Who Can do It? Saskatchemom can!: Frugal Friday: Planting my Garden

Another fun way that I love to save money during the summer is by growing vegetables in my garden. This is totally new to me this year so I am sure I will have many failures and hopefully some successes too. Last year I saw Michael Symon make a pallet garden on The Chew and I managed to get my hands on two pallets so I started small with those. It worked out really well and it inspired me to take it further and find more space in my yard! We removed a few unattractive trees in our back yard and it left us a great sunny spot to try out this year. I am so looking forward to it. Having fresh lettuce, greens and other veggies right in our back yard encouraged us to eat so healthy last summer, and it is also a wonderful learning experience for P and D to see where food comes from (other than the supermarket!).

My sister has a HUGE garden (literally the size of my entire back yard) and she plants enough of some basics like carrots, potatoes, onions and zucchini for the whole family. That means I don't need to plant any of those things in my small plot, and I can experiment with some different things

I will plant my pallets again with things that were successful last year, like lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, lots of fresh herbs and probably some radishes. In my bigger backyard space I will plant some tomatoes, cucumber, green onions and beans. Just out of curiosity, I am also going to try some of my favourite veggies: eggplant, okra, kale, and leeks. I also found seeds for ground cherries. I love these things so I'm going to test them out too. I have no idea if these things are going to grow in our Saskatchewan climate but I bought them at a local greenhouse so I'm gonna follow the directions on the packages and see what happens.

In addition to those few spaces, I am going to do some planting in containers. I will do a few hanging baskets with red and yellow cherry tomatoes. I am also going to try planting beans and snow peas in containers and let them grow and vine up my fence. I am not sure how this will work, but I'm gonna find out!

Last year I started my seeds in a starter tray with peat pellets. It worked perfectly and made it so easy to transplant when the time came. This year I bought two more of them and last weekend I planted all of the seeds that need to be started 6-8 weeks before the last frost. Wish me luck with this project and stay posted for updates on how all of my experiments are going.