Garden tips for the frugal, busy and/or lazy gardener!

I've been gardening for about 15 years. Even though keeping up with it now with three young kiddos can feel overwhelming, I can't stop gardening. I feel compelled to grow stuff, especially food. I'm certainly not an expert gardener, but I learn a little more each year. Here is my hodge podge of garden tips.

Tip #1 Grow what will get eaten
Most of us have some kind of limit to our growing space, so if you're going to grow food, grow the food that will get eaten! That sounds so obvious, but I know I'm not the only one who has started ten zucchini seeds (seems so harmless!) which became ten zucchini plants that I simply had to plant because they were like my babies! You probably don't need more than two zucchini plants, lest you become that one person who foists the 20-pound zuke on the neighbors.

Another example: I'm not a huge fan of most winter squashes, but I love spaghetti squash, so for the last couple seasons I haven't bothered with acorn or butternut or other squashes and have just grown spaghetti squash. I figure I can buy a butternut squash that one time that I may want one, but I know we'll eat every single spaghetti squash we grow. One year we did have a pumpkin patch, though. Totally worth it.

Green beans are the other one that can get quickly out of hand. So easy to grow pounds and pounds of them and be totally overwhelmed with beans that end up getting too big on the vine or molding in your veggie drawer. After all the effort! Noooooooo!
Bonus tip 1: Conventional wisdom says you have to parboil green beans prior to freezing them. I actually did a comparison test with frozen beans, parboiled and not, and the two were IDENTICAL. I chop them into 1-2 inch pieces, stick 'em in a ziplock in the freezer and cook them from frozen into stir-fries, quiches, thai curries, etc, all winter long.
Bonus tip 2: The beans that have gotten too big and tough to eat fresh make the best dilly beans. They hold up way better to canning than the slim ones.

All that said, please don't misunderstand me! I'm not trying to "squash" your veggie-growing dreams and I'm all for planting food. My plea is just this: don't let it go to waste! If you grow it, make someone eat it!

Broccoli Raab 

I'm a huge fan of growing strawberries. The "everbearing" kind give us berries from June-September.  

Tip #2 Free (and functional) garden art 
Before I buy anything for my garden, I like to see if I already have something on hand that might work. A little funkiness adds personality to any garden, if you ask me.

My husband is a borderline hoarder (his words, not mine, but I concur). But, he does bring home some pretty awesome useful stuff. I don't even know what this thing is, some kind of railing? But it makes a perfect ladder for growing stuff up. I use it for squash or beans.

That netting was also free. Old fishing net cast off that you can find in piles at the marina.

Other random found and free "art:"

I found this frog in our woods.

Another free score a la Jarrod

Tip #3 Reseeding veggies and flowers
Aka: FREE PLANTS
Some of my favorites in my garden are arugula, calendula, nasturtiums and red orach. The gifts that keep on giving year after year. I've dug up the reseeded calendula or nasturtiums and used them to fill pots instead of buying plants. My tomatilloes also reseed. I pick the best and strongest ones and transplant them to where I want them for the year.

This is some kind of red mustard/mizuna thing that reseeded itself this year. Bonus, it's spicy so the rabbits and slugs have left it alone!

Tomatilloes and nasturtiums

Calendula and tomatilloes

Tip #4 Plant that eyesore
Cinderblock wall or old toilet? Put a plant in it, on it or next to it. We had this huge stump, so I made the "stump garden."

That's me at 5 months pregnant.

The stump garden

Tip #5 Compost
Your garden will love you for it. There are many tutorials online about how to compost and many of them, probably most of them, are way better than mine, but for what it's worth, here's my half-assed, lazy gardener's method.
Collect kitchen scraps and dump them in my black composter. Next to that black composter, I pile woody stuff like stalks from cleaning out the garden in the fall and prunings from plants like sage or blueberries. Then, when I have time, I spread out the black plastic and make a pile by alternating layers of the kitchen scraps with the woody debris, breaking or snipping everything up into the smallest size I have the patience for. I use the plastic simply because I want to keep the weeds from growing up through my pile. There's trailing blackberry in this part of our yard. I wrap the plastic loosely around it and let it go to work. I might stir it up a couple of times. If I made a bigger pile or stirred it more often, I'd probably get compost faster.

Tip # 6 Mulch!
Use that compost to mulch your plants. Use spent coffee grounds to mulch acid-loving plants like berries or rhodies. Wood chips for the garden paths. In the winter, I cover the garden beds with plywood, cardboard or plastic - keeps the weeds and kids out!

Happy gardening!