Digging in the dirt - a retrospective

     It turns out that I love gardening. I planted my first garden this year, motivated mainly be the fact that a garden plot came with the apartment and I hoped to save money. By the middle of the summer, I found myself wishing that I had even more work to do in the garden, and by then I knew that I was hooked.

     I think gardening can be a hobby aligned with frugal living, but then you have to garden carefully. I kept a careful tally of all my expenses during the summer, and I can report that I spent $162 on non-durable supplies like seedlings, seeds, mulch, and compost. In the future, I can probably limit myself to $100 of expenses, because I now know where to get bulk mulch and compost. I had planned to keep an equally careful account of food harvested, but I abandoned that during this difficult summer. Hopefully I can track next year, because I would like to prove to myself that gardening is thrifty.

     I managed to take pictures at the start of most months, and they let me tell the story of the garden this year.

     By June (above) I had two plots, but I spent the first month or two eating salads of weeds because nothing else was big enough. Andrew stood in the back to show the size of the plot, so I did that in future pictures too.

     In early July we had several trellises, including an incredible winter squash trellis on the right. Sadly, the winter squash all rotted, so I will have to try using the trellis again next year. In July I ate zucchini, green beans, tomatoes, and basil.

     I'm shorter than my husband was, so it's harder to see me in the back of this picture taken in early September. During August, I ate more green beans, more tomatoes, beets, and watermelon. I also discovered that you can eat sweet potato leaves, both in salads and stir fried.
     This last picture is of course a bit sad, because it has Andrew in it. But it also makes me happy, because we were so proud of the very first harvest - one zucchini and a basil.