Open toped containers can be used for watering if you want to water with a bucket. Poke holes in the container bottoms and place them by what you want to deep water. Fill the container from the bucket and move on.
I had to add this.
The best way for a new gardener to fail and give up, is to try and do too much the first year. Dealing with new beds is labor intensive, even more so when you can’t purchase supplies that make it easier. Go for a a small quality bed, and get what you can from it. I’m thinking no larger than 12 by 4 foot, and a couple pots. Most food you can grow won’t save you a significant amount over the market. I garden because I like to and the better quality food is a bonus and indulgence.
I think it is going to be difficult to save money this way. I don’t know how much you will end up spending but lets say it is $100 all inclusive. That can buy a lot of vegetables. Then, there is the time commitment which may end up being many, many hours over the whole season. Growing plants from seed can be difficult as well. The biggest problem from a practical perspective is that you will over produce some vegetables and under produce others. It is easy to generate a 3 year supply of zucchini and but only a 2 week supply of tomatoes for example. Lots of things can go wrong to wipe out a whole crop of one of your favorite vegetables. Most people do small-scale farming because they enjoy it and like having the freshest vegetables. Doing it to save money might be hard although you might be able to sell some if you underestimate the yield and end up with a bumper crop of some vegetables.
[random thoughts]
Hmm…broke, and no strong back handy.
In the State of Illinois, garden seeds may be purchased on Link card (food stamps). FWIW.
What kind of soil is it back there? If it’s solid clay because when they built the house they dumped the excavated basement subsoil back there, then you have a big problem. But if you inherited Northern Illinois’ glacial loess black dirt, you are in luck.
Go get a handful of wet dirt from the weed patch, and see if it smooshes up stickily like a wad of clay, or if it’s just “mud”.
Because it makes a big difference in how you approach this. If it’s clay soil, you’re going to HAVE to have a businesslike rototiller run by a strong back dig it up, and you’re going to HAVE to add tons of soil amendments to loosen the soil enough to make it productive. Roots of vegetables need air to grow, and heavy clay won’t grow anything except a certain selection of weeds and, occasionally, tomatoes.
I would definitely contact your local gardening club with your tale of woe, and ask them for help–this time of year, they’re all getting enthusiastically geared up for another round, and there will certainly be people with tons of extra saved seeds from last year who would be delighted to give you a sampling of seeds. Then you can save your own seeds for next year.
(and believe me, “I’m trying to grow food because I’m broke and my SO is disabled and we’re hungry” will unfailingly touch the Middle-Class Guilt nerve, and they’ll be falling all over themselves to help you, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 
)
They will also have somebody there who owns one of these. They advertise in the back of gardening magazines all the time, showing smiling elderly women in 1950s garden hats running them with one hand. When you’re asking the garden club, tell them ya wanna borrow a “mini-tiller” not a “tiller.” A “tiller” will get you the roaring behemoth.
I would NOT advise you to go the garden fork route, as it’s extremely hard on your back. It may be picturesque, and eco-friendly, but since you are the only breadwinner in your family, if you hurt your back through overenthusiastic garden digging, your entire unit is S.O.L. You will need a garden fork for occasional tasks, as it’s indispensable, but for digging up an entire virgin backyard weed patch? Nuh-uh.
Your backyard full of weeds will need some kind of fertilizer, the same as any other patch of ground that has been in non-stop vegetation production. Weeds suck up nutrients the same as corn or beans, so what you basically have back there is just the dirt structure but without nutrients.
Since your goal is “Food. Now.”, I would have no compunction whatsover about going down to Wal-Mart and investing a few bucks in a big tub of whatever kind of chemical fertilizer billed as “For Vegetables” they may have going. You can do compost, too, and save the planet et cetera, but for right now, you need those veggies popping out of the ground, and you can’t wait a few years for your soil condition to boot up and give you bumper crops naturally.
Also, bagged soil amendments (composted steer manure, mulch, etc.) are not cheap, and it can take an alarmingly high number of bags of composted steer manure to get your former weed patch up to speed, depending on its dimensions. We’re talking, at a minimum, at least 10 bags, just to start with.
And that’s a lot of hoisting, too. Remember your back. So for right now, go with the Big Bucket O’ Plant Food, and amass compost at your own pace.
You can make your own compost with a homemade compost tumbler. It doesn’t have to be a purpose-built object: anything that you can fill up with shredded makings, put a lid on, and then manipulate or stir once a day so as to mix it all up will work. Think “Rubbermaid”. Think “Hefty sack”. Think “old garbage can”. There are innumerable recipes and advice online for how to make compost. Notice that’s it’s fairly labor-intensive: you have to get out there once a day and mix it, or else it doesn’t work right and you don’t get the “compost in 14 days!” that you’re supposed to. It will compost itself eventually if you don’t stir it, just not as fast.
Second the worm farm as a great, low-maintenance way to get useful compost. Get some red wigglers from your local bait shop; a single styrofoam cup will do. Put them in a wide, shallow plastic container that has a lid available to keep it from drying out if necessary, with dampened shredded newspapers for bedding. Feed them potato peelings, apple peelings, and other assorted organic “stuff” (in nature they eat bits of dead grass and leaves). You want them kept at room temperature so they’ll be happy, and eat and breed lots.
Now here comes the fun part: every few weeks or so, you rummage through there, pull out as many grown worms as you can find, set them aside carefully, dump out their by-now mostly-black and semi-composted bedding, put fresh bedding in, put the worms back in, and put the old bedding in the garden. Dig it in; don’t just dump it on top. That allows the soil microorganisms to finish composting the remains of the newspaper, which won’t be completely decomposed just by their stint as worm bedding. And of course it will be full of worm eggs, which will hatch out in your garden, and which will then set to work.
And you can have as many worm farms as you want, because they will breed, and you will find that you’ve got more worms than you started out with. So you can keep filling up Sterilite containers with shredded newspaper and have quite a production facility going there.
I had a worm farm going in the basement as a food supply for a box turtle. I used a single cement-mixing tub, and I had more worms than he could eat. The compost was just a by-product.
The newspaper mulch thing works great, and if your purpose is simply weed control, you don’t have to put straw or hay or other mulch (which all cost money) on top if you staple several layers together so it won’t blow away (and if you don’t care how it looks, hee 
). I planted a huge marigold-and-annuals flowerbed one year by stapling six layers of newspaper together in modules, and then stapling modules together so it formed basically a long roll, then laid it out over top of my flowerbed, then punched holes in it with a steak knife for the flowers, then stood back and didn’t pull a weed all summer. It was great.
–Of course, it looked like crap. But I sat there on the porch with my glass of iced tea, not pulling weeds, and didn’t care.
You can use those flat green plastic sprinkler hoses for a soaker hose (you don’t need to buy a cloth hose). Just lay it out where you want it, and turn it upside down, and turn the faucet on low. One caveat: where the streams come out will excavate a hole in the dirt, so try to make sure nothing’s pointing at a baby plant, or else its little roots will be all exposed. I found it worked well to lay the hose on top of a layer of straw, which allowed the water to percolate down.
Don’t use lawn clippings as mulch, because they will pack together and form an impermeable layer. But they do work marvelously in composting. If I were in your place, I’d be cruising the alleys for bags of lawn clippings put out with the trash.
Be prepared for your water bill to go up. Gardens do need to be watered. But it won’t go up that much if you use mulch (even stapled-together newspapers) to cut down evaporation loss. In my experience shredded newspapers do not work well as mulch, as they tend to pack together in hard wads instead of allowing water to percolate down into the soil. But you can set up your soaker hose underneath the stapled-together flat sheets (which is what I did with my flowerbed), then just run it whenever it feels a little dry under there.
If you get slugs, beer works. Get something like a Play-doh container, dig a little hole and inset it into the ground about halfway up its side, put an inch of beer in it, patrol daily to remove the corpses.
Pound for pound, summer squashes (zucchini, yellow crookneck, pattypan) rival only tomatoes in their ability to produce immense quantities of Food with a capital F out of a small area of ground.
Swiss chard is another goodie, since you can cut it and it’ll grow back.
Greens overall tend to be space-hogs, plus you can’t freeze them.
Container gardening doesn’t necessarily mean going down to the garden center and buying a bunch of purpose-built containers. You can grow plants in anything that will hold the root ball and provide drainage. Grow Swiss chard in old coffee cans, one plant per can. Or a milk jug with the top cut off. You can grow potatoes in a Hefty sack. Be creative.
The big challenge in container gardening is watering. Oy, what a headache. Vegetables growing fast in a hot summer in a small container will need to be watered a LOT. But if you have the patience to get out there and water the Swiss chard every time it needs it (and this of course means you have to go out there and check, with a finger), you’ll have Swiss chard in the freezer.
Broomstick, check your PM. Mebbe I can help…
:eek: She said “sod”. :eek:
It’s going to take him considerably longer than 10 minutes.
When we moved into this house, my chosen garden patch was a 20 by 30 foot spot in the backyard.
Sod.
It took the Better Half–a young and healthy Better Half, this was 21 years ago–a good two hours or so to break that up with a behemoth rototiller from the Guy Stuff Rental Place.
Because a single pass with a rototiller over sod serves merely as a beginning. Remember all those stories about John Deere and the steel plow blade? Even with a steel plow blade, it still takes multiple passes to render sod into something that you can plant seeds in. Grass has a tenacious root system, and a single rototiller pass merely rips open the layer of sod; it does not mash up the grass and dirt into little crumbly bits–“soil”–that you can stick seeds and plants into. You have to go back and forth for that, and it takes considerably longer than 10 minutes.
On the up-side, though, if you really do have good prairie black dirt back there, it’ll be well worth the trouble to get it going as a garden. Prairie black dirt–glacial loess–you put the seeds in, and stand back.
If you’re going to be the one to obtain the tiller, get what’s called a “rear-tine” tiller, it’s better at breaking up sod.
We don’t qualify for food stamps. Apparently, it’s a result of having actual savings. I suppose, technically, I could dip into that for garden supplies, but really we want to save that resource for things like car repairs and stuff.
No one has a basement in this neighborhood, the water table is way too high. It’s not clay. It’s mostly black dirt with some sandy component. Until about 5 years we had the Crazy Upstairs Gardener, so the soil has had experience with fertilizer and compost and such.
I’ll look into that - I just hope I don’t run into the CUG again. (Don’t get me started on her… it would be a Pit thread)
A couple years ago the landlord acquired about three bags of peat moss, which I used on the VERY depleted soil on the south side of the building. We have since had a very nice flower garden there, including the Rapidly Spreading Floribunda Roses of Clutching Death which keeping growing back no matter how viciously I chop them back. I have some experience with growing things, and the soil I’m working with. Any “soil ammendments” I can obtain I will certainly use, it’s just that I’m not sure what I’ll be able to get.
I open the bag and dip out little buckets o’ stuff - much easier on the back, even if it is slower. I’ll take more time to save my back.
If I wanted a worm farm I’d get a supply from the backyard - we have TONS of worms back there, every rain brings up red wigglers all over. Really, I think the basic soil quality isn’t bad at all back there. There’s lots of bug and worm life in the soil
Really?
I just reseed my marigolds every year and they grow thick enough to choke most of the weeds out themselves. Ditto for the alyssum. Mostly, I wind up weeding around the rose bushes. Our flower strip along the south wall of the building is actually remarkably low maintenance.
No one around here bags lawn clippings. They just let the clippings lie where they fall. This isn’t golf-green-lawn suburbia. Most of the lawns around here are only half-grass at best. That might, in fact, be why the wildlife is so healthy - so few lawn chemicals used around here.
I have a well. My electric bill might go up, but the water is free beyond the cost of pumping it out of the ground.
No slugs
Nonsense! I’ve been freezing greens since I was a child!
Besides - we eat a LOT of greens around here. We can go through 3-4 pounds a week in this household.
Oh, list of things I’m contemplating:
Carrots
Onions
Turnips (we eat both roots and tops)
Radishes (roots and tops again)
Spinach
Lettuce
Cucumber
Zucchini
Broccoli
Parsley (though as I recall it takes a LONG time to germinate)
Green beans
Wax beans
Bell peppers (various colors)
I considered potatoes - we grew them as kids - but I think I’ll pass on that. They really do need a mulch, and I don’t have that much space in which to store them nor is home freezing practical for them. Maybe next year
I eat dandelions, and they grow like… weeds. But I’m not sure how tasty the wild variety are versus somewhat domesticated, nor do I know if you can get seeds for those.
Further suggestions welcomed. Crops like turnips that allow eating both tops and bottoms are good. Is swiss chard like that? I’m not sure I’ve ever had it or would know how to cook it. Collard and mustard greens are eaten here, too, but I’m not sure I want to devote that much space to greens this time.
I expect after harvest I will be able to compost the plant remains in a corner of the garden - that will be less threatening to the neighbors than them seeing me cart kitchen waste out the back. I’m sure after they realize I’m not a Crazy Garden Lady like the last one I’ll be able to get something set up. Ah, social problems!
We don’t drink coffee in this household, but the milk jug idea might work. That might be good for small scale herb gardening. Because parsley takes soooo long to get going I might start that inside, but that’s the only one I’d consider doing that way. Start some inside, then plant more seed outside so I get successive crops.
It’s good to hear you do know how to grow stuff, because that is why I said limit the garden size. One thing you can do if you know gardeners, is to trade half a pack of seeds if you had to buy them. Look in places that have promotional cent seeds. You may get them for only 10 cents. The leafy vegetables are what many of them are. Get some pole beans and you can use the old tie poles together and let them to climb method. I cut pussy willows for poles. You can find them in low areas in the ditch. The road crews have to cut them out when they grow. Swiss chard doesn’t have a root that you eat, but it is pretty and productive.
What I meant was, you have to hoist the bags into the car, and then hoist them out of the car again once you get home.
We have a massive bindweed problem of historic proportions. Any patch of ground that either isn’t saturated with weedkiller or that has a building on it will have bindweed growing in it. And that included the sheets of newspaper mulch: I still had to remove occasional inquisitive tendrils from the planting holes themselves, next to the flowers’ stems, because the seeds persist in the soil for decades, if not centuries, and as soon as you till it up, the seeds present themselves (“Hi! Where’s the party?”) ready for germination.
Sorry, I should have said “salad greens”, because that’s what “greens” means around here lately in our Two-Vegetarians-They-Have-Me-Outnumbered family.
Swiss chard. Provides a basic “butter and salt it” cooked leafy green with big meaty stems, like spinach on steroids. I had a few plants and would routinely fill up a grocery bag, which cooked down into “family meal” portion. Go out there with a pair of scissors and snip off the biggest leaves, or you can use a big knife and whack off the entire bundle (although I found that the “bundle” method tends to bring bugs inside, where you find them when you open up the bundle to wash it). Anyway, if you cut the leaves off about two inches above the soil, it all grows back very nicely.
Make all of your beans pole beans. They give a prodigious output for the space they take up. I generally got tired of picking beans about halfway through the summer and said the hell with it, and abandoned them to the Mexican bean beetles.
Seriously, Broomstick I’m as cheap as they get–I hate spending money for anything I can scrounge! I go through Craig’s List looking for bricks, cement blocks and urbanite to use in retaining walls, horse shit and fill dirt. I go through the crap piles at building sites for usable lumber to make raised beds. I have discarded windowed doors that I use with cement blocks to make early greenhouse seedbeds to start my plants. I prune my cypresses and use the sticks to make tomato cages, cucumber frames and pea trellises. I scrounge wooden pallets to wire together into compost bins–after a while they rot and I bust 'em up and compost the wood. I find old iron and cement sinks on Craig’s List fairly often–they make great containers for gardening and already have a drain hole in the bottom!
Best all around cheap fertilizer idea I ever got was from an HGTV gardening show–the cheapest lawn fertilizer you can get mixed 1:1 with epsom salts and broadcast into the garden. Epsom salts are great for your plants (magnesium, y’see) and they have the same effect on slugs and snails as salt but without the bad effects to the plants. I know you say you don’t have an issue with those fuckers but up here the slug is the state bird or something, bleah! I used that the first year or so but now I pass on the lawn fertilizer because I prefer to go organic.
Cheapest soaker hose ever–that old hose that leaks anyway. Cap one end and poke a bunch of holes in it! Soakers really aren’t expensive, though, I bought a 50’ hose from Home Despot for like six bucks on sale and I’ve been using the same one for five years now–with creative placement I can make it serve an 8 x 16’ bed and have a bit left over for the flower bed on the outside of that garden enclosure. Water’s a bigger issue up here since I’m on city water and they jack me up the ass for it, too!
You’d be surprised at how much usable stuff gets thrown away every day, waiting for a recycler with a little imagination to come along. Don’t worry about your landlord, once you get stuff planted it looks great and hardly anybody can tell you started out with somebody else’s trash. 
Radish and lettuce bolt when the weather heats up. Look for varieties that say they resist bolting and pay the extra for them. Who wants to grow the stuff for a month to end up with nothing. Be sure to thin the radishes enough to grow or they just bolt.
Carrots need soil that is loose from 12 to 18 inches down, and rocks should be removed. Failure to do this will lead to twisted and split roots. I grow carrots in a rectangle and spread the seed over the whole area. You can thin carrots when young with a scissors. cut the plants off at the base. Thin to whatever width the carrots can grow to. Some only grow to a diameter of an inch and4 inches long. Other’s can grow 5 inches in diameter, and a foot long. The big ones are what great grandma grew. Around here the nick name is peat farm carrots, because of were they typically grow them.
Onions can be grown about an inch apart, and pulled as green onions at first. Thin them out leaving about 5 inches between plants that you leave to mature. Cut off seeds heads by the head if they occur. The farm that grew onions around here, would fold over the leaves in mid summer. I think it was to get them ready to go dormant for sale. Anybody know why they did this? Root crops are very easily damage by root worms. The cheapest defense is to break up the crops into small plots and plant something that won’t support the pest of the neighboring plants. A few marigolds between the root crops work nicely. They’re a good pest defying plant throughout the garden.
Ok. Unless asked for specific advice I’m done posting in this thread. Best of luck in the adventure.
Oh, I see - well, the gardening places around here will put them in the back of my pickup if I ask, and when I get home I just lower the tailgate and scoop from there. That should work.
Ah, yes, I see the confusion.
Last time I did lettuce (as a kid) we did staggered planting so we had some ready each week instead of all at once. But no, I wouldn’t put in a lot of lettuce.
I don’t think I’ve ever had swiss chard - maybe I’ll buy some to find out if we like it before I try planting it.
It does occur to me that we eat a lot of bok choy in this house - is that reasonable to grow in the backyard?
What is this “bolt” you refer to? I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word used in reference to plants before.
Go to seed. Literally.
Lettuce and radishes will go to seed production. The crown of the plants bolt upward in rapid growth. Go to seed is another term used for bolt. The plant becomes bitter, and fibrous. The radish root becomes hot and woody. The radish can be so hard you can’t cut it with a sharp knife. I’ll list a couple bolt resistant varieties later if I can.
There is no way that your garden will save you money, especially in the first few years. Just buying the supplies you will need (roto tiller, gas, tools, seeds, fertilizer or compost, bug spray, etc.) will cost you more than the vegetables you’ll get from it. Even if you rent a roto tiller (around here it costs $60 a day to rent, so I just bought one since I’ll be using it year after year) and get your compost free, you’ll still be better off, economically, buying vegetables. And when you add in the time you spend on the garden it only increases the disparity. Vegetables are pretty cheap to buy, so garden for fun if you want (that’s why I do it) but don’t think it’s going to be a good economic decision.
I will say that if you buy the equipment and use it over the course of ten to twenty years, you may come out ahead.
Let’s see… the plan is to BORROW a tiller.
Chemical garden fertilizer is cheap
The first year I’ll probably get a crop even without fertilizer or compost. I’m not looking at squeezing max production out of the land.
Seeds are cheap, maybe I’ll even get a few for free.
How can it be “impossible” to come out ahead? It would take some planning, yes, but I don’t see it as “impossible”. When I was a kid we did this and we did, indeed, save money.
Just how much time do you think I’ll be in the garden? This is NOT intended to be a small farm. I spend time out back anyway. It won’t be a picture-perfect garden, but so what?
I think there’s an issue here between what certain people think is a minimal outlay of equipment and stuff and what actually is a minimum.
I’d have to agree. I think my outlay last year was around $20-$30 and I got a lot more than that in tomatoes and peppers out of my garden.
I bought peat moss, some compost, some plant food, and a soaker hose all on sale, because the soil desperately needed it (compacted clay in a new garden space), and I bought plants because I was too lazy and waited too late to start from seed.
We dug ours by hand, since it was a small space and it would have been more trouble to try to get a tiller in there than it was worth. This year, I’ll be borrowing a tiller to work up the next piece of garden.
I could have done it for much, much less if I’d started my own plants from seed, and went and got the free compost offered by the city. I didn’t because I had the money and it was easier that way.
If you can eliminate that cost, then you may have a shot at it.
Yes, seeds are cheap and fertilizer is also cheap. What about pest control? Bug spray can be expensive (although in concentrate form it lasts a long time) and if you need to put up a fence to keep out rabbits (unfortunately we have a few that like to live in our yard) or deer (luckily not an issue for me, but growing up we had plenty).
Perhaps I should not have said “impossible.” It’s unlikely once you factor in all the costs and actually add up what you get from the garden.
In my case we got a ton of cucumbers, some cherry tomatoes, a little spinach, a few carrots, and a good number of peppers. All together, it was probably around $30 to $40 in produce. Not bad, but certainly not anything near what I invested in it. With my garden this year, though, I won’t be buying anything new except seeds, so it starts to even out the longer you have a garden.
I should also note that I planned on getting a lot more out of my garden. Nature has a way of ruining your plans, though.
Between tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting, and watering, the garden took quite a lot of time. If I would have given it the type of weeding it really needed, I can see an average of an hour a day spent out there.
True, but having a garden of any size without a tiller is pretty much insane in my view. Without fencing where I live the rabbits would destroy a lot of my work. I compost so I don’t have fertilizer, but without some type of fertilizer you’re going to have a far smaller haul than you imagine.
I’d urge you to keep track of all your expenses and all your production. I’d truly be interested to see if it saves you money. I don’t think it will, but I only base that on rough estimates of my experience. If you can find a more efficient way to do it, I’m all ears.
Well, yeah, obviously, to some people a “minimum” means only half the stuff in the Gardener’s Supply catalog
I never had a problem with lettuce or radishes bolting, mainly because they got eaten up so fast they never have a chance to sit there and go to seed as the weather warms up. If you want radishes and lettuce, just plant them early and figure on them being basically “done” by the end of May. You only run into bolting problems when you’re hoping to keep them going through the summer.
You can re-plant in August or September for fall crops.
I’ve never grown bok choy, but I dunno why you wouldn’t be able to grow it.
Really, the issue here is not whether it’s long-term cost-effective to garden, but rather it’s a cash-flow issue. Sure, it may be cheaper to buy a bag of Birdseye zucchini, but if you don’t have the cash to do so, you’re S.O.L. No zucchini may be procured.
Unless you’ve got zucchini growing in the back yard.
Big Box O’ Miracle Gro for Veg: $5.00
Packet zucchini seeds: $0.10
Tiller rental: $50.00
Gas for tiller: $3.00
Big Shaker O’ Pyrethrum Bug Dust: $5.00
Trowel: $1.00
Garden gloves: $1.00
Newspapers for mulch, 8 Sunday papers: $16.00
10 bags of composted steer manure: $30.00
Plastic containers for freezing veg: $30.00
I make that $141.10.
If you plant all the seeds in the packet, you’ll get about 20 zucchini plants. One zucchini plant, watered, fertilized, and tended, will put out, over a summer, approximately four paper grocery bags of normal-sized zucchini.
A 28 oz. or one-and-a-half-pound bag of Birdseye frozen zucchini/summer squash runs about $5.00 the last time I looked, and each bag holds about the equivalent of one normal-sized zucchini, sliced.
And each grocery bag holds about 20 zucchinis.
So each grocery bag is the equivalent of 20 bags of Birdseye frozen zucchini, or $100. Multiply that by four bags and you’ve got $400 worth of zucchini. Per plant.
But you planted all the seeds, and you’ve got 20 plants, so you’ve got $8,000 worth of zucchini.
And the cost above is initial outlay, but you’ll keep all of it except the seeds, the newspapers, and the tiller rental for more than one gardening season. The tupperware is reusable. And if you buy a Mantis mini-tiller, which run about $300, once you get the initial tilling of the sod done with the behemoth, you’ll use the Mantis every spring to prepare the garden and cultivate, and you’ll spread out the cost of that mini-tiller over six years.
Or of course, you can invest in a $20 garden fork.
But like I said, it’s not about making it bottom-line profitable; it’s about making the food available in the first place.