My Idea; A Community or Backyard Garden?

Like I said Omnivore's Dilemma made me want to start a garden, but for another reason other than the pleasure of gardening and the satisfaction of biting into a vegetable you grew. It was to run an experiment. I wanted to see if a backyard garden could produce enough vegetables to outweigh the costs of making it. How would I figure out how much each vegetable saved? I would check the prices of the actual vegetables at the store. Then whenever I grew a vegetable in my garden it would save that much money. For example, I bought radish seeds. The actual radishes at the store were $0.79 a pound. So for every pound of radishes I grew it would save $0.79. At the same time I would keep track of the costs that my garden had and then balance it against the vegetable savings. My theory is that you can save money doing a garden, due to some articles I read about how they saved money. Of course I now realize that those were talking about much larger farming. I wanted to show those of you that have space or have access to a garden that you can (or if my experiment disproved my theory) that you can't support yourself on a garden. Either way you should garden if you have the chance because it's a delightful hobby. The BLOM committee agreed to do a garden too, and then to bring in their first yield and later we'd give workshops about gardening. I told my dad of this garden idea and he liked it but he said that instead of doing a backyard garden I should do a community garden. Thus ensued a battle. My argument was that more people can garden in a backyard than at a community garden. He said that I could exclude the cost of community things and pretend it was in my backyard. I didn't like that idea. He also said that our soil was bad and that my plants would be killed by poor planting conditions and creatures and that all I'd be proving is that my backyard was not good for gardening. I retaliated by saying we could get mulch and put up chicken wire like the community garden, and that he was thinking they would die due to the time we planted in my backyard before. I was referring to the time when my dad took me and my sister around our backyard and planted seeds. Then we left them there to grow. They died of course! The plants in my mom's garden gave a small vegetable yield and the episode was basically a failure. I told him that I would care for the garden much better. Finally I decided to have two gardens: 1 in the community garden and 1 in my backyard and see which would give a better yield. On one hand my backyard garden would cost much much less than the community garden with the community garden's admission fees and gas bills ($0.44 there and $0.44 back), but the backyard garden would give a smaller yield. I am so glad I did the community garden which though it is expensive for my experiment has been a wonderful and better experience and garden than my backyard garden could have been. Later, I had to drop my backyard garden because I was so overwhelmed with school, BLOM, Organic Week, and 1 garden. Maybe next year I'll be able to do 2.

The Latest BLOM News

I now will return to the stories and history of my garden, with occasional breaks in it to update you with the latest BLOM news. Now that the Organic Week is over I (more me than BLOM) am gardening, and researching. After Watershed I wanted to continue with conducting field studies and data, doing special spots (where you sit a chosen spot in the forest for a hour or so and write poems, sketches, and your thoughts. I will be recording a sketch book. It will hold my data, or a lot of it. It will also be the start of my nature field guide. When I see an animal, I will either sketch it or take a picture of it, study it and record what it's doing and observations, then go home and tag the name. I will then add facts about it's place on the food chain, it's reproduction, and such gathered from a website. I am right now preparing a pack and finding some sites and pocket guides for these excursions. Now I return to my garden. Because I had started this blog so late and have not kept up with the events, I will now attempt to catch up to where I am now. It will be difficult since a lot has happened.

Delay

I'm sorry for the long delay. After the end of Watershed I wanted to take a week or so off to relax from the busy school year. I'm so sorry for the sudden stop of blogs bit I'll try to do a bog every other day or weekly. I will have one tomorrow however. Sorry again.