GARDENING HELPS KEEP YOUR FOOD COSTS DOWN WHILE INSPIRING IMAGINATION. This year may be the year you decide to finally grow a vegetable garden in your front or back-yard. Gardening can be as inexpensive or costly as you’d like depending on how you approach it. My name is Karen from the blog Lil Suburban Homestead and I hope I can inspire you to get out and dig with our best kept secret vegetable garden tips. To start your vegetable garden you may feel a bit intimidated, don’t be. To ease your worries I’ll share with you our success and failures over the years. We’ve been through it all which has helped us become homestead experts for our family. Sometimes failure is only the beginning to your success. Beginning to vegetable garden is about learning When we started our vegetable garden let’s just say our first attempt turned into a failure but not without a learning experience. I was disheartened but not discouraged from continuing my quest to grow home-grown, delicious food! I guess you could say it was in my DNA as when I grew up my parents always had a tiny garden but I always wanted […]
How To Grow A Budget Vegetable Garden From A Homestead Expert : The Grocery Game Challenge 2017 #3-4 June 19- July 2
How I Grow My Edible Garden Right inside Our Kitchen: The Grocery Game Challenge 2016 #1 Nov 7-13
IT’S CHEAP, HEALTHY AND WISE Why buy when you can plant an edible garden right inside your kitchen? Why toss your vegetable scraps into the trash bin when you can regrow them instead? This post is not about starting your own garden per se, but more about how to recycle and regrow your vegetable from discards. Reaping what we sow from our edible garden Before we started our edible garden, my family of four usually spent around $600-700 a month on groceries. Fruits, veggies (including those that are canned and frozen), rice and other perishable goods rarely come cheap so we usually spend around $70-90 for these items per every grocery trip. Now as our edible garden grows, we are saving around $20 per week on veggies based on their costs off the shelf. It might not be much now but having an accessible food supply 24/7 is so much worth it! Aside from saving a lot of money because I could dramatically reduce my trip to the veggie aisle, this practice is also something that had improved my family’s health. Growing veggies in the kitchen (and later transferring them to pots outdoors) has been a fun […]
Should gardening be a subject taught in school?
TEACH KIDS LIFE SKILLS Gardening is a great way for adults to grow organic fruits and vegetables plus save grocery money throughout the year. What about teaching the kids about gardening and where the food they eat comes from? I believe that budgeting should be taught at school because some parents just don’t understand the financial concept of spending less than they earn. If you are a financial nerd like I am you will agree that teaching kids about money from a young age is important. If the education system could include every day living financial knowledge then maybe we wouldn’t have so many people swimming in consumer debt. Maybe your school does this already but not many do. Basic math isn’t enough. Why stop there though? Why not make school fun and educational at the same time by teaching other basic life skills such as gardening. I’m not talking about teaching kids to be master gardeners just the simple process of growing food from seed. Gardening when I was a kid When I went to school although it’s a different system in the UK I can remember between the ages of 6 and 8 planting and […]
How to grow your own fruit at home
HOME-GROWN FRUIT U-PICK Many people enjoy going to the market to buy local produce but what’s even better is growing your own fruit trees and vegetables at home if you have the space to do so. Although you can easily buy fruit trees at your local garden centre, understanding how to properly plant and care for them takes a bit of research and sometimes trial and error. Growing up on the farm I was lucky enough to enjoy eating homegrown fruit from fruit trees such as crab apples, pears, bushes of elderberries, grapes, blackberries, currants and raspberries. They were all easily accessible and enjoyed by my family and our grandparents. My grandma made many elderberry pies over the years that we had the pleasure of eating. Having the opportunity to pick fruit from our own backyard is like nothing else and you certainly save money. The only drawback was the mess that some of them left behind, particularly the larger fruit trees. The beautiful flower blossoms add some vibrant colour to the spring landscape but once they begin to drop their fruit and leaves the mess and clean up begins. Cleaning up the fruit and leaves can not only […]
Why you should enjoy local produce or pay the price
KEEPING IT CLOSE TO HOME If you open any refrigerator most people have some form of fresh produce readily available to prepare daily meals. Why? That’s easy because it’s part of a healthy diet. Have you been thinking about growing your own vegetable garden? If so, now may be a good time to start, here’s why…… If purchasing fresh produce is part of your weekly grocery budget be prepared to see the costs increase over the next few months. California is a major exporter of fresh produce including grapes, melons, peppers, tomatoes and avocados. They are currently experiencing the worst drought they have seen in a very long time. Canada currently imports approximately $5 billion worth of produce from California every year. The majority of the organic produce we see on the shelves of our grocery stores in Canada is imported and the bulk of it is shipped in from California. How could this impact us in Canada? While it is uncertain exactly how much of an impact it will have, paired with the declining value of the Canadian dollar the drought that has hit California hard this year. It is expected to increase the cost of purchasing fresh […]
