Your Questions About Gardening

GardenersCardiff answers:

Depends.
Well do the math. Add up all cost you would incur going hunting or fishing. For example I live very close to the ocean in SE Alaska so I fish salt water and bring home hundreds of pounds of sea food each year. When I add up the cost of boat upkeep, gas and all costs Im doing pretty good. But if I lived far from the sea and had to drive hundreds of miles I wouldn’t see that savings. And if I had to travel hundreds of miles for hunting I would have the same problem unless it was worth is such as a moose or elk. You get 40% of a deer’s weight in meat. So if you spend $500 to get 50 lbs of venison that’s $10 a pound. Compare that to 600 lbs of elk or moose meat @ $0.83 a lb for a trip that cost $500. See what I mean? I have gone duck hunting and the two ducks I finally got cost me $80 a lb.
Do the same with gardening.
The wife and I either grow, gather, hunt or fish 90% of our food but we already have all the stuff to do so.

GardenersCardiff answers:

It’s hard if you have a full time job. Harvesting and putting up or preserving what you’ve grown to last through the year tends to be a lot of work over a few weeks.

But start be simply starting, and starting small. It’s always wonderfull to be able to eat fresh out of your own garden, even if it’s not enough to do you for a year. And you have a longer growing season down there than I do, so there are probably more months in the year when you can have something in the ground actually being productive.

My best piece of advice to a new gardener is to start small. If you’re a novice, the worst thing you can do is try to jump in to an enormous garden. You’ll quickly be overwhelmed, and more likely to bag the whole thing. Start by growing 3 things you like to eat. There’s always more to learn, and as you pick up skills, know-how, and confidence and experience, you can start adding more stuff, and handle a larger plot.

GardenersCardiff answers:

I’m a container gardener and have grown all those things in containers.

Things you’ll want to know:
– Strawberries can grow in containers, but they vine and propagate by shoots off the mother plant. That means you’ll need a HUGE container to grow them in (at least 2.5 feet wide), and you still won’t get many berries. If you’re satisfied with a couple small strawberries on your cereal a few times a year, go for it.

– Sand has no nutritional value for plants and potting soil is made for pots. It retains the right amount of water, the good stuff has nutrition, and you drill holes in the pot bottoms, so it drains. (Also, research how to stop your soil from pouring out of the container along with the water.)

– The size of the container dictates the size of the plants only somewhat. You’re not making a carrot that can only grow 5 inches long grow bigger, by sticking it in a deep container. You buy seeds/plants that work for containers. Since your average size container isn’t the best size for standard carrots, don’t grow standard carrots. I go for the ones that don’t get any longer than 5 inches, but you’re perfectly capable of figuring out what works for you. I’ve seen beefsteak tomatoes growing in 12-inch containers. They won’t get “beefsteak” size. Huge? If you want. I’ll include a video of our garden from last week. We got a little carried away on the tomatoes this year. (We let the ones that self-seeded in with our carrots take over that container, and now we have the tomatoes taking over a corner of our yard. Lol) I prefer the 5-gallon buckets from Home Depot. We grow our grape tomatoes and patio tomatoes in them. (Both are supposed to be determinate, but someone forgot to tell them that. Lol) The big tomatoes I do grow in a huge container, but that’s because a good Cherokee Purple tomato is worth the extra space and effort. We grew two in one container, so the second one (the one that took over our pepper space lol) is an Earl Girl. Both could have grown alone in a 5-gallon bucket. We merely prefer sticking 2-3 tomatoes in a container. Here’s the link to the video to show you our tomatoes, carrots, and strawberries – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8lEoK08NZU&feature=plcp

– Green beans. Like all produce you want to grow, you should research them before you grow them. Bush beans are better than pole beans in a container. (The container is 1-2 feet above ground and pole beans grow to 8 feet or higher.) They grew in the container that’s the same size as our Cherokee Purple tomato container and we had six plants in it, but they don’t live a full season.

– You are free to go with the raised bed idea, if you want. It will cost a small fortune, since you need wood that doesn’t rot. (Soil rots wood, in time. Cedar last longer, but it’s costly.) Then again, if you want to go through that hassle of bringing in all the soil needed to fill it, by that time, just amend the soil you have.

– Most important piece of advice. Always do your own research before starting a garden. After all, you’re getting advice from someone who container gardens in Philly and another answerer gave you…well, I’m not sure what that was, other than maybe advertisement for raised beds. Like was the case with my bush beans – had I just researched ahead of time, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. (I removed a ton of used potting soil and replaced the container it was in, simply because I thought it was diseased. Lol) Don’t expect everything to go perfectly. It won’t. Just keep track of what you learned that worked and didn’t work. Oh, and of course, have fun! 😉