Start a Veggie Garden CHEAP — 5 Easy Methods Ranked

G'day, I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me and we all know the rising cost of living is higher than Superman's underpants. And one of the biggest outlays in a person's budget is food. I've been backyard farming for nearly two decades and I can tell you growing our own food at home was the difference between surviving and going under, at least in the early days. So in this video, I'm going to give you five of the easiest ways to start a food garden, listed from the cheapest to the dearest. Let's get into it. And at the end of these five, I will give you two more ways you can start a food garden that I wouldn't recommend. But the first, easiest and cheapest way you can start a food garden is number one, in-ground. Scratching out a piece of dirt and sowing seeds into the soil is the simplest and cheapest way to start a food garden. Humans have been using this method for at least 23,000 years, so it must be effective. If you want, you can create a cheap border around the in-ground garden using sleepers, bricks or rocks to limit the soil erosion and give the patch its own area. In fact, my very first vegetable garden back in 2002 was a six foot square area in our courtyard surrounded by four wooden sleepers. We grew a surprising amount of food in just that small space. So yes, you can grow a ton of food in a relatively small area if you work hard at it, and you should be eating from your own garden where your insignificant lawn used to be in no time at all. Number two is growing in containers. I can barely contain my excitement because growing in containers is one of the easiest ways to grow, plus it's one of the easiest ways to control the growing medium. A good commercial potting mix can make it easier, especially for new gardeners to grow food because you don't have to have a real understanding of the soil to get great results. All you need to do is buy a container. This can be cheap plastic, fabric, medium priced natural clay or more expensive glazed pots. Depending on your budget, fill the containers with a quality commercial potting mix and away you go. Containers are great for small spaces and are portable, which is handy if you are renting or need to move home. Vertical growing via stackable or wall-mounted containers offer flexibility and can look awesome. And although growing in containers might be a bit more expensive than, say, a basic in-ground setup, I would recommend this method for beginner gardeners as the best way for them to start because you can get more success with less effort, plus it gives the beginner time to be able to learn about growing mediums and soil before they start growing bigger in in-ground or getting large raised garden beds. Number three is raised planters, and no, I don't mean these ones here, although they're kind of close. Look, I kneel for no one and I love stand-up gardening, hence those raised garden beds there. We'll talk a bit more about them later, but raised planters or elevated garden beds are just larger containers to allow you to grow more and are raised up to enable a more convenient way to garden without having to constantly bend over like a chicken looking for worms. This method of gardening is perfect for smaller spaces such as courtyards or balconies that get a decent amount of sunlight, or for any sized area really, or for those who want a more convenient way to grow food. And when you combine those two, yes, a lot of uni students and young people live in containers. I was going to say before that cockatoo interrupted me, but it's not really, is it? A lot of older people downsize to units and containers, no they don't, units in smaller places with a little courtyard or area like that. And older people like myself, I'm getting there, find it difficult to get down and up. So I actually bought my father-in-law a stand-up planter and he absolutely loves it. He's 87, not out and going strong. And we just had Australia Day lunch at their place the other day and they're growing a ton of small cherry tomatoes at the moment and they are delightful and they're so proud of them. Raised planters are reasonably portable and some come with wheels so they can be moved around easily. High quality elevated garden beds are built with a strong framework, so they often come with accessories or extra storage like storage racks built in to hold tools or watering cans. Yes, the setup costs are higher than in-ground or standard container gardens, but you're paying for the extra build quality and materials and engineering, but I think they're practical to use and I reckon they look great. Number four is wicking beds. Now I need to set these two up. These are IBCs. They're very cheap and easy to set up, but a wicking bed, if you can imagine, is just like a candle wick where it wicks up the liquid for the flame to be able to burn. It's the same for a wicking bed where it will wick up water so that your plants can have a drink whenever they want. Actually, I could do with a drink right now. Anyway, the reason why wicking beds are growing so much in popularity is because it solves the one problem that has been driving us gardeners mad forever and that is regular watering. What does no watering on your fruit and veggies do? Well, it kills your plants, but irregular watering is even worse. It's like water torture for your plants, making them thirsty and then bloating them up. No, you don't want that. You want happy plants, but a wicking bed doesn't need regular rainfall or you watering every few days in hot weather because it has a water reservoir in the base of the bed below the crop so that it can provide the plants with all the water they need for a week or even longer. There are some excellent commercial brands that specialize in wicking beds such as Food Cube, which are made in Australia and sold in the USA. Also, you can save a lot of money and DIY your own wicking bed from most materials, all like those IBCs made from food safe containers like Celia and I showed in our wicking bed video not so long ago. So if watering plants is too time-consuming for you and it's making you sad, well, think about a wicking bed because that will save you from watering and it could also prevent things like diseases that can be from overhead watering like some types of fungal diseases. Plus, of course, it saves on water because you don't get as much evaporation from that top watering type style. And number five is high-sided raised beds. Now I love all types of gardening, everything, even the last two that I'm going to talk about, but this way of gardening is my fave. Raised beds are the most expensive way that you can start a food garden because the materials to build them can be fairly expensive, especially if you want a really durable material. Because let's face it, the things you put in a garden bed like fertilizers, manures, urea, all those types of things, all different types of soils, burying things in my case, to let them decay, all those little animals and everything, chicken manure, all those types of elements that you put into a garden bed are fairly corrosive. And the other thing about this method is the amount of volume of soil that's needed to fill them. That can also be costly. You can slowly fill them without conventional soil by using a layering system and compost and all that, but it can take a long time to do that. Our vegetable garden is made up of over 50 raised garden beds of various sizes collected over the past 19 years. Some I have built myself from scratch out of recycled and new materials, but most have been just assembled from kits made from alu-zinc steel by an Australian company called Birdies Garden Products. And I have a discount code and links to more information about these raised garden beds below in the description of this video. I like these types of raised garden beds because they come in different sizes and shapes. I can use real soil in them instead of potting mixes, which is better for growing plants. The alu-zinc material is completely safe for food growing. The beds last for decades without rusting or rotting. They are raised, making it easier to garden standing up. The depth allows for hugelkultur or mound culture food gardening, creating a living soil with microbes, fungi and animals that all work together to make a premium growing environment that is sustainable and continues to improve over the years. I can easily bury food scraps to put household organic waste to use, and if it rains too much and our yard is boggy, it doesn't affect our plants as much as growing in ground. The only real downside is the cost, or I like to call it investment, and probably the putting it together. Although that doesn't take too long to put these garden beds together, but maybe the filling of them. And like I said before, if you're going to fill them an organic way without using any soils, that can take quite a long time to build it up. But you might want to start with an in-ground garden to begin with, and then maybe have a buy one of these, test it out, see how you go. You don't need a very big bed to grow a lot of food in it. This one here, I've got, you know, a ton of corn growing in there that'll feed our family three times. So you don't need a big space, but you could start with the in-ground and go with a raised, one raised garden bed, several plastic pots or felt containers or whatever you want. And that could be a really great start to get a taste of a combo meal, if you like. Now, as I'm walking through the bottom boggy part of our veggie garden, it reminds me there are two other ways of starting a food garden that I wouldn't recommend, or at least I wouldn't consider them easy, especially for a beginner. And the first one is hydroponics. This is where you grow vegetables in water using dissolved nutrients. Now you can get small hydroponic grow kits that have a straightforward and easy to use and maintain type of setup, but to grow at scale you really need to have a good understanding of mixing chemicals, how different vegetables grow in relation to water, and be prepared to outlay a lot of money on equipment. Plus, not everything grows in liquid, so there are restrictions on what you can and can't grow in a hydroponic setup. The second way is even harder, and that's aquaponics, whereby you not only grow in water, but you also grow and keep fish in that water using their circulated waste as fertilizer for the plants. It's a tremendously noble way of growing food, aquaponics. The fish and the plants have this almost symbiotic circularity type relationship. I find it really interesting, and I don't think there's anything fishy about it. However, building and maintaining this ecosystem requires specific knowledge in keeping fish and growing plants in water and combining them both. Having said that, hydroponics and aquaponics are big industries in the gardening world for hobbyists and commercially, so who am I to poo-poo these methods with my watered down opinion. Speaking of opinion, if you want more information on the things that I talked about in this video, go check out our new website at selfsufficientme.com. We have plenty of information, articles, recipes, our new garden planner that is super handy, and if you go to our support me page, you'll see a growing list of brands and products we recommend for your own garden. The website is brand new, as some of you might already know, so we're working through a few teething problems still, but it's getting there, and I really do like it. Plus, we've got our new online store. It's up, so you can check it out. It's only got two products there, Legacy Shirt and the Hat, but we'll be opening it soon because we're testing out all sorts of other merch, and we want to make sure that it's good quality before we do sell it, so that's why it's taking quite a long time. It's been doing this for a couple of years actually, but we're getting so close. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, make sure you give it a big start, a new garden, especially if you haven't ever before right now, and get into it. Thumbs up, share the video around, and subscribe if you haven't already. Thanks a lot for watching. Thanks for your support. Bye for now. Cheers.