Garden Investments with a High Return

Gardening can be an expensive hobby, from truckloads of imported soil to fancy raised beds and all the accessory tools designed to make your garden tasks easier. Fruit and vegetable gardening CAN save you money in the long-term, though. There are certain investments that give you a high ROI (return on investment).

Here are our top 3 things to invest in now to make your garden pay its own way in the years to come.

INVEST IN YOUR SOIL

Soil is alive. It’s the microscopic networks of fungi and bacteria that make nutrients available to plants. It’s the organic matter that holds onto moisture and gets your plants through drought. It’s the decomposers like fungi, bacteria, and invertebrates that build new soil. Even when growing in pots, soil health is important. Use organic matter, like compost, to top up your growing spaces at least once a year. Use mulch, like wood chips or straw, to protect your soil from erosion and drought. Care for your soil, and it will care for your plants. Luckily, there are some free ways to do this with the investment of some time spent sourcing and shoveling.

A free and easy way to make compost is to turn fallen leaves into a rich compost called leaf mold. You can use fallen leaves from your own trees or from yard-waste bags gathered from around your neighbourhood. Here’s a great article (by somebody else) on making your own leaf mold compost.

Mulch can be sourced for free from a couple of sources. Some livestock and mushroom farmers will let you take their old, spent straw (if you get to know them first). Arborists will usually be willing to dump their loads in your driveway when they’re working in your neighbourhood. Organizations like Chipdrop.com connect homeowners with local arborists for free.

If you don’t want to invest time into your soil, you can choose to invest money.

If filling raised beds or pots, opt for a high-quality potting mix (for pots) or triple mix (for raised beds) to get you started. If you’re going to be growing directly in the ground, add a couple of inches of compost to the prepared ground. You can lay cardboard on the ground and cover with compost and plant directly into it, but the compost needs to be very well finished (not still in the process of active decomposition) or young plants may struggle to grow. Another option is to work the compost into the topsoil with a garden fork just enough to aerate and loosen the soil for young plants to take hold. Adding soil or purchased compost to your garden can save you years in building healthy soil, but it can also set you back hundreds of dollars. This is an area where you’ll have to weigh the pros and cons of investing time vs. money.

INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE

Set yourself up for success. You know yourself and the effort you will reliably put into the garden. Food can be grown with no infrastructure, but it’ll take a lot more effort. If you don’t invest in infrastructure OR ongoing maintenance effort (e.g., weeding, watering), you’ll get less food from your garden, potentially wasting what money you did put into it. That’s why it can make financial sense to invest in garden infrastructure. Here are some of the questions to ask yourself when deciding what infrastructure will pay for itself at the end of the day.

Will you be likely to visit your garden with a hose or watering can multiple times a week? If not, install an irrigation system.

Will you probably have given up on weeding by July? If yes, consider raised beds to reduce weed pressure. Line the bottom of raised beds with double layered, wetted cardboard before filling with soil to further block weed growth, or go with tall raised beds. We find that 24” and taller effectively smothers any weeds that grew beneath the raised bed.

Are you planning to grow food in containers or pots? Get good ones that are plenty deep. Pots that are too shallow or small for their contents will dry out faster and require more frequent watering (sometimes twice a day!) They’ll also run out of nutrients faster, requiring fertilizing multiple times a year. When pots dry out or run out of nutrients, you get a much smaller harvest (and sometimes dead plants). We recommend 20- or 25-gallon pots for most vegetables, but you can put multiple plants in a pot like this. For example, plant a broccoli in the centre, and dot radishes around the circumference. Or, plant a cucumber with a little trellis for it to climb up, and sprinkle lettuce seeds around the base. Peppers also like to “hold hands,” meaning you can plant two peppers plants close together in a pot this size.

Vertical growing to maximize efficiency of your space

Another way that investing in infrastructure can make you more money’s worth in food is by going vertical. Vertical growing maximizes whatever growing space you have and allows small backyard and even balcony growers to grow a meaningful amount of food.

If you have the money to invest in ready-made vertical growing structures, Greenstalk is a widely loved stacked planter that can grow everything from salad greens to small tomato varieties. If you don’t have the money for a Greenstalk, there are lots of cool DIY creations out there using pallets or other lumber, 5-gallon pails, and pots.

If you have the space for some in-ground gardens or raised beds, use trellises to grow as much as you can vertically.

Protect your investment from pests

Finally, a good pest protection system is important to avoid losing the crops you’ve invested in. You can go as basic or lavish as you want to with pest protection. A good place to start is with some insect netting row cover (can be used on in-ground gardens, raised beds, and pots). You can either use scrap wood, conduit pipe, or wire (even old wire clothes hangers) as a frame to hold the row cover up off the plants. Tuck it in around the edges of the bed or pot, and it will keep out insect, bird, and mammal pests.

Some of the crops that tend to need this kind of protection more include cucumbers and squash (protecting against cucumber beetles, squash vine borers, and the viruses they carry), brassicas like cauliflower and broccoli (protecting against cabbage moths and their green caterpillar offspring), and leafy greens (protecting against leaf miners and hungry rabbits). Keep in mind that if covering cucumbers and squash, you’ll need to remove the covering when flowers appear, or hand pollinate.

INVEST IN YOUR KNOWLEDGE BASE

Knowledge building as a gardener is a lifelong pursuit. There are some things you should learn right away, though, if your goal is to save money on food by growing it yourself. Here are the things we recommend you spend some time researching.

Keeping your soil in good condition is critical to growing a lot of food. It could mean the difference between a broccoli plant that doesn’t produce a single head all season, and a broccoli plant that grows a huge head in spring followed by hundreds of broccoli side shoots until the very end of the growing season. So, spend some time researching soil health, including how to make compost and how to use mulch to build healthy soils.

Learning to protect your crops from pests is critical. You can invest all you want in soil and infrastructure and seed, but when those swarms of pests arrive and kill all of your plants, there’s no return on investment. We sometimes joke that you need to be an entomologist to grow a lot of food because you so quickly learn about so many insect species and their life cycles. Take your phone to the garden with you and start identifying the different insects you see on your plants. Learn the “good” from the “bad” and learn how to prevent serious damage from the worst offenders (start by researching cucumber beetles, squash vine borers, and leaf miners, as these can quickly kill a plant or render the harvest unusable).

Learning to use the harvest is critical. This includes preserving (freezing, drying, or canning), but it also includes learning to harvest and cook with the food as it’s ready (eating seasonally).