A Year in the Life of a Vegetable Gardener

A Thrifty Table reader asked if I could give her a calendar of activities for starting a garden.  What a great idea for a post!  Growing your own vegetables is enchanting and fulfilling.  Eating your home-grown vegetables is certainly healthy.  Follow me through my gardening year as I describe the ups and downs and present economical strategies for growing my own food.

Reader’s note: this first paragraph should be read in a creepy voice, preferably accompanied by a spooky music track.

I have a secret.  In the deep winter, below my normal-seeming house, in the dark warmth of my basement laundry room, something is growing.  I hover over it in a narrow pool of light each evening, carefully tending the growth, like a witch fiddling with her potion in the glow emanating from her cauldron.  I’m tempted to cackle with glee every time a new tendril creeps out of the soil.  I’m rubbing my hands together, imagining a future filled with dark, red orbs...

Tomatoes, of course!  With snow blanketing the ground, some might think I’m cracked to be writing an article about gardening.  But those of you who are already thrifty gardeners understand me, don’t you?  February and March is the time to gear up for spring.  I’m getting ready to plant the seeds that will burst out of my basement in May as full-fledged tomato plants and fill my garden with cheap, local, pesticide-free food.  I always feel a little nefarious and magical when I’m huddled in my basement initiating the process that coaxes promise into plenty.

Benefits of gardening…health, money and harmony

Is gardening healthy?  Absolutely!  The exercise alone bolsters my strength and flexibility.  The fresh air and sunshine lift my mood.  The late-night canning sessions …well…they let me catch up on my binge-worthy TV episodes.  I do know exactly what goes onto my soil, so when I eat my own garden vegetables, I have no need to worry about pesticides.  My garden produce is the freshest I can eat, which increases its nutrition compared to grocery store produce (for more detail, see Farmer’s Market v. Grocery Store—June Edition).

Is gardening a cost-effective way to eat?  Honestly, I need to take a closer look.  There are ways in which one can make growing a garden very expensive, so I’m hoping that this summer of 2018 I can collect all the data needed to fully answer that question.  But it’s already clear to me that garden produce has certain monetary advantages.  It has the longest shelf-life in your fridge (I’ve whittled away at cabbages I harvested in November until early January before they withered).  Gardening is also a great way to learn about seasonality, which can save you money (see Farmer’s Market v. Grocery Store—June Edition for more thoughts on this).  The perennials I plant that grow year after year quickly turn cost into profit (see Perennials That Pay for Themselves). 

One of my favorite things about gardening though is intimacy with my natural neighborhood environment. My enriched soil feeds the worms that live under my yard.  I’ll be digging holes to plant my tomatoes and notice a robin closely watching me from the fence.  He’s waiting for me to leave so he can pick the worms and bugs out of the freshly turned soil.  Bees appreciate the Blue Borage flowers I plant, and they wallow in my pumpkin flowers too, by way of a mutual thanks.  Butterflies lay their eggs in the leaf litter I leave on the garden bed in the fall and their progeny flit around my garden all summer.

Ok, are you excited to get going like I am?  Here’s what I do…

February: It’s time for seeds!

The best advice I can give for making a garden affordable is to plant from seed.  The most in-your-face example for affordability are those precious tomatoes.  In our local garden store, a medium-size plant will run me $5.99.  Yet for even the most expensive heirloom organic seed from my favorite Colorado seed company (Botanical Interests), I can get about 8 plants from a $3.49 seed packet.  That’s $0.43 per plant.  If I go for a more common variety, I can grow 24 plants for $1.89 or $0.08 per plant.  I usually grow 10 tomato plants, so instead of spending $60 at the nursery, I spend $1.50 on seeds and grow them myself.

If I am feeling ultra-thrifty, and if I can hold myself to one variety of each heirloom species (so that they don’t “cross”), I can harvest my own seed, and then I don’t even have the seed cost.

In February I get out the catalogs and start imagining my gardenscape.  First, I gleefully go berserk marking all the plants I want to try this year.  And then I resolutely pare it down to what I can fit in my garden.  So make yourself a cup of tea and relax on the couch with your seed catalog as the snow blows outside.

March: Get that nursery built

The middle of March is when I get seeds started for varieties that need a jump-start on the season (though I’ve planted as late as early April with good results).  For me this means tomatoes and peppers.  This does take a bit of work.  I set up a grow light, make some sprouting pots (check out my blog post News Pots are the New Peat Pots to see how to do this), water them daily when they are small, watch for mold, transplant them once, and then take them for shady field trips outside when they are old enough to get used to real light and wind.  Sounds like a lot of work, but mostly it’s 3-5 minutes every day or two for a couple of months.  Our last frost date is around May 5, so if yours is later or earlier, adjust your planting date accordingly. 

I plant more than I need to guard against the inevitable loss of some seedlings and to ingratiate myself with my friends who also garden.  I just love that look of delight and amazement when I ask them if they can take some tomato and pepper seedlings off my hands.  They don’t want to pay $5.99 for their plants either.

In late March, I prepare my soil for planting.  This means adding some compost and/or manure to replenish any depleted nutrients (total cost per year of around $50), and turning it under to bury it and loosen the soil.  Many master gardeners suggest fall as the better time to do this.  Fall gives the advantage of allowing time for the additives to break down a bit more and release their nutrients into the soil.  But I like spring because leaving in the dead plants from last year anchors the soil against winter winds and the leaf litter provides shelter for butterflies to lay their eggs.  And I’m a sap when it comes to butterflies.  They make me happy.

April-May: Planting, weeding, thinning, planting, weeding, thinning, planting…

Ok, get ready.  This is the most intensive effort of the year.  But who cares?  It’s beautiful and the sun is shining!  We can get some exercise!  Spring is here and the birds are singing!  Except when we get that 10-inch early-spring snowstorm which turns the garden to a sopping muddy mess.  Whoops.

How do I know what to plant when?  Each seed packet tells me when to plant, how deep, and the spacing.  So I just organize my seed box by planting date, clipping them together with a tag telling me the date range to plant.  Then I can slowly work my way through the box. 

Keeping a journal helps me learn which specific plants and varieties did well.  When planting, it’s easy to lose track of what I planted where.  Then when a certain variety does great, I can’t remember which one it was!  So I just draw a little sketch of our garden plot and label each section with what I planted.  Then I make a list of which plants/varieties I planted on which date. I could buy water-proof labels and mark each plant in the actual garden, but requires more money and I often loose them under the foliage.  And having a record for future years is really helpful.

Once I plant, about two weeks later I need to weed and thin the patch.  What is thinning?  It’s just what it sounds like.  You’re going for a look like the top of a 45-year-old man’s head.  Pulling some of those struggling seedlings to make room for their brothers breaks my heart every time.  Did I mention that gardening makes me a sap?  But it has to be done.  Once I weed and thin all the patches, it’s time to start again…and again.  There’s less work required as the plants get bigger.  But you are going give your quads and ankles a workout from the squats.

I’m always bursting with longing for the first garden goodies of the year at this point.  To satisfy this longing, I eat some of my weeds and sprouts.  You guessed it, I’ll write about what early shoots I eat out of my garden later this spring.

June:  Cross your fingers for no hail!

I still have some weeding and thinning to do in June, but the work really slacks off here.  Those tender shoots are vulnerable to bugs and weather though, so keeping watch is a good idea.  In Colorado, this is the time of year when thunderstorms start building in the mountains and pummeling the plains.  The big danger is hail.  A good dime-sized hailstorm can decimate my tender plants in 10 minutes.  Usually the hail won’t kill the plants, but it will set them back by weeks, because it requires them to regenerate most of their leaves. I cover my more delicate plants (especially those hard-won tomato plants and my rhubarb) with home-made hail cages made of cattle-panel sections formed into “tents” and lined with hardware cloth. 

July:  Breathe easy

Time for that summer vacation!  By now the weeds have lost their competitive edge against my plants, so only a little casual weeding is needed.

But the height of summer in Colorado can bring days without much rain and with intense sun.  A drip irrigation system would solve that, but they are expensive and often time-consuming to set up.  Our hard water here in Colorado Springs quickly plugs up the emitters, adding to the expense and maintenance.  So we go for a simpler and more economical approach: simply snaking a couple of soaker hoses through the garden and hooking them up to a watering timer.

Watering does cost money, but it’s not large compared to our monthly grocery budget.  The average for two of the most recent years that we planted the whole garden was $12.50 per month from May-October.

August: Harvest time starts

Two day's worth of tomatoes harvested out of our garden.

This is the time I’ve been waiting for!  The June and July garden supplies a smattering of peas, onions, green beans, plenty of greens and kale.  But mid-late August I can start supplying most of our produce out of our 430 square foot garden.  This bounty lasts for 3 months.  Many years, we produce more than we can eat.  I give some of it away through our informal gardener-friends exchange, but much of the excess I dry, can, or freeze so we can eat local in winter.  It’s some work, but boy is it satisfying.  I tried hard to describe the feeling I get when I eat my own produce, but there’s no other feeling like this.  Gratitude?  Magic?  Connection?  Awe?  Glee?  Harmony?  Maybe a bit of all of the above.

October: Harvest time (finally!) ends

My favorite pickling recipe: dilly beans

By October, I’m ready to not be a gardener.  Bring on the snow!  Let’s go frost!  In August it’s all fun, but by now I’m pretty tired of pawing through the greenery to find the produce, tending my drying rack so not to over-desiccate my dried goods, and sitting up till midnight for that last batch of pickled carrots to finish in the canner.  Fall is the other time of year my garden keeps me busy.  I’m sure you are getting the feeling that there’s a fair amount of time involved in helping your garden become the best version of itself.

Is the time worth it?  You might be wondering about what it adds to the cost of my garden produce.  I’m not going to calculate that here.  My perspective is that this work is fun and therefore I view it as a hobby.  The activities mostly require my hands and poking at the plants while daydreaming, a welcome contrast to my academic career, which mostly exercises my mental focus and critical thinking.  Do we expect to be paid for our hobbies?  No.  Therefore a more important question than the cost of my time is, do I want to spend my free time gardening and reaping the benefits?

November-January: Breathe a sigh of relief

Regardless of how much I love the child-like feeling of grubbing my knees in the dirt and peeking under plants to see what’s there, I’m glad for a break.   Once I have my Saturdays back to myself, I often wonder if I really want to do it all again.  And some years, if I have a lot of travel planned in the spring and fall, I don’t.  But every year, I have a choice.  I can go for the entire 430 square foot spread, or I can choose to let most of it fallow and plant out only a 50 square foot patch.  If you are a newbie thrifty gardener, I’d advise taking it slow.  I started with just the 50 square feet, and increased its size over the course of a couple of years, once I knew what I was getting myself into.

Once you start, you probably won’t want to stop entirely.  As January wanes, and memory of the effort fades, you’ll start getting excited again like me.  I’ll start looking forward again to February, and imagining what I am going to plant this year.  I’ll thoughtfully crunch a dilly bean while I remember how much I like the feeling of snapping them off the vine.  Finally I’ll be eager to retreat to my dark winter greenhouse lair and start the magic all over again.