Mark & Beth's Homegrown Adventure

The primary motivation behind us starting this garden (as well as foraging and reusing what we can) is to save money. There are a lot of other good benefits (mental and physical health, helping the environment and native pollinators), but if I had to pick the top reason, it’s the money.

But if you’ve ever gardened, you know it’s not the cheapest endeavor. Whether you’re going with raised beds, containers, or in-ground planting, you’re going to be buying either tools or materials. The plants themselves cost money, as does the food they need. Watering cans, trellises, grow lights… Even if you’re doing it as cheaply as you can, you’re spending money.

Now, I’ve been listening to a lot of gardening podcasts lately, and one point of discussion I’ve been hearing a lot of is, “do you actually save any money during your first year of vegetable gardening?” The answers are kind of inconclusive, but most people seem to suggest that you don’t start seeing real savings until year 2 or 3 because of the learning curve, and the cost of all those investments. Yikes. So, we’ve decided to be as realistic about this as possible, but still hope to get out of the red this year. Here’s how.

Firstly, starting from seeds. We bought a ton of seed packets, and they usually range from $1.59 to $2.49 or so. These packets contain dozens of potential plants (except the big sunflower seeds we bought – there were only 7 in there!), and if we can coax them into life, we can get more plants for less money than if we were to buy young, pre-started plants from, say, Home Depot. Aside from the seeds themselves, we also had to invest in a seed tray, some seed starting mix, and some grow lights (I got some cheap LED lights from a bidding website for less than $10).

Once seedlings are sprouting, many of them will need larger containers and some potting soil before it’s warm enough to plant them outside. But rather than buying a bunch of interim planters, we’re reusing things we have around the house. Plastic cups that have been sitting in the closet, an empty coffee container, and an empty spinach container are some examples. Oh also, I saw a TikTok recently about soaking cardboard boxes in water and then wrapping it around various size containers. You let it dry, and then have compostable seed starting containers! We tried this experiment once and some sizes worked better than others, but rest assured, we’re going to be trying it again and again with cardboard that we’d be getting rid of anyway. Maybe next year when we’re starting even more seeds than this year, we’ll have a little army of cardboard seed-starting containers.

We also bought some plant food from a bidding site, have been accepting some donations from family members (shoutout to mom for a beautiful potting bench that had been sitting in her garage), and have been just generally keeping our eyes open for anything that might be useful (no, I’m not too proud to grab that plastic planter I saw laying on my street after garbage day).

Maybe someday we’ll have this beautiful, luxurious garden with a fountain and some peacocks or something… But for now, we’re trying to be as practical and economical as possible. And we’re having a blast doing it.