Yesterday Caleb and I built boxes and cleaned up the garden... It has been a depressing venture due to the fact that between work and school I have not had enough time to tend to the garden, the weeds got out of control, and killed many of the plants. The garden was intended to be an experiement and we did learn somethings about gardening, as well as about life. 
Working for money doesnt necessarily cover the cost of living even when living well within your means, especially when the cost working keeps you from living at all. Having time to work in that garden would have provided us with lots of edible food that would have costed little money and only a small amount of time after the initial investment period of germination, growth and initial setup. these boxes cost less than 40$ and only about 2 hours time to build and recultivate the existing beds. Plus as an added bonus I spent those two hours teaching my son some valueable lessons about gardening and using hand tools. The plants that grow from this garden, given a minimal amount of productive research, patients with germination, proper soil selection, the correct seed choice for the season, and the probability that some plants will not survive, should yield as a rotating crop, enough vegetables to sustain us. I have not run the exact probability for success in numbers as several of my plants died for various reasons the first go around so no real number can be summated. However.. the tomatoes have yielded a decent number of delicious roma tomatoes that were enough to use in a chili I made the other night.. with still a few left over. Had the correct fertilizers been used I could have yielded twice as many. more research to be done on that note.
my point to all this is that with enough research, a well thought out time buget, and some old school ingenuity, I can live much happier off of less money and more time spent with my son and working on more important things in life.
We built these planter boxes to keep the weeds and grass seeds out of the garden.. with more time off of work starting in a couple weeks I will be able to spend more time with my son, more time in the garden, and will get more real living done.
2 comments:
The boxes look great, though I still think tacking porch screen up on the vertical posts will help keep the grass seeds you were concerned about out.
In all- very exciting.
Great project to get your son involved too and practice self-reliance.
Post a Comment