This is an updated guest post by Mavis from OneHundredDollarsAMonth.com. Previously posted in 2012.
We all know cheap, processed food can be picked up for free {or nearly free} with the help of coupons. When it comes to inexpensive fresh produce, that’s another story.
If you have never planted a garden before and want to give it a try, I suggest starting with a few seed packets of vegetables your family enjoys. When my kids were younger {and I had just began to garden} we grew things like strawberries, beans, peas, pumpkins and carrots. As my children grew older and I gained more experience, I started growing tomatoes, onions, beets and lettuce from seed.
This year, with almost 20 years of gardening experience under my belt, I finally purchased my first set of grow lights and had a greenhouse installed in our backyard. The key is to go slow, grow what you love, and to share your experience with others. You know what they say, “The more you garden, the more you grow.”
If you are just starting out here are a few of my recommendations:
Vegetables Easy to Start From Seed
- Beans — Both pole & bush varieties
- Peas — Sugar snap, English peas & snow peas
- Carrots – Kids love growing rainbow or dragon carrots
- Cucumbers — Burpless are my favorite
- Zucchini — Use the bush variety for a small garden
- Beets – Chioggia is an Italian heirloom
- Pumpkins — Rouge Vif d’Etampes was Cinderella’s favorite
Vegetables Easy to Grow From Veggie Packs
- Tomatoes — Roma, Beefsteak, Early Girl are just a few that come to mind
- Lettuce — Romaine is very popular
- Onions — Walla Walla Sweets are a family favorite
So what are you waiting for? Pick up a packet of seeds; roll up your sleeves, and starting digging. If I can do this, so can you.
Will you be planting a garden this year? If so, what will you be growing?
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Mavis is a Northwest gardener on a mission. You can follow her gardening journey on her blog OneHundredDollarsAMonth.com.
This post may contain affiliate links. See the disclosure policy for more information.
I live in the tacoma area and worry about the arsenic in the soil being transfered to my end product. This year I am growing strawberrys in a azalea pot, and 2 blueberry bushes in bigger pots, am I just being paranoid? Also wont eat the apples that grow in the backyard because my husband sprays round up on the trunk like 5 years ago… what’s the half life on that stuff…thanks
I am a HUGE fan of Mavis!!! Thank you!
Me too !!!
Thanks for posting this! I’m excited to follow Mavis’ year. Glad to know she didn’t fall off the coupon-world map. 🙂
If you live in inner PDX you may consider purchasing soil for your raised garden beds. The soil here has been contaminated with lead paint dust in many cases, before it was illegal or enforced not to sand lead paint. Some houses had no sewer to start, so you may want to check potlandmaps.com to see if that is the case with your house. Fresh soil will help the chances that your produce is clean. Plants absorb lead and you will eat it.
And many, many Portland homes have broken sewer pipes. Just ask my husband about the hundred of sewer scopes he’s had to pay for with buying and selling houses in PDX.
I did this at my first house in NE PDX before I had a kid 15 years ago. There was a big pine tree south of us so it limited our space to plant to about 1000 sq ft.
I weighed and recorded all produce from the yard for the year and multiplied by produce prices. Can’t remember how much it was but it was a fairly impressive savings although probably $/hr spent was low so you would have to love gardening.
Good luck!
Mavis, I bought a bunch of Bonnie plants for $1.50, and someone said to plant the spaghetti squash and cucumber in mounds. How high should I make the mounds and how wide. I usually do just tomato and corn and some herbs but am expanding this year to more herbs and squash and kale. Do you mound kale and chard too, or just plant in straight lines? DH wants to put down landscape fabric before the plants. Is that OK? So glad to see you here, too.
My Dearest Helen,
Yes Yes Yes… Tell the DH to lay down landscape fabric first. That’s what I did and I have not regretted it one single bit.
Plant kale and chard in straight lines.
I don’t mound my dirt for squash & cucumbers {I’m kind of naughty that way} but if you choose to you should mound it to about the size of a bowling ball. Hope that helps!
Mavis, when you are comparing your costs, make sure you compare to high quality organic vegetables and fruits. Also, homegrown food has a MUCH smaller carbon footprint than most grocery store veggies, like those tomatoes that were shipped from South America! I love my raised bed garden and the convenient and delicious foods I get out of it. I’m fairly sure that I can get food cheaper at the grocery store, I just don’t want it.
I didn’t think about comparing them to organic. Thanks for the idea Joni!
I’ve been gardening in the Pacific Northwest for over a decade and I recommend Steve Solomon’s book Vegetable Gardening West of the Cascades. It has some good advice on how our climate differs from much of the rest of the country, what/how to grow, and good information on organic or almost-organic fertilizers.
I was going to say this too! That book is my bible and I almost memorized it when I started. Use seeds from his company, Territorial Seed, as well.
I am in the middle of a quick break from working in our garden! My son and I just planted kale, brussels sprouts & cabbage from starts. We’ve also got peas, lettuce & turnips (from seed) spring up. Onions as well.
We’ll be heading out in a few to put in carrots, radishes, spinach …. and I don’t know what else we grabbed! I’m still pretty new at it, but I figured that I’ll just experiment & learn! I’m keeping good notes on what we are doing so that I can learn & remember for next year!
Tonya, I saw an article that after you put your plants in the ground take wet newspapers put them around your plants and empty areas. After that cover newspaper with mulch, and it is to keep the weeds away because they can not grow through the newspaper
This is a great tip Helen!
I have at least three zucchini plants come up free will, all the zucchini go to food banks. I planted one and received 23 zucchini one year. Wow it is just my hubby and I in the house, so sharing was fabulous.
I always let three go to seed so they can come up the next year.
The link to the carrot varieties appears to be invalid
Thanks, Cristal. I just fixed it.
IT’S MAVIS!
I always enjoyed her posts on another couponing site and it just made my day being able to follow her gardening and 100 a month challenges again!
I know, isn’t she fabulous! And her blog is packed full of gardening inspiration, it almost makes me want to give it a shot (almost).
We just finished moving and are busy w/ kids’ activities and such and I had no energy to do a full garden this year. So I picked up some starts from a local greenhouse and just planted them in boxes on our deck. A little more spendy than starting my own from seed, but I wasn’t going to do it otherwise! 🙂
Kei,
What ever you can grow is great, whether it’s from seed or a greenhouse… You Grow Girl!
I’m planting my first garden this year. Any tips and tricks you have would be great!! I have no idea how to control all of the weeds. I’ve spent hours weeding and they just keep popping back up! I’m planning on planting my tomato plants and other seeds this week. So excited!
This is great! Excited to see how it goes for you Mavis! I would love to try growing a huge garden like this! We started 3 years ago with our first garden. Tonya – I highly recommend the book All new Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. The raised beds, way to plant and soil mixture has been incredible! Also we hardly have any weeds – it is so helpful to managing the garden!
I’m new to gardening too, and our yard was a weed jungle! We pulled/dug up everything by hand and tilled up the dirt well. Then we sprinkled corn gluten organic weed killer down and added a weed barrier. On top of that, we put high quality soil in our raised beds. It was quite a bit of work, but considering I’m 6 months pregnant and my husband is 3 weeks post emergency appendectomy, I think anyone can do it! It took us 2 full weekends, but it’s worth doing it “right” the first time. It remains to be seen if our way was the right way though 🙂
Hi Tonya,
I don’t really have any tricks for getting rid of weeds but before I built the garden boxes you see in the first picture I did lay down a few rolls of landscape fabric. I still have to pull the occasional weed but it was well worth the investment.
Also, since this is your first garden I would stick to veggies that are easy to grow like cucumbers, zucchini, beans and tomatoes. Just remember if you are in the Seattle / Portland area you’ll want to wait until about the middle of May to plant. 🙂
We used wire over our garden boxes to keep out the cats. Don’t want them to use your garden as a litter box, trust me 🙂 The newspaper around the base of larger plants can do double duty though, no pun intended.