Garden Challenge 2011

I like to garden.  Odd, right?  Well for those who personally know me.  I've been composting for over 2 years now.  Again.  Odd. 

The past two years, I started plants with seeds.  I swore I wasn't going to do it this year.  But, yeah, I did it.  My dining room was turned into a green house 2 weeks ago and I still have about 3 1/2 weeks before I can even think of planting my 65 plants from seeds outside.  See:

This year, I only planted what we eat an abundance of:  Tomatoes & Jalapenos. 



I first bought a Jiffy Seed Starter Tray (72-count) at WallyWorld (with a gift card) and got my seeds there too.  Trashy is as trashy does.  I'm proud of my Walmarts gardening.

I planted the seeds and they grew, and grew and grew.  So I went to Lowe's and bought 8 8-packs of Jiffy Pots (one actually had 9 in it) and potting soil.  I used my 10% gift card promo for buying a huge gift card at Lowe's during Tax Rebate season.  So essentially it was all free - but I'm going to calculate the cost for this experiment of mine this year.

And of course you see in the pictures what they all look like now. 

So as of today, I spent $38 on gardening supplies so far.  Actually, I spent $0 - since I used a gift card I was given and my Lowe's rebate, but since I missed out on buying something else with that money, we'll call it $38.

I really don't plan on buying anything else for my garden this year.  I compost so I don't buy fertilizer or anything (although my father tells me to).  I don't buy mulch - I use newspaper. 

So my experiment this year is to see if I actually make out buy doing all this work myself.  With tomatoes nearing $3.99 a pound due to Florida's crappy weather and gas prices & Jalapenos always costing $3.99/lbs - I'm going to try to weigh all my tomatoes & jalapenos to see how many pounds I can generate from my $38.  As long as I get 10 pounds of vegetables, I will have broken even.  I do not put a price on my labor because it is the labor of love that gives me a boutiful garden.  Isn't that special?

You can find my Gardening antics on that spiffy tab up there by the title now.  I learned some HTML code for those so now I'm going all tab crazy. 

Now hopefully I didn't just jinx myself and my beautiful little plants with this experiment.