Top Ten Ways to Save Money with an Organic Vegetable Garden

1. Do it yourself:  Don’t pay someone else to dig, plant, cut and prune for you.  In addition to saving money, the exercise will make your feel better.  If working in the yard makes you grown – get over it.

2. Set your mower deck higher: set it at its highest setting (or at lease higher than you do now.  Don’t bag..leave the clippings where they fall.  You save on fertilizer and your lawn will look better.  Clippings don’t cause thatch, fertilizer does.

3. Make your own weed killer: vinegar, salt and dish soap, evidently boiling water kills weeds, and gin dish soap and vinegar.  Hit google…or this link: Hit Me! Evidently the vinegar kills the weed, salt keeps it from growing back, and soap sticks to the weed so the first two things can work. Amounts vary from recipe to recipe (or is it a formulation…again I digress) and do not appear to be very important. As the salt sticks around for a bit, you need to wait a little before replanting. [Didn't someone sale fields in the bible or something?]

4. Get your tools at yard sales and use hand tools. Never pay retail. Good tools last forever. Power tools use gas, stink, pollute your yard and the world at large, and leave you smelling like gasoline after you are done. Oh yeah, they are expensive too.

5. Compost. Make your own dirt. Don’t buy a bin, you don’t need one. Dig a hole. Make a pile. If you just pile up everything that was once once alive [and not an animal] that is left over from your kitchen, you will have compost in six to nine months. If you follow the rules and mix your compose and turn it, you can have some super dirt in two to three months.

6. Make your own mulch. Shred your leaves with you lawn mower. Contact a tree service and ask for chipped branches. You may get them for free since you will save the company the dumping fee. Be prepared though, it doesn’t look as nice as bought mulch but it works great on your garden and saves money. You may also consider stones or pebbles, the initial outlay is higher but they don’t have to be replaced. A truck load of local stone costs less than you think.

7. Divide plants, share seedlings, ask you neighbors. Talk to you neighbors and see if they have any plants that need dividing. Join a garden club or plant exchange. Look for sale by garden clubs and botanical gardens.

8. Watering. Get a rain barrel. You don’t need some expensive system. Contact your water department or look for recycled plastic barrels. Use soaker hoses in your beds and garden; you will use much less water. Water deeply once or twice per week. Daily, short watering make for shallow roots and unhealthy plants.

9. Grow Vegetables and Herbs. The saving will take to be realized but you can save a lot of money growing your own food. The savings will only increase over time. Especially if you follow the above tips. See my previous post for a calculator on gardening savings.

10. Cancel your cable and get outside in your yard.

Organic Vegetable Gardening: A Few Words About Tomatoes

Everybody loves tomatoes. And the taste best when picked from the vine, walked to the butcher block, sliced, and put on the homemade bread with lettuce, bacon, and mayonnaise. My mouth is watering at the thought. First we have to grow the tomato.

Tomatoes come in a numerous varieties, heirloom and hybrid. I just like to eat them. From grape sized and red to gigantic and purple, you can get tomatoes in a virtually unlimited array of colors and sizes. They all grow between three to four feet for you determinate varieties and seven to fifteen feet for your indeterminate varieties. All tomatoes need twenty-four to thirty six inches of space to spread out. If you use deep beds, you can plant a bit closer together and train the vines vertically. The majority of the roots are in the top eight inches of the soil with some fibrous spreading roots going four plus feet down. They like their soil to have a pH of 6 to 7.

Tomatoes love eight or more hours of full sun per day. They cannot tolerate frost and should be started indoors and transplanted to your garden after the last chance of frost. Where I live in Tennessee, that is tax day here in the US, April 15. Did I follow my own advice? Of course not! I planted early and had to cover my tomatoes because we had a frost. Some stakes and old packing blankets over the tomatoes brought them through just fine. They look great and are moving toward the sandwich as I write.

When you do plant your tomatoes, if in rows they should be 18 to 24 inches apart. If you use deep beds as I do, they go 12 inches apart and should be trained up a trellis. Tomatoes love water and should get one to one and half inches per week either from rain or watering. Apply compost or slow acting fertilizer in spring. Tomatoes are heavy feeders and require light supplements every couple of weeks throughout the growing season. Go easy with the nitrogen. You will be well served by spraying your plants with the liquid seaweed extract.

I have had trouble over the years with the tomato hornworm. You know you have them when you see holes in your leaves and black droppings in the foliage of your lovely tomato plant. If you spray your plant with water, the hornworms thrash about and let you know where they are. You will recognize them from the large (3 to 5 inches) , green, caterpillar appearance. The dead giveaway is the horn on their head. They are relatively easy to control by picking of early in the season. You can also dust with BT (bacillus thuringiensis). If the infestation is too awful, use pyrethrum twice, three days apart.

Whiteflies have been the bane of my existence on more than one occasion. The little bugger secrete honeydew that encourages fungus causing the plant to weaken, turn yellow, and die. So sad. You know you have them because your plants start to turn yellow and, when the plant is shaken, a flying could of dandruff flies around your tomato. Insecticidal soap will get rid of the pestilence. If that doesn’t work, use the pyrethrum twice, three days apart.

Hey, have fun and eat the delicious tomatoes. I know I can’t wait.