strongly preferring Mexican over Anglo landscape workers.
2. He showed up promptly to provide an estimate. He must live nearby, because he was here 15 minutes after I called.
3. He looks substantial and honest. OK, I know you can’t tell a book by its (etc.), but gut instinct goes a long way toward assessing character. He’s clean-cut, neatly dressed, and has a frank, straightforward manner. At first inspection, I’m guessing this is probably a decent man.
4. His English is excellent. That helps a lot, because my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. Like…oh, say, Spanish.
5. He charges a reasonable price, only $5 a tree more than Gerardo.
6. He also advertises a number of other skills, the very skills M’hijito and I have need of: he can install watering systems and lay gravel. If his price is right there, too, we may hire him to do the landscaping at the downtown house.
And he’s hired. We’ll see how good a job he does on the palms. If that works out, maybe we can get him going on the two houses, and that would be a great help in our lives.
I hope Gerardo is OK. Palm tree work is very dangerous—every year men are injured or killed wrestling with these nasty plants. Worse even than falling off an 80-foot-high stem is getting trapped under one of the heavy fronds: if you can’t get out quickly, you suffocate. It’s such a gruesome way to die that just about every incident hits the newspapers, and so if anything like that had happened to him, La Maya would have picked up on it, since she still gets the Arizona Republic. But other injuries and car wrecks are so commonplace no one even notices. We’re both assuming he’s met with some accident…but who knows? Maybe he took a salaried job.
One of Funny’s Ten Money Principles is “do it yourself.” Great piles of cash are to be saved (and spent) by following this principle. If you’re at all handy or crafty, improvements to your house, yard, and vehicles are waiting for you.
This weekend I visited the home of some friends who deserve the nomination for All-Time Great Do-It-Yourselfers. Fred is a firefighter, and Kathy works for the Great Desert University. A few years ago, not long before the real estate bubble began its final expansion, they built their dream house on an acre of land under the White Tank Mountains, a natural preserve on the far west side of the Valley. The basic structure of the house was built by the developer, a man they had met through their daughter’s sport, but Fred wired the place for sound, and working together Fred and Kathy installed a handsome stone façade in front. Then they started on the huge backyard.
Still a work in progress, it’s beginning to shape up as a lovely park-like retreat. Fred has made a hobby of metal-working; when they built the house, he specified a separate, fire-resistant workshop, which you can see in some of the photos here. At the outset, they laid two large patios, one of paving bricks and one of flagstone. The flagstone surface was the only landscaping project for which they needed professional help. Otherwise, Fred and Kathy designed and installed the entire hardscape, the structures, and the plantings.
This shade structure was built of scrap metal. The entire thing consists of recycled materials. It casts a cooling, airy shadow close to the house’s covered patio, where, Kathy says, the two of them like to sip wine in the evenings and dream up new projects. Beneath it, they built (themselves!) a complete outdoor kitchen with propane-powered gear and a stone countertop. Taken together with the house’s built-in overhang, the flagstone patio, and the great room that opens into the backyard, the whole arrangement makes an awesome entertainment area.
(Click on the photos for larger views.)
But that’s just the beginning. In addition to the barbecue kitchen, they also designed and built a fantastic propane fireplace, complete with a Santa Fe-style wall and bancos. In this view, a protective covering is set in place over the firebox. The other evening, though, SDXB and I had the privilege of joining our hosts in front of this lovely hearth, where we watched the sun set over the mountains and the moon and stars come to vibrant life. That’s a young elm tree behind the structure. The flowering trees are Desert Museum hybrid paloverdes, an exceptionally beautiful xeric tree that, once established, provides great shade and hardly ever has to be watered.
Their latest development is an elaborate garden structure. Fred also built the framework in his workshop, although this time the metal was, I believe, not recycled. Here are Kathy and VickyC about to enter through the gated arch—the fencing discourages coyotes and can be equipped with a dog- and rabbit-repelling barrier. A couple of weeks ago, Kathy planted a pair of Lady Banks climbing roses, one on either side of the archway. It will take a year or two, but in due course these plants will cover the arch with flowering vines. The skeletal “roof” of the structure is designed to accommodate shade and frost fabric, which will protect tomatoes in the scorching Arizona summer and frost-sensitive plants during the chilly winter nights.
They already have a healthy garden of tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplants, herbs, and the like:
The amount of work Fred and Kathy have done themselves represents savings in the tens of thousands of dollars. I can’t imagine what it would cost to have even one of those weather-resistant, termite-resistant metal structures built. An outdoor kitchen? I’ve never asked, because I can’t afford it. Outdoor fireplace? Doesn’t compute.
Kathy says that, except for the metalwork and the flagstone installation, most of the projects were not difficult to build. I think, though, that success with these projects requires meticulous care, knowledge of building codes, and understanding of how to design block and metal structures that will withstand the test of time. Clearly it’s not impossible to acquire these skills. The result is pretty amazing.
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.
