Good god damn
Feb. 23rd, 2019 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beehammerSo about... a year ago? two years? Let's call it two years. I went on a little bit of a seed-packet bender and bought a lot of things I had absolutely no way to use with what I had at the time. I also had absolutely no plans to put in anything that would let me use them. Just utterly useless, aspirational seeds. I was cleaning out my seed packets this year, after putting in all the planters, and I found one with mustard green seeds.
Now, my feelings on gardening to feed yourself are a little... let's be nice and call them gun-shy. I started out with plants because I wanted to grow my own food. Not a lot, just stuff that it was difficult to get in optimal shape at the store (tomatoes, strawberries) or very expensive (bell peppers). It was a nightmare. I made a lot of mistakes, and Florida's not a terribly forgiving state when it comes to vegetable-growing errors. My tomatoes went gangbusters, and the ten strawberries I managed to get out of those plants were delicious, but the peppers were a disaster and it turns out that eggplant both has thorns and is really not my favorite thing in the world even farm-fresh and my zucchini all died.
Yes, you read that correctly. I failed to grow even a single zucchini.
So I dialed everything way back and focused on plants that are pretty much impossible to kill and have only recently ventured back into the realm of gardening to feed myself instead of gardening to feed bees and butterflies and birds.
Basically, unless what you have is an overabundance of time and a ready-made patch of land just waiting for you to park a plant on it, growing your own food is probably not going to wind up being that much cheaper than just buying it. Mustard greens, in fact, cost about three bucks for a giant bag of ready-to-use greens.
But mustard greens, you see, are available from a normal store around here for all of two fucking weeks a year. It's like Christmas, when they show up, and I eat the hell out of them while the stores have them, and then they go away again. It's not the growing season, either--they show up a little late and disappear early, in terms of when the local growing season is. So mustard greens are very much cheaper to buy in the store than to grow yourself, when you factor in labor and water and dirt and so forth, but it doesn't matter because they can't be had even for ready money. And I love them.
So when the store stopped getting their bags of mustard greens in, I took the packet of seeds, said, "Fuck it." and scattered them in one of the planters that had the fewest things really thriving, because why the fuck not?
That was a month ago. I just cut my first batch of greens today, and I had them for dinner tonight, and they're absolutely delicious, and there's a boatload more where that came from. So mischief fucking managed on that front.
Now, my feelings on gardening to feed yourself are a little... let's be nice and call them gun-shy. I started out with plants because I wanted to grow my own food. Not a lot, just stuff that it was difficult to get in optimal shape at the store (tomatoes, strawberries) or very expensive (bell peppers). It was a nightmare. I made a lot of mistakes, and Florida's not a terribly forgiving state when it comes to vegetable-growing errors. My tomatoes went gangbusters, and the ten strawberries I managed to get out of those plants were delicious, but the peppers were a disaster and it turns out that eggplant both has thorns and is really not my favorite thing in the world even farm-fresh and my zucchini all died.
Yes, you read that correctly. I failed to grow even a single zucchini.
So I dialed everything way back and focused on plants that are pretty much impossible to kill and have only recently ventured back into the realm of gardening to feed myself instead of gardening to feed bees and butterflies and birds.
Basically, unless what you have is an overabundance of time and a ready-made patch of land just waiting for you to park a plant on it, growing your own food is probably not going to wind up being that much cheaper than just buying it. Mustard greens, in fact, cost about three bucks for a giant bag of ready-to-use greens.
But mustard greens, you see, are available from a normal store around here for all of two fucking weeks a year. It's like Christmas, when they show up, and I eat the hell out of them while the stores have them, and then they go away again. It's not the growing season, either--they show up a little late and disappear early, in terms of when the local growing season is. So mustard greens are very much cheaper to buy in the store than to grow yourself, when you factor in labor and water and dirt and so forth, but it doesn't matter because they can't be had even for ready money. And I love them.
So when the store stopped getting their bags of mustard greens in, I took the packet of seeds, said, "Fuck it." and scattered them in one of the planters that had the fewest things really thriving, because why the fuck not?
That was a month ago. I just cut my first batch of greens today, and I had them for dinner tonight, and they're absolutely delicious, and there's a boatload more where that came from. So mischief fucking managed on that front.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 04:38 am (UTC)North Florida (at least the neck of it I'm in, as we're practically up in Georgia) has its own challenges and advantages: the soil's not as sandy, it gets much colder much quicker and can stay that way much longer, the summers are just as hot but not consistently quite as humid, it rains much, much more, and we even got snow a year ago (a light dusting, but still).
I could say I don't have access to a yard because when we first moved into this apartment we didn't; it was covered in trees and brush. Two hurricanes later though it's basically clear, so I could probably grow something back there. The front has some yard, too, but functions basically as a weed lawn and is just not that great.
So my containerizing up until the last hurricane this fall's basically been in actual flower pots and planters (like round or boxy wooden, clay or plastic kinds) limited to our front and back porches and the grow lamp inside (we have a second grow lamp now; it just needs a bulb).
Until I can figure out what (if anything) might be best to put in the newly available bits of back yard we'll probably be sticking to that for now, but looking at your pictures of the mustard green planter I can see the same thing should work in the more narrow, boxy planters I have, assuming the mustard greens don't get quite as monstrous as the over-sized bunches I see in stores, so that's good to know. Thanks for all the info!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-03 12:55 am (UTC)