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Small Space, Low Budget Gardening Tips (Lessons learned from the Flower Show)

I love spring anywhere,
but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.
―Ruth Stout

Oooohhh it’s that time of year again. And even though I’ve been told I’m not allowed to garden this year due to my repeated inability to bring a veggie garden to fruition… I’ve got that yearning. To get my hands dirty. To plant seeds and make great plans.

Gardening is the purest form of optimism. It’s the embodiment of hope.

Anyway, at the Philadelphia Flower Show there was an exhibit by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society that I found hugely inspirational. Look how many herbs, fruits and veggies they managed to cram into a space about the size of a typical city rowhome backyard! Is that corn?

It’s a beautiful illustration of how you don’t need a lot of land and a ton of money to grow your own produce: enough to make a difference in your diet (and likely your neighbors’ diets as well).

Small Space, Low Budget Gardening Tips
(Lessons learned from the Flower Show)

1. Raised beds rock the house.

The picture above has raised beds (and a walkway made with boards and a seat made of part of a tree trunk). Raised beds mean you don’t have to go digging down into your dirt and then amend it; you can start off with good, clean, well-balanced dirt to give your plants an extra boost.

2. Think inside the box. Or bell jar.

Cold frames and glass jars help protect from nips of frost, extending your growing season.

3. Look up, down, and all around.

Vertical gardening is an awesome technique to increase your square yardage for growing (and ultimately increasing your yield). Think trellises, wooden pallets to make walls of plants, archways, cages.

Cherry tomatoes grown on a simple archway

Wall made of lettuce!

4. Gardening doesn’t need to be fancy.

Beds neatly hemmed in by logs. Oyster shells to create a pathway. Cages made from thin branches. Those wooden paint stirrers from hardware stores as row markers. Seats made from tree stumps. Used wooden pallets. Old windows for cold frames. Produce section twist ties for supporting and training plants. Pretty much anything with a hollow center as a planter… this is recycling at its best, and gardening at its least expensive. Plus, I think using as many natural materials as possible makes a garden so pretty.

5. Seeds are cheap.

Add love, time and effort and the return is bountiful. Freeze up your surplus for those winter months when the price of produce soars! (I was paying $3.99 A POUND for red peppers this winter! But I can buy a pepper plant for $2 at my farmers market.) Check out this breakdown of the most cost effective plants to grow— salad greens are #3 and soooo simple to grow yourself. Not to mention, way better tasting than salad-in-a-bag or trucked-in-from-afar!

Share the wealth by planting a row for the hungry or checking with your local food kitchen to see if they’ll take garden donations. Turn your garden plot into a political statement.

Garden for victory. For your health. For your kids. For your mental well-being. For your wallet.

$10 of seeds = one ton of tomatoes

Are you growing fruits, veggies, herbs in your garden this year?

What are you planting?

Please excuse the quality of the Flower Show shots. I had to resort to my pop-up flash.

March 12, 2012
National Nutrition Month Tip: Swap Mushrooms for Meat
`One side will make you grow taller,
and the other side will make you grow shorter.’

`One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?’
thought Alice to herself.

`Of the mushroom,’ said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud;
and in another moment it was out of sight.

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Ok, you got me. Mushrooms won’t necessarily make you grow taller (or shorter).

But they can help you grow healthier.

We Need to Eat Less Meat

Meat consumption has risen 47% in this country since the 1950s, and it’s hard not to wonder if the rise in health problems and obesity are correlated. After all, studies indicate that a diet high in meats may contribute to osteoporosis, heart disease and diabetes. On the flip side, a diet that’s low in meat has been associated with greater longevity overall.

Add to that the fact that meats (pork, beef and lamb, in particular) have the highest carbon footprint of common foods. By a whole heck of a lot. In our house, I do tend to opt for grass-fed and local meats, but that’s generally a more expensive option; even non-organic meat is pretty hard on a budget these days.

Time to think outside the meat aisle! Get your plate in shape with our humble hero, the mushroom.

Why Mushrooms?

Mushrooms can help save your diet— and your budget— without drastically changing your family meal plan. Mushrooms have great “swapability”: just exchange an equal amount to replace some or all of the meat in your recipes (this works particularly well with meals like lasagna, burgers, tacos or chili). The texture of the mushroom enables it to pick up the flavor of the seasonings, while adding vitamin D (the only fruit or vegetable with that vitamin), B vitamins, and the antioxidants selenium and ergothioneine.

Naturally low-cal and fat free, mushrooms are a no-brainer way to lighten up a dish while packing in some nutrition on the sly— not to mention stretching your meat dollar. And, BONUS: those peeps local to my area know we live in the Mushroom Capitol of the world, baby. Talk about supporting your local farmers! When the wind is right I can smell the mushroom farms from my front yard. It doesn’t get much more local than that.

Recipe Ideas

The Mushroom Council has a ton of mushroom recipes on their website, or you can just integrate mushrooms into your family favorites. It’s easy:
- Chop your mushrooms to match the consistency of the meat;
- Cook and season the same way you would the meat;
- Combine your cooked meat with your mushrooms and continue onward with your recipe.
If you’re on Twitter you can also check out a party happening on Monday, March 12th, 8:00 PM EST. The hashtag is #Mushrooms and oh yes, there will be prizes awarded. More info and RSVP here.

Do you cook with mushrooms?

Hit me with your favorite recipes.

Disclosure: this is a sponsored post through the Global Influence network. Opinions and preachifications are my own.

Double Disclosure: that first photo is of a mushroom from my backyard and judging by its color, extremely non-edible. While there are wild mushrooms that are allegedly tasty and decidedly frugal, you should never and I mean NEVER go foraging for wild mushrooms without a knowledgeable guide.
March 9, 2012
Wordless(ish) Wednesday: A Week with Cass

People with great passions,
people who accomplish great deeds,
people who possess strong feelings,
even people with great minds and a strong personality,

rarely come out of good little boys and girls.

― Lev S. Vygotsky

This quote is not directly linked to this post, but it’s making me feel a whole hella lot better about the way the month of March has gone for me so far.

Here she is, first thing in the morning, bedhead, face puffed with sleep. She is a pain to wake up so I tend to just lift her out of bed and deposit her unceremoniously at the table.

And, here she is after noticing I was taking her picture.

We had our last basketball games on Saturday. This was the first time playing basketball for all three kids; Jake picked it up rather quickly, Maverick quickly decided basketball wasn’t his “thing” but he soldiered on pretty much uncomplainingly, and Cass revisited her dancing days (I texted Jeff to see how one game was going since I was at Maverick’s game; he quickly replied “Up by two. Cass doing South Pacific”).

Cass took some serious hits this season; a ball or two or five to the face, a full-on collision with a much bigger kid that sent her flying across the court on her belly, a fall onto a ball with her ribcage. She’s also really little and had zero experience shooting the ball (I simply do not know how you are supposed to practice basketball at this age; the basket is 8ft. Higher than the ones you can buy at Toys R Us, lower than at the park). By the end of season she had all the parents, on our team and others, rooting her on, cheering loudly whenever she made a basket. After getting her medal several came over to tell her how much she’d improved this season. One lingered to ask me, “Is she always like this? Does anything ever get her down?”

Well, yeah. She’s sensitive (and frankly, I’d like her to stay that way). She’s easily upset by perceived injustice: Jacob making a mean face, Maverick getting a bigger dessert. I can tell when she’s coming down with something because it’s directly proportional to how much she whines and how quickly her tone of voice gets on my nerves. But on the courts and on the fields, she’s there to have fun. It’s way more important to her than winning. And I love how infectious that is, how her irrepressible joy from movement and being on a team can touch other parents.

Almost as much as I loved that lady saying how she hates my daughter.

Soccer starts March 31st! Bring it.

Postscript: I don’t know why I continue to pretend this is Wordless. I swear they always start out with just very very brief captions. The first one was wordless, does that count for anything?

March 7, 2012