Tomato plants from the feed store: $7.86
Compost and amendments to plant them in: I don’t even want to think about it.
It’s been about two years since we last successfully planted a vegetable garden. The year before last I decided to do away with conspicuous raised beds and incorporate the tomatoes and onions inteo our existing landscape. After all, the beds are full of expensive organic compost, so it should work. And it should be very French, on top of it. It didn’t work. Nor did it look at all French.
Last year I tried the same thing, making sure to put the plants in sunnier spots. Then we went to Europe for almost 3 weeks and everything died, in spite of copious automated watering. I can’t blame them. I’d probably have died too if I had to be here during those 110-degree weeks.
This year, I am back to my raised beds. And this year I built them with proper cedar planks and galvanized hardware so they’ll last. I also relocated the bed to a new spot that you can’t see from the kitchen windows, which I’m excited about. I don’t love the look of raised beds.
So here we go!
Oh, and I’m exclusively doing tomatoes this year because
- They’re so much better than store bought.
- We eat a lot of them.
- They’re the only vegetables I really feel we save money on by growing at home.
- They do really well in this part of Texas.
I’ve got a grape tomato plant, two Juliet plants for paste tomatoes, a Porter, an Early Girl and a Fourth of July, to keep up my interest with an earlier yield, a Super Fantastic, because I couldn’t resist the name, and a Black Krim, for fun. The Black Krims hail from the Isle of Krim on the Black Sea, and supposedly have a slightly salty taste. I’ve tried (and failed) to grow them from seed, but I always have much better luck with starts from the feed store.
This year I think I’ll finally make the leap into canning them. It’s my birthright. My grandmother in Kansas canned everything from watermelon rind to pigs’ feet. Plus, have you heard about this study published in JAMA about BPA and canned soup? I generally make my marinara from canned tomatoes, and I’m sick of putting up with BPA. Why is this allowed to go on?
I used these plans from Sunset magazine to build my raised beds. But, guess what, I did not spend $172. I used cedar fence planks instead of the thicker boards they recommend. Is it as sturdy or attractive? No. But in my mind a raised bed is not particularly attractive anyway; I’d rather it blend into the background. And as for sturdiness, I basically just want this bed not to rot, and it will resist that. It’s not as though I’m going to be using it as a piece of furniture. My total was about $50, which is just about right for my purposes. I also skipped the hardware cloth in their plan, because we don’t have gophers in north Texas, and I skipped the part about attaching PVC pipes for netting. I tried that before and it didn’t work well. I did use galvanized hardware, because cheaper hardware will just rust and fall apart, as I know from experience.
So far my little plants are doing well, and my raised bed isn’t falling apart yet.
