You were always good at growing things, and once or twice even entertained thoughts of life on the farm. But your “Green Acres” dream never came true and the only farming you’re going to be doing is on that scrubby 10-by-10-foot patch between the garage and the alley. Or in that dirt-filled bathtub on your back porch.
But don’t let the dream die. With proper planning, a bit of gardening skill and a few hours weekly communing with the soil, you can still produce enough crops to help feed your family, save some money and have fun while you’re doing it. At the same time, you’ll reap the nutritional benefits of eating the freshest produce available and the satisfaction of turning a boring yard or abandoned bathtub into a produce factory.
First off, be sure you select the right plants. Key criteria for cash crops include the ability to bear a lot of fruit in relation to the amount of work put into them, and the ability to grow in the space you have available.
Chicago-area horticulturists recommend several highly productive crops for this area.
Green beans is a top choice of John Seaton, supervisor of the Oak Park Conservatory. “Green beans will go on giving you crop for a long time,” Seaton said. “If you have limited space, I would definitely plant green beans.”
Ron Wolford, extension coordinator/urban gardening for the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service, votes for zucchini. “Zucchini seeds are fairly cheap; zucchini is easy to grow; and it’s tremendously productive,” he said. Wolford is overseeing the sowing of hundreds of zucchini plants this summer to help feed participants in the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.
Other top vote-getting vegetables were tomatoes and peppers because both produce a lot of fruit with little effort. “You can get quite a few tomatoes and peppers off just a few plants,” says Verle Lessig, co-owner of Fertile Delta, a garden center on North Lincoln Avenue.
A category that doesn’t produce much bulk nutrition, but which could save significant grocery money, is herbs. “Herbs are easy to grow in pots,” Lessig said, adding that some herbs can be grown in the same pot as tomatoes and peppers.
Finally, the experts recommend throwing in some perennial plants for top economy. Perennials, which come back year after year, include some herbs, such as chives and mint, and fruit bushes, such as raspberries.
“If you have a bigger yard, you can plant raspberry or blackberry bushes or grapes, and you’ll get a lot of crop off them,” Lessig says. “But you can’t do those on the balcony.”
But forget about corn. It takes a lot of space, and it’s a favorite of raccoons and other urban pests. Even if you have acres to spare and can successfully fend off the rodents, the return on your effort will be minimal. “You’re only going to get one or two ears per stock,” explained Wolford. “For the space you need, it’s probably not worth it.”
Now that you’ve chosen your plants, farm them wisely.
To keep a fresh crop going all summer and fall, sow your plants in 10-day intervals, Seaton recommends. This way the plants will ripen at different times all season, avoiding a glut of produce all at once.
Fertilizer will increase your vegetable output. Just a few cents worth of commercial fertilizer will keep you in tomatoes all season, Lessig says. Or, if you’re into organics, compost your lawn waste and use that for fertilizer. Active composting–shredding the waste and regularly stirring up the decaying matter–can produce usable fertilizer in a month, says Vernon Bryant, an extension educator with the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service.
Avoid the temptation to use a lot of pesticides. Bryant explains that healthy plants that are well cared for can generally fight off a lot of pests on their own. In any case, he advises, don’t panic if you see a few bugs on your plants. Some of them are even helpful.
Seaton recommends watering your plants in the early morning–about 6 a.m. during the summer. If you water during the day, up to a third of the moisture can evaporate before it does your plant any good, he said. And if you water in the evening, your plants’ leaves will be wet all night, which could lead to mold and mildew.
How profitable can gardening be? You can get four small tomato plants for $1 at Fertile Delta, Lessig said. Throw in a $2.95 box of fertilizer, which will last years if you’re just growing a few plants at a time. Assuming you’ve got a patch of ground or a dirt-filled pot, a couple of dollars for water and an old spade to work the soil will be your only expenses.
If they grow well, each of your tomato plants could produce three dozen or more nice tomatoes. So, for an investment of $6 you’ll get a gross of tomatoes. If that totals 50 pounds, at in-season prices of 49 cents a pound, your tomatoes would be worth almost $25. Not bad. Try to get that kind of return on your mutual fund.
You also have to consider canning expenses if you don’t plan to give away some of those tomatoes–or you and your family consume all 50 pounds of them youselves.
Think you’d like to convert your weedy flower patch into a serious food-and-budget stretcher? Perhaps some real-life examples will inspire you:
Consider the North Kenwood community garden, supervised by Hyde Park resident Carol Gittler. Her garden, which is funded by small donations of cash and goods from a variety of organizations, provides the local gardeners with bushel baskets full of fresh produce ranging from okra to watermelon to turnips. That produce not only helps feed the gardeners and their families, but also helps fill the larder of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Food Kitchen.
The value of her garden “is not measurable in terms of `I put in a dollar and got 50 cents return,’ ” Gittler said when asked about the financial side of things. “But it’s measurable in smiles,” she added, explaining that the garden provides fresh vegetables to inner-city folks who have limited resources to buy such products in stores. Perhaps more importantly, it helps revitalize the neighborhood.
An even bigger gardening-for-profit success story is the Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program, administered in Chicago by the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service. This program takes produce grown in community gardens and provides it to participants of the federal WIC program.
Of course, all the money you save by growing your own food will pale in comparison to the satisfaction you’ll feel when you pick those first ripe tomatoes. “From an economic standpoint,” said Seaton, “it depends on if you can put a value on walking into your garden and picking your own fresh produce.”
