Paid for WDW trip by growing my own food

[mrsabbott]

We have done some raised beds. We used to do squash but I had an allergic reaction to the plant (not the squash though) so we don't grow it anymore. Decent yields with tomatoes, Dukes, peppers, and beans. We did spinach last year.

We have chickens and love them! They have an enclosed area, but we sometimes let them roam the yard.. Get the bug and slug problem under control! Lol! Bad thing is they won't stay out of the garden so next year we have to fence it off. The eggs are great! We have 6 hens (my Plymouth Rocks are super friendly but out RIR is skittish!) and get about 3 dozen eggs a week. There are 6 of us in our family though.. We have gifted eggs to people and may sell some just to cover feed costs.

 

[rnorwo1]

Are you my children posting from the future?!? My son wants to move to San Francisco or Seattle or London. My daughter wants to move to a suburb. Any suburb. lol

Yep, that was me as a child! I could never sneak out of the house as a teen because there was no where for me to go out in the sticks! I swore I would never live in the country when I grew up, but here I am living in the middle of no-where, loving our chickens.

I have a small, rectangular strip of ground between the side of my house and a sidewalk that is very difficult to keep flowers growing there. I was thinking of doing a container herb garden there. Does anyone have any ideas of inexpensive, yet nice looking containers that I could use? I agree with a pp, pics of gardens and container set-ups would be wonderful! I can post a pic of the chicken coop/tractor that DH built if anyone needs ideas... We used scrap wood and DH is no carpenter, but it was easy and came out really well, I think!

 

[kymom99]

Here is our garden back in 2013.
Corn, beans, peppers, tomatoes

 

[kymom99]

One more

 

[CAFarmerGirl]

Ky...your garden is like a picture in a book!

 

[kymom99]

Ky...your garden is like a picture in a book!

My husband is a perfectionist when it comes to the garden!

 

[holycow]

Oh that is beautiful!!

 

[lorac4disney]

Oh I love this thread!!!! I also do a lot of gardening. We also have free roaming chickens (13 hens and 3 roosters). They are Barred Rocks. I'm able to let them free roam thanks to two wonderful dogs that we have. To my dogs, the chickens are their pals. They even sleep together. We incubated all of our chickens from eggs so they are very people friendly too. We get quite a few more eggs than we can eat so we incubate the excess and sell the chicks for extra income while raising the roosters for meat. We also have our own cows, goats, and pigs. I make our own butter and cheese as well as raise a lot of our own meat although I will buy some meat at our local Mennonite store. As for my garden, I sell a lot of our produce. What I don't sell and don't eat fresh, I can and preserve it for winter. During the growing season, I have an outdoor kitchen where I usually keep two pressure canners running so that I don't heat up our house. I have a group of neighbors that trades our home canned goods so that we each get a bit of variety. I also grow a huge watermelon patch that I sell the watermelons out of every year. I easily make $200 to $300 on any given day I sell them which is usually on Fridays and Saturdays once they start to ripen. My mom and several of my other neighbors are diabetics so I also grow fresh Indian corn for them since it doesn't spike their blood sugar like sweet corn does. That's a little niche thing I do that brings in some nice money since I have long time buyers standing in line for it. We also hunt and fish and I do a lot of wild foraging for berries and mushrooms. All of this keeps our food bill extremely low while keeping the quality of our food very high. It allows us the freedom to use our income for things like nice vacations also.

 

[Candlelady]

Take a look at self watering gardening.

Go to youtube and type self watering containers

There are a bunch of videos on this.

Here's one video by Larry Hall

Because we have sand for soil, we experimented with this method last year. I swear by it now and we are increasing the size of our garden this year. We never had any luck even with a raised bed garden. With this method we feel we can grow almost anything! I even started most of my own plants this year instead of purchasing at the local greenhouse. I can't say enough about this method of gardening.

Larry Hall also has a facebook group called Rain Gutter Grow System Group Page, which is very helpful, or look him up by name on Pinterest and YouTube.

 

[magicmomms]

Dang! I don't know what happened, but I haven't been getting notifications anymore for this thread. I have missed a lot! Nice garden pics by the way! Very inspiring and revving me up for this season. I don't have one picture of the whole garden- it won't fit in one shot. Most of the pics I have from last year have my lil girl in them- I feel weird about putting those up here. I will take some this year though. Truth be told- my garden is not beautiful- it would win NO awards with marth stewart or BH&G. My garden is useful and functional though, so that is what matters to me.

I am in Virginia 7a zone- and currently I have planted: onions, leeks, chives, potatoes, carrots, parsley root, parsley, parsnips, radish, turnips, cucumbers,
watermelons, broccoli, kale, collards, lettuce, tomatillos, beets, spinach, swiss chard, corn, ground cherries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, cilantro, thyme, rosemary, oregano, lavender, sage, tarragon, mint, sunflowers, zucchini, & peas.

This week and the following week I will be putting in melons, pumpkins, and basil. Around mother's day I will put in tomatoes and peppers. A week after that beans.

I may have forgotten things, or I may end up adding more as the season goes on. I just never know. I never follow the garden plans I make. Never

 

[magicmomms]

ok I found some sans daughter (I take a lot with her!)

But now...I can't post them b/c it says they are too large. Can someone help me learn to resize them?

Edit: Never mind...I googled it!

 

[magicmomms]

This is August when things are slowing down and the garden has been picked for the day. The part you can't see is all getting planted for fall garden at this time, not much to see anyway.

 

[magicmomms]

So even though my garden doesn't look like much it puts out a lot of food. When I first started it wasn't what I expected, meaning it's not like going to the grocery store. See my pics below. Each one is that days picking. I pick every other day, every three days in slow periods. The food is random! Maybe a lot of tomatoes one day, or a watermelon the next, but it isn't anything you can plan on for a recipe. I have to come up with recipes on the fly to use things up and also I have a plan in place for each kind of vegetable preserving. Like, on days when I don't have enough tomatoes to can...I put the extra in ziplock bags and freeze. On days I don't have enough peppers to can...I roast them, peel them, and store them in olive oil in a mason jar in the fridge. Stuff like that. Mostly I do a lot of freezing, until I get a bigger garden where I can grow more for preserving this is my option. I hope these help.

 

[Arich01]

Wow Magicmomms~ truly inspiring! I'm starting my first little garden and you have really given me some "real world" tips! Thank you!

 

[hershey2014]

We just got chickens this year. We have 22 right now. We have our garden tilled. Just waiting to plant. But were canning all of our food this year.

I need to learn how to grow year round.

 

[Monykalyn]

Got our beds ready for more plantings-fresh dirt/compost/peat moss and added another raised bed, will be building the "living fenceposts" tater towers this week too. Since we have to do a barrier to keep chickens out of garden when they are allowed out of their area-we are adding posts and ability to do a cold frame/small greenhouse cover. Hoping to grow more into colder months this year.

If anyone has tried/true sites or recipes for canning/freezing/preserving I'd love any recommendations!

 

[magicmomms]

If anyone has tried/true sites or recipes for canning/freezing/preserving I'd love any recommendations!

I would just go with the Ball's Blue book of canning. You can buy it cheap online or get it free at the library. There are a lot of people online/blogs just spoutting stuff off they don't know about. You can really hurt someone if you make the stuff wrong. This book is the standard. I would start there. When I first started I didn't because it looked boring- all the onliners I tried were not real recipes and all my food turned in the jars. No one ate them- but what a waste of money, veg and time.

 

[The Princess]

That is wonderful!!!

 

[pigletto]

Wow this thread is so inspiring!! I am impressed!
I don't have nearly as much space as it appears some of you have, but I do have a nice sized back yard and am planning a garden for the summer. I am going to grow a lot of tomatoes and my MIL is going to teach me to can. Dh and I have two large container gardens in the back but haven't used them for a few years. They were his project but he just didn't have the time for them any more once he went back to school and was working full time.
So I've decided this year they are my project. I find it all a little overwhelming to be honest but I will start with some of the recommendations in this thread and with the veggies that I know we will eat and go from there. I'm also planning to grow the herbs we use.
My MIL said keeping notes was very important to her the first few years while she learned what did and didn't work.

 

[magicmomms]

Might be a frost tonight- so check your regional weather. 32 degrees and below and a lot of spring/summer plants will die! Put a sheet or row cover on them tonight if this is in your region.