Hui!!!! Are you growing your own food yet? Well, we don't have to tell you what's going on in the world, you already know that. But have you ever thought about how growing food can save you money on your lawn care? Check this out: We priced the average lawn care costs and not too many of us really use lawn care providers, aside from kupuna whose families won't cut their grass. Most of us don't think about it. Its just a matter of gas and a dry afternoon, right?
A decent lawn mower can cosyou into the thousands. For a good ride-on, you can spend the same money buying an island cruiser. Then you need to be able to maintain that machinery, buy parts as needed, get a gas can and oil, gas - if you plan to cut soon, and last but not least - good weather to coincide with your schedule and energy level. Now that's not asking a whole lot if you can swing it, but for some of us with tight schedules, that can add up.
Aside from needing to be cut and in some cases watered, what do you benefit from having a lawn? Perhaps people being able to look at your house?
Now what if you had some really neat planters around (to prevent invasive growth issues) and had a different food in each planter? Would that cost any more than a lawn? Well let's see how this could easily fare out...
Seeds and starters are free, if you eat fruit & vegetables. Every time I cut open a bell pepper, I have enough seeds to grow a pepper garden. It was free seeds. I eat organic, so it was free organic seeds for my household. A bag of starter soil is like $8. I didn't have any planters, but I had plenty of paper bags and a few scrap tires laying around.
After giving the tires a good wash, I stacked 2 of the tires to make the pepper garden high enough for me to easily reach. Then I put a few paper bags on the bottom. You know all those annoying cuttings from your last lawn care day? Well it makes great mulch and filler, so I brought that over. If you save your compost, bring that free soil replenisher too. The combination of the mulch & paper bags will pH balance the compost just nice. So you will want to layer those on top the paper bags inside the center of the tires. Put one more paper bag on top and fill the top with soil. Plant your seeds. Voila! You have just transformed 2 sq. ft. of lawn mowing into free food. Now if you do the same thing, all down the row with a different vegetable that you eat, you will have a whole row of tires that takes up for a row of cutting.
If you get inspired to continue, you can do the same for your ginger, carrots, potatoes, strawberries, onions, garlic, chives, green onions, chard, tomatoes, chili peppers, and the list goes on. You can make rows and use the pretty stuff for the front, or grow some kind of hedge in the front. By the time you finish picking up free tires on the roadside to complete your garden, and gotten food back from your garden, here's a list of what you actually did:
- You cleaned in the community
- You recycled tires
- You may have had to buy some soil to start the garden, but you have saved on gas and the environment in the long term, by not running your lawn mower
- You infinitely save on your grocery bill. If you are also a vegetarian or hunter, you pretty much don't have a grocery bill
- You taught your kids, family and community how its done and possible inspired a whole community initiative, providing that you actually don't mind being some kind of leader or agent of change. People really perceive gardens to be hard and they aren't any harder than cutting the lawn or sweeping the pavement.
Now if you currently have a chicken problem, you can buy chicken wire at about $50 per roll. If you were to frame a layer of chicken wire to a 2 ft tall shelf, as long as you want to make it. Use that as sort of a property line border, in placement. It will need to be about 3-4 ft into your property though. Food will be growing on top of the chicken wire. On the outside of the chicken wire, plant lilikoi. If you are good with building chicken wire foundations, you can even build a second layer, another 2 ft above the first layer, like a 2 story chicken house. Until the chickens get trained to go there, throw your excess seeds in there. For the 2nd floor of the coop, put a layer of ti leaf or something. Then put seeds or chicken feed up there. This will train them to view that area as a safe place to live - away from your house. They make great watch dogs too because if anything near them happens, they will cackle. Check for free eggs every morning while laying some seed to keep them over there. For a $50 roll of chicken wire and some free lilikoi seeds, you have free lilikoi and eggs forever - or as long as it lasts at your place.
You pretty much have a fully functional farm for pennies a day, for one year. If you are broke like me, this might take a year to complete - going one Saturday at a time. But by the following year, you will have saved:
- the climate, by growing more plants, not grass
- your grocery bill, with the bounty of your harvest
- your family from too much heat in the summer
- your lawn care, maintenance on machinery and time
- teaching those around you how its done
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