Most of us who have half an idea of what’s going on in this country are scared to death of the future. Thanks to that fear, we strive to stock up on canned goods, guns, ammo, water purification devices, etc. Yet preparing properly takes money… and a lot of us aren’t exactly rolling in greenbacks, especially since the economy is about as healthy as a bed-ridden cancer victim with shingles. Avoiding debt should be a big part of your survival plans – and along with that, you should actively seek to cut expenses and make more money in any way possible. One way to do that is through gardening. When a gardener plants his patch of veggies, he’s keeping himself from having to buy that food later on. One particularly enterprising gardener who has taken a deeper look at the economics of gardening is Rosalind Creasy, author of “Edible Landscaping.” If you’re looking for some gardening inspiration from a money-saving point of view, this article she wrote for Mother Earth News is a great start:
In 2007, I began to get lots of questions about growing food to help save money. Then, while working on my new book, Edible Landscaping, I had an aha! moment. As I was assembling statistics to show the wastefulness of the American obsession with turf, I wondered what the productivity of just a small part of American lawns would be if they were planted with edibles instead of grass.
I wanted to pull together some figures to share with everyone, but calls to seed companies and online searches didn’t turn up any data for home harvest amounts — only figures for commercial agriculture. From experience, I knew those commercial numbers were much too low compared with what home gardeners can get. For example, home gardeners don’t toss out misshapen cucumbers and sunburned tomatoes. They pick greens by the leaf rather than the head, and harvests aren’t limited to two or three times a season.
For years, I’ve known that my California garden produces a lot. By late summer, my kitchen table overflows with tomatoes, peppers and squash; in spring and fall, it’s broccoli, lettuces and beets. But I’d never thought to quantify it. So I decided to grow a trial garden and tally up the harvests to get a rough idea of what some popular vegetables can produce… (keep reading)
The article just gets better from there. Just imagine if you decided to build a modest 1000 square foot garden… you could potentially be saving $7000.00 per year. Talk about smart.
By growing your own food, you save the money it takes to do other things of vital importance, like buying gold, figuring our water storage and maybe even fleeing the empire before it collapses… plus, you’ll be healthier than if you sat around inside and ate typical commercial fare. Something to think about.