Time to Get down and Dirty with your gardening tools....

You know, I personally hate the whole "I don't have a green thumb....I couldn't grow anything to save my life!" excuse. Both of my thumbs are normal colored....and I have grown lots of things successfully. I didn't even grow up in a farming family! Having a garden can save you an incredible amount of money, and let me attest to you that the taste of home-grown, vine-ripened veggies is a BILLION times better than just about anything you can find at the store. Not to mention the fact that it's healthier! There are other benefits to having a garden too (like helping to save our bees) that I'll discuss later in this post, but first, the savings!
Gardening does not require a ton of space in the backyard. Having 5-6 garden boxes or a small corner of the yard functioning as your garden can produce LOTS of fresh, healthy food. However, when planting things in your garden, consider the veggies that you are planting, as well--is it cheaper to buy potatoes at the store (whole 5lb bag for $2) or spend an entire summer caring for them and using up garden space to plant them...for me, personally, I will never plant potatoes in my garden. The cost is not effective! However, with things like squash, tomatoes, fresh green beans, spinach, kale, bell peppers, etc, the cost of growing vs. buying these items is VERY much cheaper!
As far as supplies go, this is another place that you can save some money. You COULD buy that expensive rototiller to till up your dirt, but if you're just starting out and have a small gardening space, water your garden with a little extra sweat and pull out the old shovel to churn some dirt! Also, not buying veggie plants from the store is a very easy way to make your savings even better....one decent tomato plant will run you $2-3 (sometimes even more at smaller nurseries), whereas an entire packet of tomato seeds would ring up at just under $1. Be brave! USE SEEDS! You have the internet...there is no excuse not to learn how to start seeds on your own. They are much easier to grow than babies...and lots of you have done that so far! ;) As far as water goes, there's no good excuse to complain about water usage. Water is dirt cheap! If you are fortunate enough, you may have a secondary water source available to you, which is EVEN CHEAPER.

Now, I mentioned earlier something about saving our bees. How is YOUR garden going to help save the world's bees? (Have you looked into that? They are dying faster than they should be, and we COMPLETELY rely on them for every fresh thing you see in the grocery store...and even all of the canned things, too!). Most of the farming that occurs in the united states today is what we call monoculture farming...this is where farmers grow one thing on a HUGE piece of land....for instance, Joe only grows soybeans on his 300 acres, and Fred only grows tomatoes on his 150 acres. This farming practice is a double edged sword. While it is efficient in producing a lot of one product, these farms are a terrible place for bees to reside. Think about it...if you have 300 acres of tomatoes, they ALL bloom at the same time for about a week or two, then the blooms are gone....when the blooms are gone, the food for the bees is gone. Did you know that most of the bees in our country actually get shipped (from Florida) around the ENTIRE country during the growing seasons of different monoculture farms for most of the year? That's right...the bees go from Florida (on trucks) all the way to California for Almond production, then they head as far as the east coast for cranberry production (and other things). This is INSANE! We have to ship bees around the country to feed ourselves because we can't locally sustain the bees (there are some fascinating documentaries on Netflix about this...go look them up! I really liked "More than Honey"). So, now does it make a little more sense why having your own garden helps our bees? Just think, if everyone grew the majority of their own fresh produce during the summer (then lived off of their canned goods from their garden during the winter), we would not only lessen the need for monocultures, but we would also provide the bees with more polycultures....Polycultures are what they need, and ultimately, they are what we need if we want to continue to be able to have fresh food.

So, BEE brave, go buy some veggie seeds, and START THAT GARDEN! Now is the time to get them going! You won't regret it...I promise. :)

P.S. Check out this lady's article...she tracked her actual savings from having her own (small) garden (as opposed to buying her veggies in the summer) for 3 years. Awesome!

Photo Cred: Google Images