Analyzing "How does your backyard garden grow?" from the Los Angeles Times, 080914 [PGM01 - V100-080915]
First, a small rreminder of the PGM Motto: "The fact that personal gardens are becoming a powerfully growing trend is slowly recognized even by the mainstream media. This is exemplified by recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times, among many others. Clearly, this trend is just at its beginning, poised to explode once the economy truly collapses during what could be called "The Second Coming of the Great Depression". We most probably won't have to wait very long to see this trend truly bloom, since real economic turmoil is just at the corner, waiting to take the stage just after the oncoming election. Although the core reason why everyone should create and maintain their own Organic & Sustainable Garden is obviously caring for one's health, there is little doubt that once people will have a hard time to pay for food, free food from their own backyard or rooftop is going to start looking extremely appetizing."
The latest example of this growing interest in Personal Gardening showed by the Media can be found here:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cover14-2008sep14,0,7780441,full.story
Here is the analyzed and commented text of it. The original text is in a smaller font than the rest of this post. [This is a work in progress, expect the article to be finalized within the week or so!]
The latest example of this growing interest in Personal Gardening showed by the Media can be found here:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cover14-2008sep14,0,7780441,full.story
Here is the analyzed and commented text of it. The original text is in a smaller font than the rest of this post. [This is a work in progress, expect the article to be finalized within the week or so!]
BUSINESS - YOUR MONEY
How does your backyard garden grow?
By David Colker, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 14, 2008
[ This is perhaps one of the most interesting facts with that article here. This piece wasn't found in the "Home and Garden" section. It made the FRONT PAGE of the BUSINESS section that Sunday, the very day where most people actually read the newspaper...
The trend is clear -- make no mistakes, the fact that gardening is on its way to being Big Business, in the general sense, as well as perhaps soon in the economic one can no more be denied.
In fact, some of us have a complete plan for a "Gardening dot-com" in the making, merging Personal Gardens and Technology, but that's another story, considering that the true beauty of it is that YOU don't need any money to start your own personal Organic and Sustainable Garden right now.
Your own backyard or rooftop is begging for it! Or even better, you could finally be replacing that wasteful and useless lawn, now when times are still half-good... to start harvesting it three months from now, when the real bad times will REALLY start!]
With proper preparation and know-how, even newbies can harvest a bumper crop of satisfaction along with their homegrown veggies -- and maybe save some money.
[As the rest of the article illustrates, you can only save money by gardening if you use simple, common sense, time proven approaches, and more or less knowing what you are doing. If you try to emulate conventional, chemical laden agriculture, first, money-wise, you'd be better off at your local supermarket, and second, you will get the same quality of produce. Why bother at all?
For example, let's examine the author's budgeting, provided in an insert:
"Cultivating costs : As first-timers, we spent too much on our 8-foot-by-4-foot garden. As a result, the vegetables we raised were even more expensive than at Whole Foods. [Our emphasis] Here's the rundown:
* Raised bed wood frame: $83
* Gas mini-tiller (used): $100
* Soil amendment and fertilizer: $139
* Seedlings: $63
* "Natural" pest sprays: $35
* Various other supplies (estimate): $40 Source: David Colker"
Now, let's go over that :
* Raised bed wood frame: $83
* Gas mini-tiller (used): $100
* Soil amendment and fertilizer: $139
* Seedlings: $63
* "Natural" pest sprays: $35
* Various other supplies (estimate): $40 Source: David Colker"
Now, let's go over that :
* Raised bed wood frame: $83 Use used wood, and you can probably cut that budget a little. On the other hand, this is not necessarily the place to save a maximum.
* Gas mini-tiller (used): $100 That's the best one. What exactly a staff writer for the Business Section of the Los Angeles Times thought he'd do with a (used) gas rototiller in relation to ONE raised-bed gardening unit will always remain a mystery to anyone with any gardening experience... So here is an easy $100 saving for YOUR own gardening budget. However, let's not make fun of it, first, the author's honesty must be admired, and second, the conclusions he came to about that issue are totally on the spot: If you decide to get into creating and maintaining your own garden, as you should, get first the easily accessible and available information. Which he admittedly forgot to do.
And begin with reading http://optimalgardens.blogspot.com or our sister blog http://personalgardens.blogspot.com
* Soil amendment and fertilizer: $139 You can probably heavily cut on that one, although we don't know what it entailed. Who knows, they might have bought a bale of alfafa and a bag of bio-dynamic compst, among whatever else it was.
* Seedlings: $63 Grow your own from reasonably-priced ORGANIC seed packets, and you can again cut down the budget here. Or harvest your own seed from any seed-bearing ORGANIC produce you bought.
* Soil amendment and fertilizer: $139 You can probably heavily cut on that one, although we don't know what it entailed. Who knows, they might have bought a bale of alfafa and a bag of bio-dynamic compst, among whatever else it was.
* Seedlings: $63 Grow your own from reasonably-priced ORGANIC seed packets, and you can again cut down the budget here. Or harvest your own seed from any seed-bearing ORGANIC produce you bought.
DON'T harvest the seeds of supermarket fare: It has a good chance to be GMO-tainted! THE ORGANIC LABEL GUARANTEES THAT THERE IS IS NO GENETICALLY-MODIFIED CONTAMINATION. OTHERWISE, in practice, WHETHER A SEED WAS GROWN ORGANICALLY OR NOT IS UNLIKELY TO HAVE A MAJOR EFFECT ON YOUR PLANTS, SINCE THEY ARE GOING TO BE GROWN ORGANICALLY. (That is, if you think a bit about it before doing anything else...)
* "Natural" pest sprays: $35 Only buy them if you need them. Or rather, make your own with water boric acid, a little biyt of neem oil and organic soap. In emergency cases, use one of the most powerful poisons known to man: Nicotine, in form of tobacco leaf tea.
* Various other supplies (estimate): $40
[More comments to come...]
* "Natural" pest sprays: $35 Only buy them if you need them. Or rather, make your own with water boric acid, a little biyt of neem oil and organic soap. In emergency cases, use one of the most powerful poisons known to man: Nicotine, in form of tobacco leaf tea.
* Various other supplies (estimate): $40
[More comments to come...]
I don't have a green thumb. When little plants misbehave, their parents threaten to send them to my yard.
But with supermarket prices for produce on the rise, it seemed a good time to try, yet again, to grow a vegetable garden. And I wouldn't be alone. According to the National Garden Assn., hard times seed more gardens. "The high point we had was in 1975, 1976, when there was a gas crisis and Gerald Ford had his Whip Inflation Now program," said Bruce Butterfield, research director for the association, which has been tracking gardening since 1973. "At that point, 49% of households had them."
Last year and in 2006, the percentage stood at 22%. This year, Butterfield expects a resurgence. "We have gotten information from Burpee and other seed companies that they've been up in sales about 30% this year," Butterfield said. "And in some cases they've sold out."
Locally, sales at the Armstrong Garden Centers chain are also up 30% this year. But Gary Jones, vice president of marketing, thinks the reasons go beyond the economic.
"It's also about people wanting to be closer to nature, the taste of homegrown vegetables and the whole food-miles thing -- people want to get their food from local sources," Jones said.
True, the carbon footprint from backyard to kitchen is zip. But the bottom-line question is: Can money be saved by gardening at home?
It's quite doable, garden experts insist.
Although not the way we did it down on the lower 40 (more like an 8-foot-by-4-foot raised bed) in a section of my backyard that was so barren it looked as if it should include a car up on blocks.
My partner in this venture was Susan Ortmeyer, a dog-park buddy who also wanted a garden but lives in a condo.
Together, we novices managed to overspend, over-water and come up with a garden that was bountiful -- at first -- but produced blah-tasting vegetables.
Still, it's quite possible for first-timers to be successful, given the ample instructional and other resources at hand in Southern California.
And it can be done at a wide range of costs.
Marta Teegen, who owns Homegrown, a Los Angeles-based garden consulting company, will come to your house and install a vegetable garden with your choice of plants. She generally puts in about four 4-by-6-foot raised beds.
The average cost -- $2,000.
At that rate, and because this is Los Angeles, it's no surprise that several of her clients are celebrities (whom she declined to name) with private chefs.
"A big part of the design process is to find out what they eat and how they cook," said Teegen, who also hosts group classes for us mere mortals at a far lower cost.
She designs each garden for the microclimate of its neighborhood and for year-round production.
On the other end of the spectrum, the National Garden Assn. said, the average annual amount spent on an edibles garden in the U.S. is $58.
Susan and I spent more than that long before putting in our first tomato seedling.
In our defense, first-timers are going to have an initial outlay of cash for tools and other equipment.
For example, $83 went for redwood boards to make the raised bed, and that was at a bargain rate because the owner of the lumberyard is a friend who cut and delivered the boards for free.
Speaking of free, we should have made more use of the bountiful no-cost information on putting in an edible garden.
Local info is of paramount importance because the Southern California climate is different from that of most of the country. Many of the general books on edible gardens don't zoom in on our territory.
One of the largest local resources is the Cooperative Extension for Los Angeles County, a division of the University of California. The program's website has so much information for gardeners that sorting through it can be a bit difficult.
There's month-by-month gardening tips specific to the area and a guide for growing the most popular of garden vegetables -- the tomato.
"People who have never grown anything will want to grow a tomato," said Yvonne Savio, manager of the community gardens program at the extension.
"The tomato is the perfect entry plant, and then they can branch out."
The extension's online brochure, "Growing Tomatoes in Your Garden," recommends digging the soil to at least a foot and then adding about 2 pounds of fertilizer per 100 square feet of planting area.
Savio said the simpler formula that works for her is to dig the garden area about a shovel deep, then add 2 inches of compost and another 2 inches of manure on top. (She recommends the organic non-sludge manure available at garden nurseries). Then, mix the dirt and amendments all together.
She likes using raised beds when possible. "It's one of the best ways because you can corral your amendments," she said.
Savio uses soaker hoses for watering with a substantial layer of mulch on top of the hoses to preserve water and keep down weeds. After her plants are established, she waters only once every two weeks.
There are many paths to gardening, all a bit different. Teegen does only raised beds, and she doesn't dig the soil at all. Rather, she fills the beds with compost rich enough in nutrients that she almost never adds fertilizer.
When Teegen came to visit our garden, the look on her face was one of a person searching for something nice to say. Finally, she came up with: "It's crowded, and I like that."
Teegen uses methods devised by John Jeevons of Willits in Northern California, whose bio-intensive techniques have been taught around the world.
Even without those techniques, which place plants closer together than usually recommended, a family's well-tended 200-square-foot garden can turn out about 200 pounds of produce in a year, the National Garden Assn. said.
The garden group has never performed a detailed comparison of home garden vs. supermarket costs, but the National Garden Assn.'s Butterfield estimated that the produce grown in a 200-square-foot plot in a year could cost about $400 in a market.
At that rate, the economics of home gardening makes sense. If done right.
Our four tomato plants grew more than 6 feet tall and had an impressive amount of fruit, but Teegen said over-watering had led to mediocre taste.
She uses a stake technique that results in fewer tomatoes, but more intense flavor. Also, rather than the little drip system I had hooked up to a timer, she recommended hand watering. "It makes you get involved in the garden," she said. "You're always aware of what's going on."
Our cucumbers were wonderful, but few and far between. Teegen said the problem was probably the absence of flowering plants in the otherwise barren backyard to attract bees needed for pollination.
The one plant that came up beautifully was basil, but it's hard to mess that up.
With our busy work schedules -- Susan is a church administrator -- and because the result of our garden labor wasn't stellar, we essentially gave up on the plot about halfway through the summer growing season. It looks droopy now, and just about the only remaining task is to feed the plants to the compost bin.
But we've already started to plan a fall garden and the one for next summer. There will be two more raised beds, placed in sunnier spots than the original, and a wider variety of plants.
The reasons we'll try again go beyond the economic or environmental.
Jones of Armstrong Garden Centers said it right.
"There's a psychological factor involved," he said. "We get a good feeling from producing our own vegetables."
While the garden was flourishing, I drank coffee out there in the quiet of the early morning. I'd get a kick out of any sort of new growth, any sign of emerging baby tomatoes or cucumbers. When Susan came over, our dogs would joyfully chase each other around the raised bed.
It was a bit of sanity in the middle of the city.
"When you create a garden," Jones said, "it's kind of like comfort food."
Permalink: http://optimalgardens.blogspot.com/2008/09/analyzing-how-does-your-backyard-garden.html
"It's also about people wanting to be closer to nature, the taste of homegrown vegetables and the whole food-miles thing -- people want to get their food from local sources," Jones said.
True, the carbon footprint from backyard to kitchen is zip. But the bottom-line question is: Can money be saved by gardening at home?
It's quite doable, garden experts insist.
Although not the way we did it down on the lower 40 (more like an 8-foot-by-4-foot raised bed) in a section of my backyard that was so barren it looked as if it should include a car up on blocks.
My partner in this venture was Susan Ortmeyer, a dog-park buddy who also wanted a garden but lives in a condo.
Together, we novices managed to overspend, over-water and come up with a garden that was bountiful -- at first -- but produced blah-tasting vegetables.
Still, it's quite possible for first-timers to be successful, given the ample instructional and other resources at hand in Southern California.
And it can be done at a wide range of costs.
Marta Teegen, who owns Homegrown, a Los Angeles-based garden consulting company, will come to your house and install a vegetable garden with your choice of plants. She generally puts in about four 4-by-6-foot raised beds.
The average cost -- $2,000.
At that rate, and because this is Los Angeles, it's no surprise that several of her clients are celebrities (whom she declined to name) with private chefs.
"A big part of the design process is to find out what they eat and how they cook," said Teegen, who also hosts group classes for us mere mortals at a far lower cost.
She designs each garden for the microclimate of its neighborhood and for year-round production.
On the other end of the spectrum, the National Garden Assn. said, the average annual amount spent on an edibles garden in the U.S. is $58.
Susan and I spent more than that long before putting in our first tomato seedling.
In our defense, first-timers are going to have an initial outlay of cash for tools and other equipment.
For example, $83 went for redwood boards to make the raised bed, and that was at a bargain rate because the owner of the lumberyard is a friend who cut and delivered the boards for free.
Speaking of free, we should have made more use of the bountiful no-cost information on putting in an edible garden.
Local info is of paramount importance because the Southern California climate is different from that of most of the country. Many of the general books on edible gardens don't zoom in on our territory.
One of the largest local resources is the Cooperative Extension for Los Angeles County, a division of the University of California. The program's website has so much information for gardeners that sorting through it can be a bit difficult.
There's month-by-month gardening tips specific to the area and a guide for growing the most popular of garden vegetables -- the tomato.
"People who have never grown anything will want to grow a tomato," said Yvonne Savio, manager of the community gardens program at the extension.
"The tomato is the perfect entry plant, and then they can branch out."
The extension's online brochure, "Growing Tomatoes in Your Garden," recommends digging the soil to at least a foot and then adding about 2 pounds of fertilizer per 100 square feet of planting area.
Savio said the simpler formula that works for her is to dig the garden area about a shovel deep, then add 2 inches of compost and another 2 inches of manure on top. (She recommends the organic non-sludge manure available at garden nurseries). Then, mix the dirt and amendments all together.
She likes using raised beds when possible. "It's one of the best ways because you can corral your amendments," she said.
Savio uses soaker hoses for watering with a substantial layer of mulch on top of the hoses to preserve water and keep down weeds. After her plants are established, she waters only once every two weeks.
There are many paths to gardening, all a bit different. Teegen does only raised beds, and she doesn't dig the soil at all. Rather, she fills the beds with compost rich enough in nutrients that she almost never adds fertilizer.
When Teegen came to visit our garden, the look on her face was one of a person searching for something nice to say. Finally, she came up with: "It's crowded, and I like that."
Teegen uses methods devised by John Jeevons of Willits in Northern California, whose bio-intensive techniques have been taught around the world.
Even without those techniques, which place plants closer together than usually recommended, a family's well-tended 200-square-foot garden can turn out about 200 pounds of produce in a year, the National Garden Assn. said.
The garden group has never performed a detailed comparison of home garden vs. supermarket costs, but the National Garden Assn.'s Butterfield estimated that the produce grown in a 200-square-foot plot in a year could cost about $400 in a market.
At that rate, the economics of home gardening makes sense. If done right.
Our four tomato plants grew more than 6 feet tall and had an impressive amount of fruit, but Teegen said over-watering had led to mediocre taste.
She uses a stake technique that results in fewer tomatoes, but more intense flavor. Also, rather than the little drip system I had hooked up to a timer, she recommended hand watering. "It makes you get involved in the garden," she said. "You're always aware of what's going on."
Our cucumbers were wonderful, but few and far between. Teegen said the problem was probably the absence of flowering plants in the otherwise barren backyard to attract bees needed for pollination.
The one plant that came up beautifully was basil, but it's hard to mess that up.
With our busy work schedules -- Susan is a church administrator -- and because the result of our garden labor wasn't stellar, we essentially gave up on the plot about halfway through the summer growing season. It looks droopy now, and just about the only remaining task is to feed the plants to the compost bin.
But we've already started to plan a fall garden and the one for next summer. There will be two more raised beds, placed in sunnier spots than the original, and a wider variety of plants.
The reasons we'll try again go beyond the economic or environmental.
Jones of Armstrong Garden Centers said it right.
"There's a psychological factor involved," he said. "We get a good feeling from producing our own vegetables."
While the garden was flourishing, I drank coffee out there in the quiet of the early morning. I'd get a kick out of any sort of new growth, any sign of emerging baby tomatoes or cucumbers. When Susan came over, our dogs would joyfully chase each other around the raised bed.
It was a bit of sanity in the middle of the city.
"When you create a garden," Jones said, "it's kind of like comfort food."
Permalink: http://optimalgardens.blogspot.com/2008/09/analyzing-how-does-your-backyard-garden.html
Posts
