There HAS been a big jump in price on 4 & 6-packs from last year to this year! I am being VERY selective on the ‘extras’ I buy - I start most of my stuff, anyway.
I’m wondering if we’re going to see people hit home gardening again as hard as they did during covid with the food prices as high as they are.
I’ll have to look around for some news articles on the topic; gardening (and chickens!) was the ‘New New Thing’ when covid was being crammed down our throats.
Beer can shown for size reference
I haven't seen a whole lot more gardening going on around here yet like I did in 2021 but most people here tend to start in May when the soil's not waterlogged because everyone likes to till hard every year. Like our silty loam isn't fine enough, let's beat it to death, kill a bunch of microbes and make a hard pan 6 inches down. In a couple of months, we'll give it a good dose of white powders and kill some more soil life.
I took to the tunnel area with the grader blade and dug around it so that rain will drain away instead of running through it. The soil was darker than the usual(yellowish brown instead of brownish yellow) because I fed hay to the goats there for two Winters in a row. Not this past Winter but the two before that. Hay itself is a good feeder of soil. I used it as mulch the first year of the front yard garden. Mix in plenty of goat urine and manure and it really does well.
I know my uprights will eventually rust near the ground so I already have a plan in my head on how to convert it to moveable.
Now the gears are turning thinking about some sort of rotation with movable tunnels and animals combined. Maybe a fodder cover crop. With the right plan, one could feed animals while feeding the soil via animals while making material for compost. Make the rotation 3+ years and it would qualify for Organic Certification without having to monitor the compost temperature or being concerned about raw manure being deposited directly onto the soil within a certain time of growing food plants. And of course the animals themselves are food. Oh my. I need mo land and mo tunnels and mo money.
Yeah, I'm a dreamer but we wouldn't have all these modern amenities without all us dreamers.