How Many Will Lose Money on Those "Frugal" Gardens This Year?

Certain costs are one-time costs: fencing, pots, stakes, even seeds-- if you save.

I don't rent a roto tiller-- I use muscle . . .

My compost is my garbage . . .

The only real cost is time, water, and some fertilizer.

But the real value is the quality and personal satisfaction . . .

Square Foot Gardening saves a lot of time, once the initial work is done to get your raised beds made and filled with a soil mixture. I never have to week, cutting the actual time I spend gardening way down. The initial work is a lot, but maintaining them is nothing. I'm a lazy gardener, too so I pretty much just water the garden as needed and that's about it.

I like what the above poster says about gardening feeding the spirit. It's very satisfying to grow your own food. And don't get me started on how much better the tomatoes taste when they are fresh picked out of your own back yard! I'm counting down the days until Tomato Time!

I don't know if my husband and I save money by having a garden. However, we take pride in being more self sufficient. It is also deeply satisfying to be able to enjoy the results of your labor all year long.

... that it's a good idea.

That way, I get what I want, like heirloom tomatoes that I LOVE to eat, and I know that I grew it, and not someone like a slave in the U.S. in Florida, or that it was shipped across the country in a polluting truck.

I think I'd be willing to pay more for that, even if it was more expensive (which I don't think it is).

They also have options to grow tomatoes for example (what I love to eat the most), up from the ground in something I saw on TV called a Topsy Turvy.. There are ways to grow specifically what you love to eat so that you don't waste time.

Tomatoes, Potatoes, Chives and Onions would be my thing.

Most people who garden, while cautious of costs, are not trying to profit from a garden.

Some want healthier food, some want a guaranteed source of food (this will grow in importance over the next two years - wait and see), and some just want the spiritual satisfaction that comes from independence.

Only the naive think it will save money in the short term (even though it can).

Starting a garden can be expensive. The one-time costs should be spread out over the expected life of the item though: putting up $250 worth of welded wire fence does NOT add $250 to your produce expenses this year! That fence will last ten years, so it adds about $25 to this year's produce expense.

Pro tips:
Don't buy junk. If you need a spade, buy one of the all-steel spades. It costs twice as much, but will last for the rest of your life. Home Depot, Lowes, K-Mart, and WalMart sell mostly junk (and you might want to have the paint on their tools tested for lead...)

Learn about beneficial plants and insects.

Milky Spore. Get some.

Moles are harmless at worst, and they eat grubs that will rip your garden to shreds. The mole-trap, mole-repellant, and mole-bait markets are a racket aimed at the naive.

Take the time to learn. A great online resource for raising food is www.homesteadingtoday.com, but you really need to read books. Lots of them.

Ditto the comments about Square Foot Gardening. It's a great way to make the most of limited space, with much lower cost and effort than traditional methods.

Don't forget about seed saving; in the age of big corporate agriculture, patents on plants, and genetic modification, it's important to maintain heirloom seed lines. Besides, it's easy to save seeds at the end of the season and dramatically reduce next year's costs; several friends are planning to pool our seeds to start a small local seed bank. Check out Seed Savers Exchange for information and access to seeds.

Finally, for some DIY inspiration, check out The Cheap Vegetable Gardener for homebuilt versions of self-watering containers, upside-down tomato growing, grow lights, hydroponics, and more.

I agree that many gardeners spend more than they will ever get out, and I think it's important to decide if you are gardening as a hobby or of you want to see a return. Permaculture offers small-scale solutions that are conscious of inputs vs. outputs. Today most recommended growing techniques require a lot of fertilizer. And tilling takes a lot of energy. These things will be getting way more expensive, along with commercially grown food. Permaculture gardens are no-till, use more perennials than annuals, and focus on building the soil and controlling pests naturally. The goal is to maximize output versus inputs, which is way different than the typical approach today. While individual plants may yield less (because they are spaced apart, grown without chemical fertilizers, and in the shade of other diverse plants growing nearby) the whole system can yield more.

Ditto for square foot gardening
Ditto for homemade compost
Ditto for tomatoes AHHHH tomatoes still warm from the sun

We've found marigolds to be a great animal repellant as we get them all, rabbit, squirrel, possum, skunk. We also use grey water for our garden from the bathtub, sticking it in gallon milk jugs, putting them under the back porch and using as needed. Rain barrels are a bit problematic here as we have mosquitoes. But someone may well have figured how to solve that one. You may want to check out if your state has any gardening programs. We were given our composters at clinics held locally. The information was wonderful as well. We have two raised beds about 4 by 8, and zero in on what we like best. Tomatoes (we go through alot of sauce), green beans (easy to freeze), some carrots and lettuce and BASIL. We do alot of pesto and basil freezes well. Last year we were given a rhubarb plant from a friend and some seed from a freecycler. So our repetoire will expand this year. Have fun.

If you're going to invest the time and money in any size gardening, invest in a canner or take the time to freeze your produce! Most vegetables freeze really well, but we find our tomatoes do best with hot-water canning.

In fact, we just had fresh tomato soup last night. Yum... We always grow more than we can eat and share, just to ensure organic veggies year-round.

Even a small investment can yield outsized gains.

I planted a green pepper plant and a six-pack of varied tomatoes last year. Due to a complete lack of knowledge of how to grow things in Texas, I didn't get any tomatoes until fall... but I did get three pounds of super-sweet cherry tomatoes (retail: $5/lb), 25 green bell peppers (retail: $1.99 each)... and I learned how to do better this year.

The biggest thing about "frugal" is thinking about the long term as opposed to short term. In the short term, you may have grown six seedlings and ended up with one plant. But next year you know to harden the seedlings off slowly as opposed to putting them all out at once in the dirt. You learn to start from seed ordered over the winter instead of buying started plants, even if they are tempting. And your first year investment pays off in knowledge, satisfaction, and nutrition later.

Besides, when I spend an entire weekend tending my little 8x8 plot, I'm not out spending money on other stuff. :-P Now THAT'S frugal.

It's always wise to approach anything that's supposed to create a return with caution -- but I give a huge thumbs down to this article's author and her attitude. Wise Bread isn't a website that I come to for this kind of negativity.

Sure, there are costs and risks to gardening. Crops can fail, and you can spend $60 to produce a tomato, if that's the way you garden. But there are also plenty of ways to garden cheaply, year after year, and to minimize risk, as you point out. Experience pays big dividends in gardening.

I would also point out that the raw costs/savings when comparing gardening to shopping at the grocery store don't tell the whole story. You can save money on gasoline by shopping in your backyard. You save time too by going to the store less frequently. You get some physical exercise and a very cheap form of therapy. You get healthier, fresher produce which will never feature in a national recall or e. coli alert. If you happen to be one of the people sickened from store-bought spinach/peanut butter/apple juice/cantaloupe, how do you suppose your reckoning of the value of homegrown produce would change? How do you value produce that is two, three, or more times as nutritionally dense as the stuff from the grocery store? It's your own health you're talking about here, after all.

Finally, I would add that perennial edibles such as asparagus, rhubarb, fruit and nut trees, grapes, and berry bushes offer a superb return on investment over the long run, and with a lot less risk than annual crops. Perennials are an entirely different "game" than the typical garden annuals.

Gardening and tightwaddery go well together. We use egg crates to start seeds and only buy "heirloom" varieties that will come up true from seed to reduce seed costs. We swap seedlings with coworkers every spring so nobody ends up with more than they need (we start squash, others start peppers, tomatoes, etc.)

We don't have a lot of time to weed, so we only have a small garden to grow more expensive veggies and most of our money has gone to buy "edible landscaping" fruit trees and fruit bushes.

We've invited our neighbors to dump all their grass clippings, pine needles and leaves into our "lazy mans compost ditch" and dug an irrigation ditch to capture stormwater runoff to help the yard debris break down faster. The compost ditch will become our new garden in another 2 years.

Water is expensive here and rain barrels are expensive, so we've added plastic garbage bins (be sure to keep them covered and USE them or they'll be full of mosquito larvae YUCK). We also have a "greywater recycling bucket" where we capture around 6 gallons of waste water from the sink before it goes down the drain every day and dump it into the garden.

We did buy tomato cages (back when we were young and foolish) instead of using sticks, but we keep reusing them so I guess they've earned their keep. If you start small and expand a little every year, you'll get there without an overly sore back or a huge expense.

I'm with the tightwadder guest above. No need to spend more than $50 on a garden every year, even the first year. Especially if you start your composting the fall before your first spring planting.

A beginner gardener can eat for really, really cheap on a few staple foods - you can dig up most of your yard for potatos and zucchini, put in a few tomato plants, and there you go. If you know or live near gardeners you can probably get everything you need to do that for free, too.

But man is that miserable. There's a reason my mom hates to garden, and it's the 1970s gas-shock recession.

The other way to save money at it is the one I see magazine articles about right now. If you usually spend a lot of money on things like sprouts, cherry tomatos, broccolini or mesclun mix - those are all easy, fast, low-input veggies with really high dollar value (I wouldn't put tomatos in that group because of their water needs.)

Mix the two together, and you can do pretty well for cash savings - add in the opportunity savings (if you used to have a more expensive hobby, or if your kids can be motivated to be self-entertaining with the threat of weeding duty) and you're golden.

But if you hate it, there are a *lot* of more cost-effective ways to spend your time. Food is usually cheap and the times of year when your garden would have the most yield are the times when food is cheapest.

I used square foot gardening last year, and quickly lost the seedlings to pests. That aside, I was surprised at the cost of startup, not to mention the labor and materials used to build the square frames. The use of peat moss bothered me, too, as it's not a renewable resource.

Still, I think I'll give it a go again this year--I have materials left over and I'll cover the seedlings to keep out birds and the squirrels that plague my neighborhood.