Grow your own

timothy leary wrote: Organic is always best, keep it simple

Sure, i'm only on organics.

Planted 12 raspberries plants last weekend, lot of strawberries and i'm attacking "vintage" old tomatoes strains, begun sproutings into micro-greenhouse. Just bought some salad & french beans seeds that im about to plant directly in soil outdoor. The growing season is open!

^ somebody has to do it, mine always flop down after a rain, maybe i should stake them up??

Gonna plant the snap peas today and think about stir fry in about 60 days

^ Looking good and I am sure will taste better than any store bought.

^ Home grown tomatoes taste much better than those from supermarket. But it depends. In our shops there is food from Poland, Argentina, apples from Spain and potatoes from USA, instead of food from our country. So we have a garden,we had everything- strawberries, peas, potatoes, beans, tomatos, apples, some oregano, onion....But then we had no time and we reduced our food to tomatoes, beans and potatoes. And we're trying own wine, because we live in wine region. And also we have cherries and apples on trees in the garden. It depens on the care, but in my view your own food taste much better. 

My grandparents on my Dad's side had a nice size yard when I was a kid and did some serious summer gardening.  I remember the string beans and cucumbers in particular.  We by no means grow enough to live off of but have a nice blueberry bush out back.  A pecan tree as well but the squirrels always beat us to the nuts.  Herbs, tomatoes, and hot peppers are essential just because there's nothing like having them handy, herbs especially.  The dill crapped out on us rather rapidly this year.  Everything else is doing OK.  One of the tomato plants and the habanero are being a little slow.

Edited by Slartibartfast - June 24 2012 at 16:23

You think it does not require too much effort? Maybe because you are not much of a gardener.

Small doesn't take much. What we are doing is not small. Our garden is one third of an acre.

timothy leary wrote: You think it does not require too much effort? Maybe because you are not much of a gardener.

I'm not anything of a gardener - I'm an anti-gardener. I plant stuff, I look after it, water it on dry days, it grows, I eat it. I don't see that as effort - sure my veg bed is only 2m by 4m, it's raised so I don't have to bend down to dig and weed it and it's protected by nets to keep out pets and vermin - weeding is a few minutes work once a week - two watering cans of collected rain water each night if it hasn't rained that day and the job's done in less than 5 minutes. This year I grew salad leaves from seed sprinkled onto wet coir compost - in a week they were fresh shoots that could have been cropped and eaten there and then, a week later we were snipping off individual leaves to eat, some of the stronger ones were picked out and planted in the raised-bed to grow into mature plants - none of that was effort or required special "gardening" skills. Anything that requires too much effort is the law of diminishing returns. I used to grow potatoes direct into the ground but that is a complete waste of energy having to double-dig heavy clay soil and then spread manure into the trenches then having to dig them up a few months later for a few pounds of spuds - I can yield almost as much growing them in a plastic sack for considerably less work. It's the same with strawberries - growing them in containers is far less effort than growing them directly into the ground and they yield just as well, if not better. Anyone who thinks growing a few veg for the table requires a lot of effort is either doing it wrong or growing the wrong stuff. I got my daughter growing tomatoes and beans in a grow-bag at her London flat last year - all she did was water them every night and pick them when they were ripe - any more effort than that and she wouldn't have done it. I'm not a gardener at all - I'd rather sit back with a beer and watch stuff grow than spend all weekend "gardening".