[Ben E Lou]

PROLOGUE: This past spring, very much at the last minute, I decided to grow an organic garden in my back yard. It started because I was at Home Depot for some other reason, and they had a display full of seed packets for 50 cents each. That's how you get sucked in. "Only 50 cents each? Cool! I can grow 10 different vegetables for 5 bucks plus tax!"


{pulls up spreadsheet}


Yeah, so more than $700 later, here I am in Fall 2018, planning for Spring 2019, and thought I'd start this thread. (I do have some broccoli growing for the fall and will report on that.)


THE THREAD TITLE
The title captures the four areas that I'd expect to be reporting on constantly.

"Veggies"--Well, I'll be growing a few flowers and fruits, but the bulk of the garden has been/will be vegetables.

"Varmints"--Birds, squirrels, groundhogs, rabbits, and insects all caused issues this year, and need be factored into the discussion.

"ROI"--For me, this isn't just a financial concern, but also time invested and the enjoyment my family gets out of it. Basically I'll be using "ROI" in this thread as a proxy for "is it worth the time/energy/money?" To give a couple of examples, my daughters (ages 9 and 5) really got into it, so I found gardening to be a fun way to spend time with the girls and slip in a little natural science on the sly, but I spent wayyyyyy more time weeding this year than I'd like. Reducing the latter would greatly improve "ROI."

In fairness, a decent bit of the cash referenced in the Prologue was spent on one-time expenses on reusable items such as stakes, tomato cages, trellises, a rain barrel, and garden tools. Beyond the one-time expenses, the biggest expense by far was clearly soil improvement--mostly Miracle-Gro dirt. Most of the soil improvements were bought along with other stuff, so it'd be hard to tease out exactly how much was spent on them, but just eyeballing the numbers indicates a number north of $250 was spent on enhanced soil, manure, and lime. I'd like to reduce that number drastically, thus...


"Rotting"--Compost, baby! Let it ROT! I have excellent space and opportunity for composting, and probably much of what gets posted over the next few months will reflect the progress of my efforts in this arena. And of course if this goes well, the need for soil amendments will be reduced drastically.