Growing Money in the Backyard

Virginia Free Citizen ^ | May 10, 2014 | Jeff Bayard

[RightSideNews]

This is my story on how you can cut down your grocery bill while improving your diet. It’s called intensive organic vegetable gardening and it’s like growing money in the backyard.My wife and I completed our organic certification course last year at the University of Richmond’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. We decided to take this course so we could eat healthier and reduce our grocery bill. This has been a fun project and we look forward to growing our own vegetables, or as I like to call it: growing money in the backyard!

[GraceG]

I am considering planting some things like choke cherries and fruit trees in my backyard.

[gorush]

We are avid gardeners but this article made me realize that I don’t have the organic certification course... at the University of Richmond’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. I feel so ignorant.

[wideawake]

Unless you live in a state with no frost, you’ll need to do a lot of canning to have those vegetables year round.

[Argus]

Brining/pickling should work too.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

[moovova]

Ping for later. Thanks.

[Ouderkirk]

I little Miracle Grow doesn’t hurt either....

[Ouderkirk]

Yeah..that’s nice. Wonder how well it works when it’s 5 degrees Fahrenheit with clouds everyday for two months.

[goodwithagun]

It’s so cute when rabid libs try to tell me how to do something my family has done for generations due to liberal policies.

[Utilizer]

On the one hand, I appreciate stories such as this because I would like to grow a nice garden with lots of fresh fruits and veggies. On the other hand, they all seem to devolve into another tale of how you need to take months and even years of college courses for you to be successful at it. Some of us are just too disabled to travel very far to take any classes, not to mention being too poor to afford Higher-Education instruction.

I wish someone would set up a website where articles and instructions for example could be presented for general useage so that everyone might be able to do such things. Especially help for different people in different climates, instead of assuming that everyone lives in the middle of a large area of fertile and freely available land.

The closest I have come to is the Geoff Lawton series, as long as you can get past his almost hippie-esque attitude. He at least presents vids that show possibilities for differing climates with already-done examples. What I am looking for though is more specific instructions as well as help from others who have already had experience with similar climates of people who are trying to successfully grow things as well.

[Arthur McGowan]

I first heard of “intensive gardening” in 1975.

The recipe was simple. Dig down one foot. Throw in coffee grounds and eggshells. Plant stuff.

[Utilizer]

Seems cute. Won’t last long here with the strong winds and three-foot snowfalls we get every year.

[RegulatorCountry]

Start out with patio tomatoes grown in containers and learn your way through that. If your soil isn’t a good, rich soil it can be corrected with some sphagnum peat and Black Cow, both cheap at any home center such as Lowe’s. Keep the soil from drying out completely down beneath the surface, but don’t overwater either, you’ll drown the plant. Container needs drainage to help prevent this.

There are certain pests that bother certain plants. Tomato sornworms, etc., wear gloves and pick those off. Ladybugs eat most garden pests as do praying mantis. Wiping the plant with warm slightly soapy water will kill aphids without use of pesticide.

Branch out from there next year. You’ll probably kill one or two of the plants your first go if you’ve never done it. But, it’s not rocket science.

[RegulatorCountry]

should be tomato hornworms.

[LurkingSince'98]

“Wonder how well it works when it’s 5 degrees Fahrenheit with clouds everyday for two months”

We had worse than that and still we have a bumper crop of garlic, which we planted in September; strawberries, a perennial; and asparagus, which come up like weeds.

the trick was to cover everything with at least a foot of straw mulch... the first nice weather we had, those shoots were pushing through the top of the mulch like they couldn’t weight to get out...

our locale - just south of the cheddar curtain.

Lurking’

[DNME]

I think there’s a lot of wiggle room between full organic and the Monster of Monsanto.

A little MiracleGro now and then does not make food inedible, IMHO. I’ll use compost and “friendly” bugs as much as possible, and my resident toad is an honored guest in my garden, but I’m not shy about using a fungicide when powdery mildew appears, or a pinch of magic dust to knock down a bad infestation of assorted flying pests.

Organic is nice. Yup, it sure is. But the bugs do not win. Ever.

[RightSideNews]

Thanks for that Simple Greenhouse info! That really helps me ALOT, as most solutions costs lots of money.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

In a situation like that I would first think to heavily insulate the greenhouse, then pump in some “waste heat” from the residence, and use plant lights for light only, not heat.

The primary source of waste heat is likely the clothes dryer, but you would need a more constant source.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Check out www.gardenweb.com. It's like FreeRepublic for gardeners. VERY friendly and helpful people will answer all your questions. You can usually find an existing thread about the problem you've got in your region, too.