Garden Season

We both consider ourselves to be foodies, and pre-COVID, we enjoyed going out to eat quite a bit. The pandemic changed our eating habits as we found ourselves eating at home for nearly all meals. As there were also fears of food shortages in 2020, we decided it would be a good idea to put in a garden that summer. While the fear of food shortages sparked the start of us putting in a garden, we also wanted to plant one in order to save money on items we could grow ourselves, and eat food made with less pesticides.   

In 2020, we had a fairly simple garden with just tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, kale, basil, and mint. Then in 2021, we went a bit overboard and bought some new veggies to try like beets, carrots, broccoli, corn, garlic and cauliflower, but they just didn’t do well.  So, this year, we’re keeping it simple and going to go back to our ‘roots’ and mimic what we did in 2020. 

To prep for gardening this year, we bought seeds back in April and then life just got busy, and we never were able to start our seedlings indoors. (Hopefully we aren’t the only ones to do this!).  To ensure we still had plants growing this month, we decided we needed to buy some plants to get us started, and then we will plant the seeds to ensure we have plants to harvest through the fall.   

To keep with our food budget, we’ll share a tip with you – you do not have to buy plants from a store! This week we were able to pick up eight tomato plants for free, as a woman in our neighborhood Facebook group had too many that grew from seed and was giving them away. Then at the Saturday West Allis Farmers Market, there were quite a few vendors that had many plants ready for the garden at such great prices. One vendor had a variety of peppers and tomato plants going for six plants for $5 and another had single plants and herbs going for $1.50 each. Had we bought them earlier in the week from a well-known store, the plants would have been $5 each.   

We’ll keep you posted on how the gardening goes and spoiler alert – we do can most items in late summer and early fall.