The $1 garden by Jonathan Nunan Issue #122. The dollar garden is simple in concept: buy as many seeds as you can for one dollar and harvest as much food as possible from the plants you grow. You see, sometime last year my mother, Susan, read something somewhere that claimed a tomato cost some incredible amount to grow on your own. Mom—whose plan to build a house out of firewood worked out just fine—made it her mission to grow as much as she could on as small a budget possible. Mom currently resides on a nice piece of central Pennsylvania acreage which allows her to plant large amounts of just about anything; she remembers all too well, however, the days when she lived in town ("when I got my water from the city and my eggs from the grocery store").
To make her results easily duplicated by anyone with a small to moderate amount of yard space, she limited our growing area to a six by ten foot plot. Starting the seeds We lucked out when it came to seeds. Preparing the soil Soil preparation began well before warm weather hit. Harvesting. Backyard Farmers: 25 Websites You Should Be Reading | Apartment Therapy Re-Nest - StumbleUpon. Growing Your Own Garlic - Planting Growing Harvesting and Storing Garlic ...
As far as I'm concerned, garlic gets the blue ribbon for growing your own. It's absurdly easy to plant and care for; it tastes great; it looks beautiful and it takes up so little ground that even those with very small gardens can raise enough to be self-sufficient in garlic for a good part of the year. All you have to do is choose the right varieties; plant at the right time, in the right soil; then harvest when just right and store correctly. 1. Choosing Types of Garlic If you look in a specialist catalog like the one at Gourmet Garlic Gardens, you'll find dozens of varieties of garlic listed.
You see where this is going – and you can see a lot more types of garlic on either of those websites, but for general purposes the most important difference is the one between softneck and hardneck. Softnecks are so called because the whole green plant dies down to pliancy, leaving nothing but the bulb and flexible stems that are easy to braid. Gardeners in most of the U.S. can try some of both. 2. Home Orchard. Search for other topics in Food-Skills-for-Self-Sufficiency.com: Planting and managing your own home orchard can be a very rewarding activity. It takes time and patience to develop a productive orchard, but the payoffs are worth it. Growing fruit trees is measured in terms of years, not months or seasons, but once your young trees are established, the time investment needed to maintain them is relatively low.
There's a huge difference between home grown, tree ripened fruit and the fruit you buy in the grocery store. Home grown fruit can be left on the tree until it is at the perfect height of ripeness before being harvested. Nearly all commercially grown fruit has to be picked before it's ripe so it can be handled and shipped without damage.
Have you ever eaten a peach picked fresh from a tree at the exact height of ripeness? The Home Orchard - Types of Fruit Trees Where you live is a big factor in deciding what kinds of fruit orchard you can grow. The Home Orchard - Sizes of Trees Planning. Fruit Trees That Grow Well in Minnesota. The University of Minnesota lists several varieties of plum trees that it considers hardy. They are Alderman, La Crescent, Pipestone, Superior and Underwood. The Alderman plum is noted both for its ornamental value and for the magnificent burgundy-red fruit it produces. La Crescent produces a high-quality yellow plum that looks somewhat like an apricot. In addition to producing high-quality fruit, the La Crescent plum is a vigorous grower.
The Pipestone plum produces a large red plum, and is perhaps best suited for drier areas of the state. If you live in the southern part of the state, you may want to experiment with a Superior. This variety, although not particularly cold hardy, produces large quantities of dark-red plums.