Ways to Save Money, Plant a Garden
Gardening is something I have been doing for years. It so exciting to plant a little seed and see how much food it can produce. Gardening is one of the great ways to save money on groceries. You may not have the room to grow all the fruits and vegetables you need, but every little bit helps.
Ways to Save Money with a Garden
Plant to Maximize Space
Our garden isn’t very large. We have a few raised beds. But we maximize our growing area by growing as much as we can upright. I grow my tomatoes in cages to keep them from taking up more room than needed.
I grow peas, beans and cucumbers on trellis. Keeping them upright instead of sprawling over the garden area helps to minimize the space they used but still keep a good number of plants growing.
Planting bush varieties for as many vegetables as you can, helps to maximize your garden. I usually grow a bush variety of zucchini. It helps me conserve on my garden space but the plants yield lots of zucchini.
Plant Expensive Items
Tomatoes can be expensive, especially cherry or grape tomatoes. For the cost of one container of tomatoes you can get a plant to grow. The cherry and grape tomatoes plants can produce lots of tomatoes, saving you money over the season. Not to mention the great fresh taste.
Artichokes are another expensive item my family loves to eat. For the same cost as one artichoke you can purchase a plant or a package of seeds. These plants don’t produce as heavily as tomatoes but over a season you can really save. Also if an artichoke goes to flower in the garden, not only are they beautiful to look at, but they attract bees to help with pollination.
Berries are another item that can be expensive even when in season. We started our raspberries with a few plants from my in-laws in a large pot. When they finally out grew the pot we found a place under our maple tree to transplant them. While it’s not the most ideal spot to grow them, last year we harvested about 2 flats of raspberries during the season.
Strawberries and blueberries are two other berries that can be grown either in pots or in the ground to save money. Out little patch of strawberries produced about two flats of berries last year. Enough for us to eat and make jam with.
Herbs are another item that is easy to grow and can save you lots of money over store-bought fresh herbs. Most herbs can be grown in pots in a sunny spot. Just one plant of each herb can supply a family with the herbs they need all season long. Our favorites to grow are chives (the flowers are wonderful to eat too), basil, parsley, thyme and mint. We grow our mint in pots to keep them from spreading out everywhere.
Plant High Yield Crops
Plant varieties of vegetables that have a high amount of yield per the amount of space they use in the garden. Some of the high yield plants are tomatoes, beans on a trellis, peas on a trellis, leaf lettuce and zucchini or yellow squash and beets.
What is an item you grow to help save money?
[signoff]
Need more gardening advice or help? See more of my gardening posts.
Follow My Gardening Board on Pinterest,
Thanks for the info. (pinning!) I started a couple years ago planting herbs in two large pots on our deck, and they grow so easily and are very hardy. For those of us who would love a garden, but know ourselves well enough to know we wouldn’t keep it tended well enough to be able to harvest, a couple of herb pots are perfect!
Thanks for pinning, Lisa! Gardens come in all sizes, even growing a little can save you a bunch. Those little packages of fresh herbs can be so expensive at the store.
Yay. I wanted to do raised beds, do you just put the bed on top of existing dirt with a wood border around it? I need someone to build me that border so I can fill it up with dirt. I really want to plant blueberries there. We have strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, rosemary, for fruits and veg so far. And a couple of pots of flowers 🙂
We covered the grass with newspaper and then build the boxes and filed them with an organic compost/soil mix we were able to purchase locally. The newspaper will decompose and it will also keep the grass from growing up. I know you can purchase kits for the raised beds. Bi-Mart here locally, has cedar raised bed kits for $40. Not too bad since cedar lasts a long time.