Am I the only one who finds it odd that Salon is running a piece in their "Pinched" series about planting a garden to save money? If you don't find it odd, you either aren't a gardener of any sort (yet), or you live south of the Equator, because the glaring problem with planting a garden now is that it's fall. I got over my annoyance, though, because it's a well-written little piece that I wished I'd thought of and pitched myself, and really does get to the heart of why gardening is a great hobby for people who are otherwise completely caught up in their modern ways and surrounded by air conditioning and electronics, like myself.
Still, as the article hints, it's actually not a bad time for people who haven't started the process of gardening yet to start planning for one next spring, because if you do it right, it can in fact save you money. Steve Almond admits that he lives in the mid-Atlantic farmland territories where the soil is so fertile that you can actually forgo messy human reproduction and grow cabbage patch babies, but even he and his wife are realizing now is the time to get the heavy lifting done to expand their gardens so that they just have to plant next year. (Steve, by the way, if you use mulch generously you won't have to weed as much.) They're tearing up some of that space-wasting grass and putting in more gardens and building a compost pile. I love to see someone turn like that. He also pities people who live in places where the soil is less forgiving, but as someone who lives in one of those places, I'm here to say you can do it. In fact, there's one advantage to Austin, which is that we kind of have two growing seasons, because it's warm up until after Halloween. I don't think my basil died last year until December, in fact. And by then it was 3 feet tall, not counting its container.
Almost anyone can find some way to save money through growing your own stuff. If you have land, you need to learn what kind of soil amendments you need and what you can grow in your part of the country. For that, I recommend, if you have one, checking out your local ag university's resources. Usually, they'll have some information for the public from their research, because they were started with that specific public mission of improving the area's agricultural potential. If you're in Texas, here's A&M's resources. Then you can decide how to amend your soil and get the garden ready for spring. You can also start a compost pile. At our new place, I just used this spot by the wall that's too narrow for any other use, and with a few boards and those little gardening gates, I created a neat pile, using bags of all the ivy and grass I yanked up in rebuilding this yard as a garden to start it.
But seriously, even if you don't have land, but you have a windowsill, you can save some money by planting an herb garden. I tend to get offended at how expensive fresh herbs at the grocery store are, when it's not that expensive to grow, say, basil. What's nice about fresh herbs is that they make it a lot easier to cook with cheaper foodstuffs like rice and beans. I also recommend, if you have the room, growing some peppers like jalapenos or even habeneros. All it takes is one or two habeneros in a giant pot of beans to make them spicy, for real. People like to joke about Ramen noodles, but rice and beans taste better and are cheaper, especially if you flavor them right. All my peppers are in pots right now, because we moved from a place where I didn't have any yard at all, and so everything was in containers. If you're in a situation where you can make do with a container garden, check out You Grow Girl for some ideas on how to grow vegetables and herbs instead of just flowers, and make your garden save you some money. I love that site, because they are a bunch of cheap bastards living in small spaces, and so they fit right into my mentality. I never had the room when I was container gardening, though, to grow tomatoes. If you have even a teeny-tiny lawn, or a deck, or a little outdoors entranceway to your apartment, they'll inspire you to quit wasting space and start planting shit.
One of my pet peeves, especially after I learned how much any individual plant can contribute to reducing carbon in the air, is how much of urban spaces are absolutely wasted. When I went to D.C. for a meeting, Scott Swenson was telling me about how some new government buildings are moving towards "green roofing", which is just using the rooftops to build gardens and lawns, instead of just leaving them bare and wasting space. That's a good start, but we need to do a lot more than that. We not rethink Parks & Services so that federal and state governments can completely remake urban landscapes so that there's less wasted space and more greenery? It could be a combination of extending green roofing gardening rights to tenants to just having these areas be grassy and easy to maintain if there's no takers. Unfortunately, I suspect the interest in such a gardening program might be low amongst citizens, because Americans have gotten so far away from that. But maybe Steve Almond is right, and the recession could be an opportunity to get people thinking about our very own victory gardens.
