A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other peoples pictures and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all have a rock star garden this summer. Keep them coming!
~Mavis
Check out the pictures reader Kim send in. She took action when she realized the Monarch Butterflies were in danger. See what she did to make a difference:
Hi Mavis,
I started gardening many years ago when we lived in a mobile home. We were extremely financially strapped and lived off of mostly canned food from a food donation center. I craved fresh food like no tomorrow.
I found a book by Mel Bartholomew, Square Foot Garden, and realized I could grow at least something fresh to eat. I took literally a few pennies from our very meager budget and bought 3 packets of seeds that first year: tomatoes, bush beans and cucumbers. It was life changing the day I picked my very first home grown vegetable: a green bean!
Fast forward 32 years and I continue to grow as much of my own food as possible. I have a very small yard and 1/3 is all raised beds. This area floods every single time it rains and the raised beds is the only way I can grow food here.
This year I built a new bed just for the butterflies after hearing that Monarchs are becoming endangered.
Once established, I applied for certification through Monarch Watch and now have a nationally certified and numbered garden.
I have not had a Monarch visit yet but have a large population of black swallowtail butterflies that visit on a regular basis.
I am hoping that you will let your followers know about the plight of the Monarch and encourage them to plant a small area in their yard to help them find their necessary food sources. I have just a small 3ft x 8ft area and have already seen the impact it can make.
Kim
Your Garden Pictures and Tips – I’d especially like to see your garden set ups, growing areas, and know if you are starting seeds indoors this year. If so, show me some picture of how you are going about it.- Your Chicken and Chicken Related Stories – Coops, Chicks, Hen’s, Roosters, Eggs, you name it. If it clucks, send us some pictures to share with the world.
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Deb says
I found this story and these pictures really inspiring and motivating. Reading about starting out with 3 packets is a lot less intimidating than starting a whole garden to someone who hasn’t done it before. Thanks so much for sharing.
Kim says
Deb for your first garden I would suggest starting with a small raised bed of no larger than 4 ft x 8 ft. Fill it with the best compost you can find and plant the things you most love to eat. Bush beans is one of the easiest yet most bountiful vegetables you can plant. You can purchase a tomato plant or 2 relatively inexpensively and should be really successful the first year.
If you do not have a source for compost all you have to do is layer any plant material you can find in the future area you want to plant. You can also add shredded paper and cardboard. If you start to do that this year, by next year things will breakdown enough to plant some veggies.
When I lived in the mobile home, I would scout the neighborhood on trash day and bring home bags of grass clippings and leaves. Over the year the vegetable area got better and better. To this day, I still pick up as many bags as I can get. Some of my neighbors feel sorry for me I guess because they will drop the bags off along my fence :). Ok I usually don’t share this one but here goes: a really good, natural fertilizer is very diluted urine. You will be amazed at how well something so simple can help plants grow. About once a month I save a very small amount and put it into a 5 gallon bucket and add water. I then sprinkle it around the garden beds. The plants love it and it is totally FREE, maybe gross to some people but it really works.
OK maybe too much information LOL. Kim
Gina says
Love these stories! I’m super discouraged with my vegetable gardening skills these days (attack of the squash bugs, groundhog, turtle and shade trees last year so no gardening this year!) But, definitely will research the monarch butterfly and what plants to include in my flower gardens for next year! We have honey bees so never enough flowers around!
Especially love the pictures and post from the lady who started a garden while living in a mobile home. I really would love to know more about her garden. Because I am so unsuccessful at it, I really want to know how to do it right, on a small scale. I think I need to just concentrate my vegetable gardening efforts on a small area and get that right. Please pass along to her that we want to KNOW MORE about her first garden and how she grew her gardens to where she is today. Sounds like an awesome story about which I want to know more! 🙂
Thanks for always having such terrific blog posts! Love your blog and love the frequent posts and updates! Incredible! So much knowledge here.
Gina
Kim says
Gina thanks for asking to hear more about my first garden in the mobile home. I was certainly surprised to see my story on Mavis’ blog today when I opened my email 🙂
The area I had to work with in the mobile home was a small strip between the wall and curvy sidewalk that was about 18 inches wide and 13 foot long. It was covered in grass and weeds the year I decided to plant my first vegetables and I didn’t even own a shovel. I had to come up with a way to get rid of the grass and weeds and decided to cover the area in wet newspapers and cardboard that was weighed down with rocks. I waited a few weeks until the grass looked pretty dead and removed areas to plant the vegetables in.
While waiting, I planted 3 tomato seeds in cans I saved. They were pretty tall and leggy and looked pretty pathetic but I decided to plan them out any way. I read that they could go in the ground pretty deep so I used a spoon and dug the deepest hole I could and planted the tomatoes. I was super surprised that they did pretty well and I was able to get quite a few tomatoes that year! I used foraged sticks to make cages to support the plants which actually worked pretty good. I would say I got maybe 30 tomatoes that year and to me that was a huge success.
Next I cut a circle out of the cardboard and newspapers with a steak knife in the area I planted the cucumbers and again made something of a trellis with sticks and string. They didn’t do too great but I was able to get quite a few cucumbers, maybe a dozen or so that year.
The beans were the best of all! I planted bush beans, probably way too many, according to the Square Foot Gardening book which is 9 per square foot. I planted the whole packet of seeds and we were eating beans for a very long time because I had a lot to freeze.
Over the years, I read and learned all I could about gardening. I have many successes but a lot of failures also. My favorite vegetable is cauliflower. I have tried for 30 years to grow cauliflower and to this day still have not been able to grow a single one to an edible size 🙁 My best advice is to grow what you love, start very small and observe daily what is happening in the garden. Once you are successful, add another small garden area and repeat through the years. Don’t be afraid to purchase plants if that helps you be more successful and experiment a lot. Be happy with the successes and learn from the failures but don’t be afraid to try, try, again. Gina, I hope this will encourage you to keep trying. I know you can be successful too! Kim
Mindy says
I love this feature! Growing up I remember chasing butterflies around at my Grandparent’s property, watching them land from flower to bush and then chasing after them as the flew again. We so rarely see them anymore. I have read a little on this subject previously and have planted a few butterfly friendly flowers but this has given me even more inspiration. Thank you!
Angela says
Awesome! You’ve inspired me to get the butterfly certification! I was already planning on planting a pollinator garden next year. I could only do a few plants this year and some random wildflowers because we’ve got to do a cycle of vetch for our nitrogen poor soil before I really get it going. But I’m excited to get a certification and put it on the roadside past where the garden will be… it gets tons of foot traffic, so maybe we won’t be the only ones in our county for long after that! 😉
Preppy Pink Crocodile says
Oh wow- the butterfly garden was really interesting! Thanks for sharing!!
KK @ Preppy Pink Crocodile
Kim says
I wanted to let you know that I saw my first Monarch in the butterfly garden and she was working really hard laying eggs!!!
Mavis says
AWESOME!