One Hundred Dollars a Month

A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other people’s pictures and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all find unique ways to save, show off our chickens and have a rock star gardens. Keep them coming!

Hey friends and fellow readers! Liz from Indiana here with a garden to share with you all. My spouse and I bought our first house in a rural suburb in 2017. One of our requirements was space for a garden, and I’ve got about 475 square feet of growing space here now.

I grew up with a large garden, but strangely enough, it wasn’t until I moved out that I started really getting interested in managing my own veggie patch. I tried to grow a few things in pots on apartment balconies, and even got some raised beds put in at our last rental, but this has been so much more rewarding, not to mention productive! I love starting my day by going out to the garden and seeing what’s new since yesterday.

Think of this series of photos as Garden In Progress – I wanted to show that not every garden is going to be picture perfect. There’s a lot of good stuff growing, but lots of projects and tasks still to do. I mean, is any garden really ever finished? I’m pretty pleased with where my garden is right now though, considering this was all grassy yard last April!

Here’s what I’ve got planted: 4 kinds of green beans (long beans, pole beans, and 2 varieties of bush beans), carrots, spinach, bok choy, tatsoi, 3 kinds of lettuce, swiss chard, broccoli, herbs, bell peppers, 1 jalapeno plant, cocozelle summer squash, cucumbers, sugar snap peas, strawberries, 3 kinds of tomatoes (cherry, paste, and pink brandywine), shallots, asparagus, rhubarb, corn, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, and red and purple potatoes. It’s a lot for just two people, but part of the fun of having a garden for me is sharing it with friends and family, which I try to do as often as I can.

The view from the other corner of the garden. We just installed the third bed this year so I could add in some crops that needed more space. I’m trying out the three sisters planting for the first time with Glass Gem popcorn, cranberry beans, and jack-o-lantern pumpkins.

I’m waiting for the corn to get a bit taller before I put in the beans. Another new thing for me this year is potato trenches. My parents were visiting the other day and they’d never heard of the technique, so I’m eager to see if it yields more than the usual method of “stick ’em in the ground and wait.”

I tried starting plants from seed, and I think the cold interfered with their growth quite a lot, even inside the house. I successfully grew herbs, tomatoes, and peppers from starts last year, but this year nearly everything died after I planted it, or was so small that I’m not sure they’re going to yield before frost hits.

We had a very cold, wet spring, so gardens got a late start around here. It also got hot very quickly, and then stopped raining for nearly a month, so the weather’s been a little wacky. I supplemented with some starts from a local nursery – broccoli, bell peppers, cherry and paste tomatoes.

I try to garden pretty frugally using what I already have available. Here’s green beans growing against the chain link fence, and I’ve got sugar snap peas that are growing on the other end of the fence. Ready-made trellis! You can also see my attempt at a compost pile on the other side of the fence.

Compost is something I’m still figuring out. Haven’t quite gotten the formula down yet, so I’ve got 3 piles in various places around our property in various states of decomposition. Last year I put way too much green grass clippings on the pile and they didn’t break down properly – it just got slimy and smelly.

The strawberry bed – Last year it grew pumpkins because all the roots I planted did absolutely nothing. I didn’t get a single plant out of about 40 crowns – grr! What a waste of growing time, money, and garden space. I suspect it was a lack of water. The pumpkins did just fine though, and their seeds were delicious. This year I bit the bullet and bought 8 strawberry plants and 10 more crowns.

The crowns haven’t done squat yet, but the plants are doing really well. They’ve put out a bunch of runners and a few blossoms a couple weeks after being planted. Most of my netting was used to keep rabbits from eating all my pea shoots, and I didn’t quite have enough left over to cover the strawberry bed. I’ve got more netting, but haven’t installed it yet. The hoops are some flexible pipe that was left over from putting in a new water main, and the netting that’s there is held down by old boards and some scavenged bricks.

Some perennial herbs fighting the grass. We didn’t till this entire row last year, just parts of it, so I’m fighting off a nasty grass invasion now. I’m planning on moving these next to the asparagus and surrounding all my perennials with a brick border to help fight the grass from creeping in (we dumpster-dove for the bricks).

Eventually I’d like to put down weed barrier and mulch between all the rows, but the garden budget is already exhausted for this year. I also need to run a few more irrigation hoses so I don’t have to spend 2 hours watering the whole dang garden.

Peppers surrounded by volunteer flowers. If you’re ever considering planting forget-me-nots, don’t plant them in the vegetable garden. Just….don’t. You’ll never get rid of them. Pick a place in a flower bed where they can scatter their seeds to their little hearts’ content. At least they’re good for the bees. I see a few buzzing around pretty much every day. I suspect a neighbor a few houses down has a hive.

Another example of using what’s available – the sticks are from trees that we had to cut out of the fence, and the posts are from what used to be a horseshoe throwing pit backstop. Since neither my spouse or myself have any interest in horseshoes, he knocked out the boards with a sledgehammer (borrowed from a very kind and friendly neighbor who saw us struggling with a regular household hammer and brought his much more useful tool right over), and we put in the branch trellises.

I need to tie the cucumbers onto the sticks so they’ll actually start climbing them. This bed also looks about half weeded. My excuse is that I had more pressing chores to do, like eat sugar snap peas straight off the vine.

The three sisters garden with pumpkins growing in between 2 patches of corn, plus some flowers growing at the far end. The planks are from the old horseshoe backstops, and I have or plan on having a little walkway like this across each bed.

I call this Salad Row, probably the most successful part of the garden besides the sugar snap peas. It has all the salad greens growing in the space that’s closest to the house for easy harvest. We’ve had an unusually hot streak in June, so things are starting to bolt now.

The bok choy and tatsoi are being eaten by some kind of bugs, but I’m leaving them for now as a sacrifice crop. Hopefully that’ll keep the pests out of the good stuff for a while longer. I’ll plant bush beans here once the lettuces and the broccoli are gone. I also need to clean up the edges pretty badly – the grass is creeping in by leaps and bounds.

My garden’s never going to be featured in a magazine, or perfectly weeded, or even good-looking sometimes, but it’s doing its job: growing food. There’s nothing quite as tasty as a bowl of sugar snap peas or a salad that was picked an hour before we ate it. I’ve got a lot to do still: finish installing drip hoses, mulch everything with dried grass clippings (way cheaper than buying straw, and I can’t keep piling it on the compost anyway), clean up the bed edges, plant dry beans, plan a fall garden, turn the compost piles a few more times, build the raised bed for the blueberry bushes my mom bought me as a delayed Christmas present…but honestly, I’d rather doing this than just about anything else. I love my garden, and I love hearing about yours too.

~Liz

Find More Mavis Mail Submissions HERE.

If you would like to have your garden, chicken coop, pantry or something you’ve made featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, here’s what I’m looking for:

• 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 Pantry Pics – Submit at least 5 HIGH QUALITY pictures of your pantry/fridge/cabinets, as well as a short blurb {at the very least} about you and your food habits.
• 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.
• Cool Arts & Crafts – Made from your very own hands with detailed {and well photographed} pictures and instructions.
• Your pictures and stories about your pets. The more pictures and details the better.
• Garage Sale, Thrift Store and Dumpster Diving pictures and the stories behind the treasures you found including how much you paid for them.

You’ll need to send in a Minimum of 5 HIGH QUALITY pictures and the stories to go along with those pictures. Please do not send in a couple of grainy photos and a sentence about them. I can’t post that. It doesn’t make for an interesting or informative story.

If I feature your pictures and the stories behind them on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I will send you a $20.00 gift card to the greatest store in the world: Amazon.com. You can send your submissions to me at onehundreddollarsamonth @ gmail.com {spaces removed}and be sure and put Mavis Mail in the subject line. Thank you. I’m looking forward to your submissions.

Go HERE for the official rules.