Saving Time & Money

Mix it up! Companion Plant your Annual Vegetable Garden

Debby WardLeave a comment

Make the most of your garden space by mixing flowers and herbs with your annual vegetables.

Backyard Foodscape
Backyard Foodscape incorporates flowers and herbs along with vegetables.

Pairing the right plants together, those that gardeners have observed grow well together, allows plants to do some of your garden work for you. This accomplishes several functions as we can see…

One classic example showing some ways plants work together is the native American corn/beans/squash combination:

Poll beans climb up the corn stalk, so the corn is the support, or trellis, for the bean.  So the corn just saved you from building a pole bean trellis. The bean is a member of the legume family of plants. This plant family are what are called ‘nitrogen fixers’, which means they capture nitrogen and store it in nodules on their roots, making it available for other plants to take it in. Corn is a heavy nitrogen feeder, so in exchange for the support the corn gives the beans, the beans feed the corn. The beans just saved you from having to add something to feed your corn. The squash plants wind all around the base of the corn and beans, providing them shade cover to keep moisture in the soil longer for all of them. The squash just saved you from watering as much or putting down mulch to hold moisture in the soil.  A couple nice additions to this already cool combo are:

  • Sunflowers in the mix to also support beans and provide seeds for humans and birds.
  • Nasturtiums attract a ‘beneficial bug’ called hoverflies.  Beneficial bugs are so named because they prey on other bugs that like to eat your food, although, in a diverse ecosystem, all bugs are beneficial to maintain balance. Hoverflies like to eat bugs like aphids and thrips.  Nasturtiums repel loads of critters who want to eat your crops including: cabbage loppers, worms and weevils; squash, cucumber and bean beetles and more.  In addition, the leaves and flowers are edible!

Companion planting is a good way to design your garden beds. See what plants go together and plant in those combinations. Start with simple combinations and then get more complex over time. Good places to start are:

  • tomatoes/lettuce/onions/marigolds/parsley
  • peppers/basil/marigolds/chamomile
  • peas/carrots/lettuce
  • bush beans/potatoes/flax
  • cucumbers/radishes/nasturtiums/dill
Squash & Nasturtiums. Nasturtiums are good companions for not only cucumbers, but also squash and melons.

Another reason to use companion planting is it makes a beautiful garden, as these photos show, and remember, beauty is food too!

Container gardeners, you can do this too!  The same combinations apply, either in the same container, or containers that are next to each other.

I’ll write more companion planting, so check back.

5 Steps to Prep Old or Future Garden Beds Now

Debby WardLeave a comment
make living soil
You can also do this around perennial plantings like blueberries as we did in this pic

Post update: This process can be done any time of year ..

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Happy autumn!

As the days grow shorter and cool down, fall is a great time to get outside.  Save yourself some work next spring by preparing your current or future garden now with these easy steps:

  1. Chop old dying plants off at ground level, or mow very low, and chop up the above ground parts
  2. Put either cardboard or 4 sheets of newspaper down over your existing beds, or over an area you would like to make a garden next year.
  3. If it is a windy day, hose down the cardboard/paper so it does not blow away while you are working.
  4. Put the chopped up old plants on top of the cardboard/newspaper (or you can compost it)
  5. Top off with leaves racked from your yard and then a bit of hardwood mulch to hold it all in place and look tidy

You’ve just accomplished:

  •  Beginning to build healthy living soil that will grow great plants for you
  • If the bed is current – provided weed suppression for next spring planting
  • If the bed will be new next year – you have started eradicating grass or whatever is currently in the space so making the bed will be much easier next spring

Get Great Organic Garden Tips & a Free Workbook

Happy Gardening !

Sourcing Materials for your Garden Projects – Foundations of Organic Gardening Info Series

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Backyard Foodscape
Backyard Foodscape

Think free, or darn close to it. There are various ways and places to find low coast items for your gardening projects.

‘Use and value renewable resources” is one of the 12 permaculture design principles we explore in the Foundations of Organic Gardening course.

Sometimes this looks like building a community of people who share resources.

Sometimes this is discovering what resources we have on our property we can cultivate.

Sometimes buying something makes sense based on its utility.

Another permaculture design principle is “Produce no waste”. These two principles can go hand in hand.  For example, maybe you have a tree that drops branches each year. Perhaps it makes sense to invest in a chipper so you can chip those branches into mulch instead of bring in mulch. You may be saying, ‘that is not free’, but consider how much you spend now dealing with the branches and how much you currently spend on mulch.  The investment may be worth it.

Most of the things we use to build healthy living soil are free.

We explore these types of ideas all through the Foundations course, so join the fun and sign up now.

3 Reasons to Start Your Veggies from Seed – Foundations of Organic Gardening Info Series

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Ok, I have been getting such a great response to this series of posts, I’ll keep going into August ….

Are you someone who has hesitated to start your own plants ? Here are three really good reasons to try it.

1. Save money. Really, you do save money by starting your own plants.  A seed packet that can last you for years can cost the same amount as one plant.

2. Variety diversity. Think about how many varieties of tomatoes you see in the store.  How many from your local farmer’s market.  Consider this, the Seed Saver’s Exchange Member catalog  has about 4000 tomato varieties– that is variety diversity. You won’t get bored,  you get to try loads of cool stuff and eat a much more diverse yummy diet – what is not to love about that ?

3. You control what happens to your garden plants. Most people I work with want to know their plants are not grown with GMO seed, are not given chemicals as infants and given proper organic nutrition as they grow up. Unless the plants you buy are certified organic, or you know your local plant grower well, you are taking your chances.

Spring Green Seedlings
Spring Green Seedlings

Growing from seed is not hard, especially the crops most people love like tomatoes and cucumbers. Some plants grow really easy from seed right into the garden, like lettuce.

Want more Foundation ? Consider the Foundations Course.  We start in August, so sign up soon so you don’t have to wait anther year for garden success !

Don’t like to take time weeding ? Mulch !

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Tomatoes mulched with cardboard and straw to keep weeds back.
Tomatoes mulched with cardboard and straw to keep weeds back.

Although some of us actually like to weed, many people don’t have that view.

To cut down on weeding, place cardboard or 6 sheets of newspaper around your plants and cover with 4″ of straw.  In a small home garden, one bale is likely enough for your entire vegetable garden or blueberry patch, maybe for both.  Local straw from Home Depot is about $5.00 a bale.  The $5.00, plus the tax in addition to the gas money and time to take the trip, are pretty cheep compared to the time you could spend weeding.

In addition to cutting down on your weeding, this also helps build healthy living soil.  It breaks down to create richer, blacker soil, so don’t remove it at season’s end.

Want more straw cheaper ? Check Craigs List for farmers selling it within 100 miles of you.  Then plan a family day trip to a site close to where the farm is where you’ll pick up your straw bales. The fun will offset the gas cost and you’ll support a small local farm.

Growing Your Own Tomatoes Saves you Money

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Thessaloniki Tomato, great for drought and a good all around open pollinated red tomato
Thessaloniki Tomato, great for drought and a good all around open pollinated red tomato

Lets look at how much money you can save by growing your own organic tomatoes.

Tomato prices at the Farmers Markets are between $3.00 and $5.00 a pound.  Although you are at least supporting a small local farmer, they may not even be organic.  Organic tomato prices at local stores run in the same range.

If we are super conservative, you can easily get 15 tomatoes off one plant even if we have challenging  weather.   Each of those tomatoes (from a  red fruited open pollinated variety like the Old Brooks or Thessaloniki) is 1/2 to 1 1/2 pounds each depending on variety and conditions.  Staying with our conservative model, if those 15 fruits are 1/2 a pound each,  your one tomato plant has given you 7.5 pounds of tomatoes, and would have cost from $22.50 to $37.50 if you bought them. If you got your tomato plant from us at $4.00, subtracting that from your savings total, you still saved from $18.50 to $33.50 and had plenty of tomatoes for several BLTs, salads and a pasta sauce or two – all from one tomato plant in a very conservative model. Plus, they are homegrown, so you didn’t have to go anywhere to get them, thus you saved more money on gas and saved time too by walking to your tomato plant instead of driving somewhere !