I love your ideas! I keep thinking along the lines of ways to provide some sort of income for us. I had hoped goat milk soap would be a good one but they are mass produced now with such a low price, so for now they are just gifts for friends and family.
My tomatoes are being hit with blight, again, after I put black plastic down from fall until planting, and installed a drip system. I have been treating, but it only knocks it back as it rains almost every day here. Feed store guy suggested I sprinkle lime. We will see. I ran into the same problem with tomato cages (the hoop ones don’t cut it). I bought several of the Fiberglas stakes and using the hoop cages and the stakes, I then ran a horizontal stake from the plant to the fence and tied it. As the tomatoes are getting taller I just tie them to the horizontal stake and so far so good. Inexpensive fix for that (so far)
Cattle panels are a ridiculous price here - from $60+ for a cattle panel to $90+ for a goat panel (with 4x4 openings). Ugh. I need the goat panel to make a hay feeder, but I think I will settle for goat fence and use a wood frame. I needed a cattle panel to hoop trellis for spaghetti squash and cucumbers. So far it is working great. But as I am putting them in, I am counting how many veggies I could get from the farmers market for $60 😂
Anyway…
I have 2 “zucchini” plants that are putting out fruit that is zucchini in color but the taste and shape of summer squash 🤷♀️ Weird. Kind of like the year all my watermelons tasted like cucumber (same families cross polinating and such I suppose)
My maters and peppers are going to be very expensive this year. $120 for cattle panel fence. $120 for drip system. $40 for compost as mulch. Then I made a raised bed for 4 shisito peppers and filled it with store bought raised bed soil, $44. I'm up over $300 for 4 pepper plants and a dozen tomato plants.
Almost $20 per plant.
One determinate tomato plant made three tomatoes and I think it's done. I should have pulled the flowers off when the plant was too little to grow fruit.
Guess I'll try and think of it as $300 for growing lessons.
$50 for the lesson called -- Why You Should Pull the Flowers Off of Small Mater Plants (lesson includes 3 free tomatoes).
$50 lesson a couple of weeks ago was -- Don't Prune Too Soon (you could inadvertently cut the main stem off)
The $44 lesson -- Check the Price of Bagged Soil Before it's Rung Up
I just figured $5-6 or something. Nope, Whitney Farms Organic Raised Bed Mix is $11/bag and I grabbed four. Those four bags were more expensive than the truck bed full of compost. I could have mixed compost/soil -- 50/50 and it would have made a fine raised bed mix. Of course when I bought the bagged stuff, I hadn't bought the compost yet, wasn't sure if the "landscaping" place even sold it or if it was for their own use and had no idea of the price.
Free bonus lesson -- Don't expect the plants to act like normal plants.
One of my Chadwick Cherry plants grew a normal cluster. Then it grew three more clusters but the cluster branches kept getting longer and developed another cluster and one kept going and has three clusters. They are not suckers. They came out the stem all by themselves, not in the armpit of a branch. After those three turbo wacko cluster branches, it went back to normal single clusters. I had to drop another lean/lower string to hang that triple cluster from. I'll probably have to support the double cluster ones too.