We used to have a great garden when we first moved into our home almost 20 years ago. I loved it. But kids came along and with them came activities. So the garden went by the wayside.
We love our salads though so we decided to grow one tomato plant this year. Just for fun, I did some calculations on purchasing the materials and compared them to tomato prices at the local grocery store (minus the salmonella of course. Just to be fair, store-bought tomatoes were found not guilty of salmonella). I figured that we needed to grow about 80 big, juicy tomatoes to break even. Of course our own home grown tomatoes would taste much better…and they do. The only problem is that we were a bit confuzzled on what tomato seeds we were buying. Here’s our bountiful harvest.
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Nice tomatoes, Mine aren’t growing well this year but we did plant them a bit late. we also have beans, butternut squash plants, and some other stuff of which I cannot remember. Oh and chickens and soon we’ll have some more ducks (the last ones were caught by the fox) Oh and a herb garden, 2 plum trees and 4 apple trees, black berry bushes and some nut tees!
Also this picture only shows about a third of my garden, there is a veg patch at the back and a huge front garden
Nice, I’m lucky enough to have a very large Bramley apple tree, about 90 years old and still producing enough fruit to last more thanhalf the year every other year.
We have our apple tree as well, but we don’t spray it so the apples can have some bad spots. We usually pick the apples when they’re ready and stick them out in front by the street with a sign that says, “Free Apples.”
I think we still have some applesauce in the basement freezer we made in 1998.
My family lives on applesauce for breakfast, so the apple source is extremley useful. We don’t do anything at all to the tree except pick the crop as it comes, wrap the apples in newspaper and box them up for the months to come. We only get a heavy crop every other year and it has dropped off a bit in the last few years, but is still going strong.
1 Get or make a tray of cups. I screw 20- holed cups to a board with a screw gun. Put another holed cup in each holder. Fill them with garden dirt. This is the hardest part by far.
2 Take your favorite tomato from the market, cut it up, and scrape the seedy pulp into a bowl.
3 Pour a bit of seedy pulp into each cup.
4 water a bit, and stir the pulp into the top 15 mm of soil. Don’t worry about the tiny seeds that are left unburied, you have to many anyway.
5 Put in a sunny place and water often. 10 to 20 tiny plants will sprout in each cup. Keep pulling out the small ones, or transplant them to an empty cup with a spoon.
6 in one month you will have 20 cups with a big plant in each one, ready to go into the garden.
For about an hours work, and the price of a tomato (which you still get to eat) !
Tomatoes from the store are probably not the best ones to grow in your garden. The ones in the store are chosen based on it’s transportability. Better taste can be had from non-hybrid seeds that are from tomatoes that have been grown locally, as those produce best in your area.
Is Andy Cotter on the forums? I remember he said that he grows a rediculous amount of tomatoes on his and Irene’s farm, they had a whole bunch of different kinds too.
My favourite home grown food are raspberries, no work required as far as I know, and you can usualy get quite a lot of berries if you pick them at the right time, plus they taste awesome! We have had big raspberry plants at two of the houses I have lived at and they were great. Whenever I was bored during the summer I could just go into our back yard and pick a handful of them for a quick snack. If I were more organised about harvesting I’m sure you could really take great advantage of one and they seemed to grow really easily so I would imagine it would be really cheap if not free to do so.
From left to right two pumpkins and two watermelon plants, a composter filled with bind weed to get up and running, four big beef tomato plants, zucchini and squash along the back, variety of lettuce, carrots, and flowers on the right. I got a lot of lettuce, two tomatoes, and three zucchini so far, but a lot more on the way.
at our house we have zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, sugar snap peas, lettuce, green beans, and yellow squash. we get so many zucchini we dont know what to do with them! then down at the farm we have sweet corn, cantalopes (sp?) watermelons, asparagus, potatoes- regular and sweet, onions, okra, tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, and pumpkins.
yeah, the garden can handle the normal spring hail, but not this late in the season. glad I wasn’t outside, when it hit.
before picture on page one of this post
