Our Victory Garden

My wife and I have started a more sincere effort at growing a good bit of our own food over the last couple of years in general, but in these tough economic times specifically, we have increased our efforts. We live in a rural area with plenty of room and have the space to expand our gardens even more. Faced with the economy the way it is, it just seems fitting to roll up the sleeves and get more dirt under the fingernails to ride out this mess by helping out ourselves....

...the only thing is, growing cheap homegrown food is pretty expensive. In our area we have a very rocky soil, and calling it soil is being nice. What we really have is rock with some limey clay around it. So, we took our garden efforts up above ground level into raised beds. The beds are nice, built of mortared stone - certainly not the cheapest way to build a bed. And, they are filled with a purchased mixture of sand and compost, hauled in by hired dump trucks. Again, not the cheapest way to grow a tomato.

Of course every good gardener needs a place to store their tools. So, we built a nice garden shed that more or less matches the appearance of our house, doing much of the work ourselves, but still adding to the cost of each little pepper grown.

Did I mention the greenhouse? If you are going to make an effort to supply your appetites with homegrown veggies and such you have to be able to get plants going early in the year, and extend the harvest throughout the winter...so a greenhouse found its way into the mix. Price a greenhouse (though we built it ourselves) and see how many sprigs of overwintered basil you need to pluck to make it cost worthy.

All told we may never realize a "profit" from growing our own foodstuffs, but it's satisfaction and reward enough watching the plants grow knowing we did it, and that we know where they came from and that no chemicals have been applied to them. And it is a downright tasty reward, too.