Planning for a Frugal Organic Garden that Saves you Money
Tips, Tricks
On Todays episode we are going to kick off the frugal garden challenge with a few tips on planning. If you remember from my 2015 goals video I am along with Huw and Patrick are doing the Frugal Garden Challenge. We will be working to not only show that you can garden cost effectively but it can produce great results! So on to the tips! Tip 1: The initial list Write down all of the fruits and vegetables that you purchase from the grocery store. This is easy to do if you save your receipts for a few weeks. This will give you your initial list. The second part of tip 1 is to look up if you can grow the fruits and veggies in your zone. This should be fairly easy to do. What I did to find my growing zone was hop on google and searched growing zone Edmonton and it told me I was in Zone 3 with and an average between 120 to 140 frost free days. Then all you have to do is search each crop and often they will have a hardiness zone and days to ripeness. As long as your zone is higher and the average frost free days are longer you should be able to grow if a well lit garden. Tip 2 Pricing the crops This is an easy one to do take a look at the receipts you have been saving or take a quick run through the grocery store. Finding out which vegetables cost the most in your area will help you save more money by focusing on the costly crops as appose to the cheaper ones. That said the caveat to this tip is grow what you enjoy goring. Gardening is not just a utilitarian excursive but a cultural experience and great hobby. Tip 3 Save your Seeds Seeds are usually the most cost effective way to grow your plants. Saving seeds from plants is usually free or very very low cost. if you have a surplus you can trade seeds on lots of local sites to increase the number of varieties you have to plant. The next best thing is hopping on a seed buying website. When you plant the seeds you can make them really stretch if you save them in a dry dark area and only plant one see each time when you need them. This avoids the loss of viable seeds through thinning. Tip 4 Use Local Free Resources Now that you have your plants growing its time to think about feeding your plants. If your soil is healthy it should have more then enough nutrients for your plants. I generally add moderate amounts of free resources you can find in most communities. Things like fall leaves, municipal wood chips and used coffee grounds can be added as a mulch to the surface of your soil and will not only feed your plants over the long term but will keep weeds down and help retain moisture! So finding these resources in your community will help once you get out and grow your garden. I would love to know how you save money in your garden! Some of my favorite childhood memories are of gardening with my parents and brothers. This channel is about low cost organic urban gardening in zone 3. I am by no means an expert gardener however I love to share my experiments and journey garden year round. Please feel free to join the conversation and if you think you might like this channel subscribe. Have a great day! Check us out on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/stephenlegaree14 Webpage: www.albertaurbangarden.ca Google +: google.com/+StephenLegaree Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlbertaUrbanGarden Twitter: https://twitter.com/northern1485 Pintrest: http://www.pinterest.com/ABurbanGarden/
Comments
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I grow what I eat and is hard to find . Like Speckled Butter Beans.
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1. Fruits and nuts are expensive, so working them into your overall landscaping, with trees and bushes, helps a lot. Every tree or bush in your yard could produce something edible.
2. Fresh herbs are pricey, too. So if you use fresh herbs, they should be a garden priority.
3. Grow things that don't take energy to preserve, like winter squash.
4. Grow salad sprouts from all the extra seeds that you save, beyond what you will replant.
5. Learn to like what grows easily and reliably in your area. -
My favourite frugal gardening tip is to use paper pots. They are fun to make, and I use them for starting most of my seeds. I only plant one seed/pot because I don't like to waste seeds by thinning. If something doesn't germinate in one of my pots, I put a new seed in the same soil.
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Wonderful and helpful tips Stephen thanks for sharing! +Alberta Urban Garden Simple Organic and Sustainable
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Gardening does not have to cost a lot or be super complicated. Check out this weeks frugal gardening tips to see how you can plan for your frugal garden!
#frugal #gardening #frugalgardening #organic #seedsaving #seeds #planning #lists #freeresources #free #cheap #cheapgardening
http://youtu.be/k8n9s71yftw -
thankyou sir for the invaluable info. keep up the good work
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Great tips Stephen. Learning to love what's growing abundantly and eating seasonally is one of the biggest ways to eat more from your garden and buy less from the store. I've been trying to adjust our diet to what grows better in the sub tropics. Many European veggies just don't grow well here so we look more to SE Asia for what they grow and eat. We do have about 40 kilos of pumpkins to eat after a bumper pumpkin harvest lol.
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Great tips Stephen. I have a frugal tip to share. Go visit your local Hydro store the day after it rains and look for coco block that got wet and busted open. I asked employee for a discount on the wet blocks. He said, no we can't sell them like that, but you can just have them (3 blocks) for FREE! Bonus! I'm seriously waiting for it rain again and I'm going back.
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Thanks for the tips Stephen!
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Great video. I find beans are a very cost effective. They are so expensive in the store. And of course, fresh peas are same story.....
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I've learned that one of the great benefits of harvesting seeds from your garden is that they are built out of the nutrients in the soil from which your garden was planted. This helps them acclimatize to their environment each generation creating stronger and more resistant plants for your specific region.
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This is awesome!. Pre spouting also helps when using older seed
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Great advice and tips, Thanks!!
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Excellent frugal gardening tips, Stephen! Thanks!
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Thanks for the wonderful tips!!.....
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One of the reasons I like every one of your videos is you do not blast the music as an intro and you don't feel the need to raise your voice. When something like this is soothing it's easier to pay attention to what is being said. Thank you.
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Great tips. I garden for necessity and fun!
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Terrific video. It was my first year gardening and I went over board buying more seeds than I had room or time to grow. This year I'm going to plant from the seeds I have and try to control my urge to plant everything! There are a few things that I wish you could do this season--could you show how you are saving seed in a small garden instead of just saying to save them--for us new to seed saving? and maybe Patrick could do the same? and also could you talk about placement of plants in the garden,especially if you intensively plant. I found this year that I shaded out too many plants because I wasn't aware how high they could grow under good organic conditions! When you said to keep your food receipts, I thought you were going to say that you saw how much that produce was costing you at the market! I found it was a great incentive to grow those things. One thing though. I think it might be cost effective to buy herb plants when you are first starting out. Most people only need one plant of each herb and if they buy it on sale at the beginning of the season,they have something growing right away and it is cheaper than the seed packet. Of course, one can never have too much parsley and dill!
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Thanks Stephen for the tips. I have already started to look into veg for this year. This is basically based on what my wife and I use in our cooking and what we can grow based on the season we have here in Ontario.
I am also spending time thinking of how to capture sunlight for the plants and want to look into vertical gardening and using grow pots not clay pots.
Cheers
Harold -
@ 0:25 What's hiding there on your belly, a new audio recorder perhaps? @ 2:14 I not sure what goes on elsewhere, but here in the land of Aus, there are many groups saving seed too... They're great places to not only obtain seeds, but also information... and if you are lucky enough of attend one local, the seeds are usually acclimated to the region, and the information is locally biased ;-) As it happens, I'm currently working on a seed saver's database for a group (myself recently included) that meets in our local progress hall...
On a production note... Nice lighting, I like the off centre framing too... :-) Little Rodney is currently sitting on my lap humming to your outro... I guess that's a thumbs up from him then? ;-) ... Chris
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