Well, we made it through the winter.  Winter for me here in Iowa was more mild than last year, snow wise, but much colder.  The chickens handled it surprisingly well.  I put a CFL bulb in their coop (which they did not like) for warmth (I guess it’s supposed to be a heat bulb.  Duh)  Anyway, after a few nights of them sleeping on top of the coop away from the light in super cold weather I decided they must be hardy enough and not need the extra warmth, so I removed the light.  I did however wrap their coop in the fall with bags of leaves, including the roof.  This seemed to work well enough that they weren’t in trouble through the winter.

No problems there.  Dragging out to deal with frozen water twice a day was a bit of a pain.  Especially when it was dark on both trips.  We managed.

But, now that spring is here the chickens are really earning their keep.  They’ve been pacing the walls of the dog kennel wanting to get outside to explore and eat, not unlike me in my house, although I don’t have to go outside to eat.  When I’ve let them out they have done a fantastic job of digging up the garden and working in the leaf shreds and compost I’ve put on top of the beds for them to look through.  I had heard about how good they did this, but even I’m surprised at how well they do this.  It’s kind of shocking even.  Better than advertised as far as I’m concerned.

We’ve had a mishap or two with plants and the cold frame, but there is enough other stuff for them to get into that they don’t come back after being shooed away.  They are even starting to learn that when I come after a while it means they need to get back in the kennel for the night.  They don’t seem to mind pushing back from the buffet and going home to rest for a while.

Keep an eye out for more chicken info in the coming months.  Drop a note to us on the Barnyard about your animals.

This website was recently shared with me so I’m sharing with you.  It’s about scavanging a garden together for little to no cost.

The 2009 No-Cost Garden

I recently became aware of a site called Hyperlocavore that is helping willing gardeners meet up with willing yard owners in a yard sharing type of arrangement.  After some looking, it appears to be much more than that.  Check it out when you get a chance.

Hyperlocavore

Treehugger featured a story recently discussing ways to keep the costs of a garden down. Some ideas are good, although they could use expansion, and some were really not that great. Let’s have a look-see….

1. Plan Ahead
–Decide what kind of garden you want. Unstructured, informal ones with wildflowers and random containers are cheaper than formal gardens.

Matt’s comment: Sort of. I find structured raised beds gardens easier to care for, which means more use around my house. They also produce more heavily as they can be planted more intensively. By planning ahead I also can make sure I have enough mulching material and compost around to build or enrich the beds as needed. Even better, if you know you’ll be gardening in the spring you can set up some sheet-mulched beds for use in the spring.

–Vegetable gardens can work out to be cheaper than flower gardens and more productive.

Matt’s comment: True that. I like a 70/30 or 80/20 veg to flower mix in my tended gardens. My permanent plantings tend towards fruiting trees, edible bushes and perennial flowers to keep my expenses to a one time expense, and produce year after year.

–Plan projects that you can do yourself, rather than hiring someone.

Matt’s comment: Duh.


2. Cut the Cost of Plants

–Compare prices–often supermarkets and hardware stores are cheaper than garden centres and the quality can be just as good.

Matt’s comment: Disagree emphatically. They are cheaper, for a reason. Usually plants that are started (and you purchase) will grow as well if they are from a store vs. a garden center, but beware the seed packets. They are cheap, but they don’t have the same germination rates. A 20 cent packet of seeds that only produces a few plants isn’t a useful as a $1 packet where almost every seeds grows. Packets last a couple years with good storage so there is no need to worry about them going bad. Buy the quality ones, but hopefully not the ones owned by Monsanto.

–Planting from seed is cheaper than buying individual plants.

Matt’s comment: True. Especially useful if watching for people to throw out their empty plant containers, and then using them at home to start your own plants from seeds. It’s like a low cost nursery to you. Also save the trays from any plants you do buy for the same reason

–Take cuttings from fellow gardeners.

Matt’s comment: I would suggest you reciprocate when you can as well.

–Split plants when they are big enough
–Go to local plant sales, often at churches or people’s gardens.

Matt’s comment: I like these options, and they need to get better promotion and see better traffic. Also don’t be afraid to save your own seeds. Many plants like peas, potatoes and beans are easy to save from year to year.

–Buy small specimens of plants–they are cheaper and still grow bigger over the long run
–Perennials come up every year–try not to buy annuals which are finished after one season.

Matt’s comment: Personally I’ve never understood the appeal of an annual unless it feeds me. There are a lot of perennial vegetable plants as well. Check out Bountiful Gardens for some options.

–Herbs go on and and can be grown outside or on the window sill.

Matt’s comment: Herbs are great to grow anywhere. Most are pretty and can be both edible and ornamental in your formal gardens.

Matt’s addition: Sign up to receive seed catalogs in the mail (as well as plant catalogs). Most have a section for plants that have produced extra that year and you can get some fairly large discounts if you are willing to accept the overruns.

3. Don’t Invest in Lots of Equipment

–Most gardening can be done with a few tools: a lawnmower, a hoe, spade, trowel and secateurs.

Matt’s comment: So true. The Path to Freedom folks garden almost exclusively with a hand trowel. If your soil is in the right shape you probably can too. Instead of a tiller use a broad fork. Use plants to break up the soil with their roots instead of digging and tilling. They do it better and cheaper. Worms will make your soil nice and loamy if you continually keep the soil mulched. Don’t expect overnight success. It takes a while, but you’ll see the benefit eventually.

–Check the clearance section of the hardware store for deals on larger, heavier items
–Borrow the bigger tools that you use less frequently from a friendly neighbour.

Matt’s comment: Or, check out a tool lending library in your area. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tool-lending_libraries) Don’t have one? Start one!

–Or rent them for a day
–Or go on the net and buy them second hand.

Matt’s comment: I would encourage you to purchase one time at good quality rather than 2, 3, or 4 times at poor quality. Good quality tools just work. And they work well. I really love the quality of the tools I’ve gotten from Earth Tools (http://www.earthtoolsbcs.com/html/garden_tools.html). Look for a review in the near future!

–Keep a compost heap so that you don’t have to spend on fertilizers.

Matt’s addition: Don’t be afraid to scavenge compost materials from neighbors. I harvest yard containers from all my neighbors for their grass and leaves. My son and I drive around the night before trash pick up and load our truck up with paper bags full of leaves and grass clippings. It’s great material and it’s great for the garden.

If you want raised beds on a budget just pile compost on top of cardboard or newspaper. Sure edging would make it look better, but the plants don’t care. Plant it that way and over time you could edge the beds with materials you scavenge.

4. Containers On a Budget

–Ceramic pots can turn into a fortune once you start buying lots of them for the patio
–Check the hardware store, they often have sales
–Be creative: use empty olive oil cans, old kitchen sinks, old buckets, teapots, chimney stacks and beer cans–your imagination is the limit.

Matt’s comment: My local grocery store will sell the empty plastic buckets their ingredients come in for $1 a piece. They work great for a ton of uses. Growing things. Storing things. I’m not much of a container person so I can’t be much help on this topic

Follow along with the discussion to this post in the Barnyard as all of our citizen experts talk about how they keep costs down when they are gardening.

The Simple Green Frugal Coop featured an article recently about growing root vegetables to feed to your animals over the winter.

Check out the story here.

We recently featured a video from the Garden Girl discussing how to make herbal teas.  And we’ve featured other posts like that.

The Times in England featured an article this week discussing growing our own herbs.

Story here.

Roger Doiron wrote this piece for his website, Kitchen Gardeners International.  Great piece about the cost savings of growing your own food in your yard.  Money may not grow on trees, but it does look like it can grow from your yard.

With the global economy spiraling downward and Mother Nature preparing to reach upward, it’s a good question to ask and a good time to ask it.

There isn’t one right answer, of course, but I’ll give you mine: $2149.15. Last year, my wife Jacqueline suggested to me that we calculate the total value of the produce coming out of our garden over the course of the growing season. Initially, the thought of doing that was about as appealing to me as a recreational root canal. I remember replying something like: “OK, so let me get this right: in addition to raising three busy boys, managing two careers, volunteering in a school garden, and growing most of our own produce, you’re proposing that we weigh every item that comes out of our garden, write it down in a log book, and spend a few leisurely evenings doing math?” Jacqueline, an economics major in college and a native French speaker, answered with a simple “oui” and so the project began.

There was a lot of work involved, mostly for Jacqueline, but as with gardening itself, it was work with a purpose. It didn’t take long for our log book to start filling up with dates and figures. Although we started eating our first garden salads in late April, we only began recording our harvests as of May 10th, starting first with greens and asparagus. Our last weighable harvest was two weeks ago in the form of a final cutting of Belgian endives forced from roots in our basement.

By the time we had finished weighing it all, we had grown 834 pounds and over six months worth of organic food (we’re still eating our own winter squash, onions, garlic, and frozen items like strawberries, green beans, and pesto cubes). Once we had the weights of the 35 main crops we grew, we then calculated what it would have cost us to buy the same items using three different sets of prices: conventional grocery store, farmers’ market and organic grocery store (Whole Foods, in our case). The total value came to $2196.50, $2431.15, and $2548.93 respectively. For the other economics majors and number crunchers among you, you can see our crunchy, raw data here.

There are things we didn’t include like the wild dandelion greens which we reaped but did not sow, the six or so carving pumpkins which we ultimately fed to our compost pile, and the countless snacks of strawberries, beans, peas, and tomatoes that never made it as far as our kitchen scale. There were also things we forgot to weigh like several pounds of grapes which turned into about 12 jars of jam. As with any growing season, there were hits and misses. The heaviest and most valuable crop was our tomatoes (158 lb/72 kg for a total value of $524). In terms of misses, our apple tree decided to take the year off and very few of our onions started from seed made it requiring me to buy onion plants.

On the cost side, we had $130 for seeds and supplies, $12 for a soil test, and exceptional costs of $100 for some locally-made organic compost we bought for our “This Lawn is Your Lawn” frontyard garden (normally, we meet most of our soil fertility needs through our own composting). I don’t have a scientific calculation for water costs, but we don’t need to water much and, when we do, water is relatively cheap in Maine. Also, I mulch my beds pretty heavily to keep moisture in and weeds down. Let’s say $40 in water. So, if we consider that our out-of-pocket costs were $282 and the total value generated was $2431, that means we had a return on investment of 862%. The cost of our labor is not included because we enjoy gardening and the physical work involved. If I am to include my labor costs, I feel I should also include the gym membership fees, country club dues, or doctors’ bills I didn’t have.

If you really want to play around with the data, you can calculate how much a home garden like ours produces on a per acre basis. If you use the $2400 figure and consider that our garden is roughly 1/25th of an acre, it means that home gardens like ours can gross $60,000/acre. You can also calculate it on a square foot basis which in our case works out to be roughly $1.50/ft2. That would mean that a smaller garden of say 400ft2 would produce $600 of produce. Keep in mind that these are averages and that certain crops are more profitable and space efficient than others. A small garden planted primarily with salad greens and trellised tomatoes, for example, is going to produce more economic value per square foot more than one planted with potatoes and squash. We plant a bit of everything because that’s the way we like to garden and eat.

Clearly, this data is just for one family (of five), one yard (.3 acre), one garden (roughly 1600 square feet), and one climate (Maine, zone 5b/6), but it gives you some sense of what’s possible. If you consider that there are about 90 million households in the US that have some sort of yard, factor in the thousands of new community and school gardens we could be planting, this really could add up. Our savings allowed us to do different things including investing in some weatherization work for our house last fall that is making us a greener household in another way. Some might ask what this would mean for farmers to have more people growing their own food. The local farmers I know welcome it because they correctly believe that the more people discover what fresh, real food tastes like, the more they’ll want to taste. In our case, part of our savings helped us to buy better quality, sustainably-raised meat from a local CSA farmer.

The economics of home gardening may not be enough to convince President Obama or UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to plant new gardens at the White House or 10 Downing Street, but the healthy savings their citizens could be making and then reinvesting in their local economies could.

In the end, it might come down to the language we use. Instead of saying “Honey, I’m going out to the garden to turn the compost pile”, perhaps we should say “Honey, I’m going outside to do a ‘green job’ and work on our ‘organic stimulus package.’” I bet that would get the attention of a few economists, if not a few psychologists!

Yes Magazine featured a story recently about new young farmers who are joining the profession.

Story here

Based on what I’m reading, even if you aren’t doing it full time this coming spring there will be a lot more people planting gardens.  To me, this is a good thing.

If you are planting a garden this spring join our Garden Challenge on The Barnyard.

Picture courtesy of Yes Magazine