8 Reasons to Start Gardening NOW!

1) Cheap - Here in my town we have about half a dozen or so little dollar stores and most of them sell seeds packages at a price of either 3 or 4 for a dollar.  It usually doesn’t take a determined person long to earn, find, borrow or even beg to come up with a single dollar.  While I’ll be the first to admit that these aren’t the best quality of seeds, or the best selection, they will still sprout and grow for you most of the time.  The displays in our stores seem to generally include things such as carrots, lettuces, peas, beans, radishes and the like while also having a decent selection of easy to grow flowers to attract those pollinators with.
  Let’s say you grab a package of carrot seeds, peas and a lettuce variety for your dollar spent.  Carrots are super easy to grow and have tiny seeds, odds are you will get over 100 seeds for the 33 cents that package cost.  Even if only 1/3 of them grow you are still looking at 33+ carrots for about a penny each.  When was the last time you saw carrots for sale at a penny per?  Odds are the answer is never.  The math on the peas works out even better since a single pea seed can grow into a plant that produces dozens, if not hundreds, of pods with new seeds in them.  Save a couple & eat the rest.  Peas are now free forever!  How’s that for cheap?!?

2) Saves Massive Cash - If you paid any attention at all to the first point then you can probably see how this works already.  Around here we can usually buy a 5 pound bag of carrots for about $3, same price as 9 packs of seeds, and it will have between 15 and 20 decent looking carrots in it.  Even with the low success rate from above that same number of carrots would have only cost about 20 cents.  Let’s see, if I grow 20 carrots at a penny each instead of buy them for $3 I could save … $2.80!
  Lettuce is another great example for this since those dollar store packages usually have over one hundred seeds in them as well.  For the sake of argument, we’ll assume that same 1/3 success rate as the carrots for this and that you have similar market prices as I do.  I would pay about $1 per head of lettuce if I were to purchase it at the market so the savings there is basically a dollar per plant grown.  So in essence a 33 cent pack of lettuce seeds could save a gardener over $33!  Okay, that’s impressive if you think about it …
  If you really want to have some fun saving money through gardening you should try growing the most expensive things that you would buy from the produce department and then put the money you would have spent on it into a jar.  Just harvest a beautiful fresh bell pepper?  89 cents in the jar please!  You will be shocked at how fast that adds up towards next years garden.  It’s quite spectacular to see happening.  Personally I grow a lot of hot peppers, herbs and tomatoes to keep those savings up and the family healthy!

3) Sound Investment - For most of us living on this planet the idea of investing is something of a sick joke.  For example, my bank wants $500 just to get started and the returns don’t really seem that great to me.  I’m going to keep this one short and to the point.  If you find an investment that pays out better than lettuce, and is legal, put everything you’ve got into it and remember who gave you that advice … (*cough*)  Where else can you turn a penny into a dollar?  ‘Nuff said.

4) Food Security - These days there seems to be a lot of concern over something called food security.  Is it just me or does that make anybody else picture a little uniformed guard in the fridge asking for your ID?  Anyway, that concern is not necessarily a bad thing since odds are that’s what brought you to one of my videos or blog posts in the first place.  The funny thing about that is that food is pretty easy to grow almost anywhere so there really is no reason for a gardener to worry about going hungry for long.  Many plants can be eaten as sprouts when they are only a few days old and have plenty of nutrients to keep a person healthy while they wait for other plants to grow.  With a little creativity, the ability to garden can even be used to help secure meats for the family.  After all, who hasn’t heard stories for some garden raiding deer or rabbit?  Both pretty tasty in my books!

5) Healthy Food - For those who are concerned with the quality of the food they eat, gardening is almost the only affordable option.  Our local markets charge at least twice as much for any produce marked as organic.  I saw in one store they had ‘Organic’ cucumbers selling for $4 each.  EACH!  I bought a cucumber plant for the aquaponic system and it’s already got 3 fruit starting on it and since it’s in the AP garden I feel it will harvest as far better than so called organic produce at the market.  Gardening is simple to get involved in and let’s face it, as long as you have seeds you’ll have access to top quality & healthy foods.

6) Reduced Global Footprint - Granted, it is beyond awesome that we can grow food and transport it anywhere in the world and I don’t intend to suggest otherwise.  However, the habit of doing so has had some serious and negative effects on our world.  Driving to the market to buy packaged and out of season fruit is very convenient and has become quite normal in many places.  Skipping over the packaged & processed stuff, let’s just look at what is needed to get that produce to market in the first place.
  The farmer has to take on a HUGE debt load for the land, seeds,  and equipment that are needed plus a small fortune in operating costs for the fuel to power everything along the way.  Those tractors to plow, plant and harvest all need gas of some sort don’t they?  Then of course so do the large trucks that take it all to market, but not to your market yet.  First it goes to huge warehouses to be sorted before getting shipped to the companies buying it all for resale.  Then it goes to other warehouses to get sorted again before getting shipped some more before it finally gets to your market.  Where it gets sorted again before you even have a chance to go through and ‘pick out the best ones’ like we all do.  Excellent, now wasn’t that easier than just growing it yourself?  Not really …  Ever wonder why food prices are so high?  There’s your answer!

7) Takes Practice - As I’ve said many times, gardening is easy to get started with but with that being said, it does take some practice.  If I had a dollar for every plant I have brutally killed one way or another along my learning journey, we’d be living on a pretty big farm right now!
  There are times when the plants will get forgotten or simply can’t be cared for or the weather does something that kills them all or, or, or … the list goes on for a long time.  These things happen and you learn from them.  No two gardens are ever exactly the same so you have to learn what will work in your garden specifically.  Folks like me can offer tips and tricks and advice but results will vary.  Stubborn practice is the only sure fire way to become a better gardener, there is no short cut.

8) Takes Time - Great gardens do not happen overnight.  Sorry if you were hoping otherwise, it just doesn’t work that way.  On the surface gardening is simple.  Plant a seed, give it some care and just watch it grow until harvest time.  Pretty easy right?  At a deeper level there is a lot more that goes into it, as you will learn with practice.  Good soil can be found in many places but truly great soil is built over years by loving gardeners trying to proved the best possible environment for their plants.  It’s a beautiful and habit forming process that I hope you get started in soon.  Give it a try for a few years and I’m sure you’ll know what I mean!

Now go out there and get growing!

JT Bear

The Amazing Power of the Penny vs. The Billion Dollar Corporations

　

When you think about it, a penny doesn’t really seem like much. One hundredth of a dollar, and it’s not like a dollar will buy much these days. In fact, I recently watched a report which stated that our dollar now will purchase about as much as four cents did in 1913. Four cents. Now, there is a huge ugly reason for that but that’s the topic of a different rant.

There are over seven billion of us on the planet today and that number is growing fast. Each and every one of us is, in some way, destined to come into contact with the Billion Dollar Corporations sooner or later. Can’t be helped. Most of us feed them with energy money if nothing else. Gas for the car, gas for the heat, electricity to power everything in our lives. These bills add up to a huge portion of our spending in ways most people don’t even think about. When you buy something at the store it’s price probably includes the cost of transport … more paying for power, but at least this time it’s only pennies. Right?

A couple of pennies here, a couple of pennies there … by the time you finish shopping you’ve probably spent at least an extra dollar in those little pennies but hey, they’re just pennies right? Those little pennies really do add up quite quickly. Let’s look at a large city, take New York City for an example. The last time I looked the population of New York was around 8.3 million people. If each of them only gives the Billion Dollar Corporations one single penny, the corporation has gained an easy $83,000 per day. If they are all good little shoppers and spend a full dollar in those little pennies for power the corporation has gained over 8 million dollars. From pennies collected in a single city they are up quite a nice chunk of cash.

The problem with getting that much money for no real effort is that you get quite used to it and spend accordingly. Let’s switch things up a bit shall we? Let’s say that each New Yorker were to keep just one penny back every day. One single cent. Eighty-three thousand dollars a day. After a year that would work out to over thirty million dollars they didn’t get to waste. Imagine if everyone was able to keep back that full dollar a day in pennies! That’s over $3,000,000,000 they don’t get to play with from just one city.

Let’s go back to the amazing penny but look at it from a global point of view, because let’s face it … we are all feeding the same beast once you look far enough up the financial food chain. So according to the world population clock there are over 7.1 billion of us here. If we could each just keep back one little penny per day at the end of the year we would have starved the Billion Dollar Corporation of $25,915,000,000. Almost 26 billion dollar they don’t get per year. From one amazing little penny. Kind of shocking, isn’t it?

So then, the question becomes how can we save those pennies and start to fight back where it will really hurt them. The answers are everywhere and we’ve all heard them before but not enough people are listening, so those that are don’t feel like anything is working. It is my friends and more people every day are waking up to the fact that something HAS TO CHANGE and soon. We’ve all heard that we should drive less and walk more to save money, and these days that’s way more than pennies per trip. Get more energy efficient items for around the home such as washers, driers, fridges and freezers. While your at it, check the insulation of your home. Odds are it could be improved upon saving you more than pennies every day there too!

Perhaps one of the best ways to pinch a few of those pennies is to start generating your own electricity. Much safer than trying to make your own gasoline I think. Two obvious options here would be solar and wind. Solar panels are becoming more efficient every day and they will produce electricity for a LONG time but they are really overpriced compared to the cost of that same amount of power from a plug in the wall. Most of the large solar panels that I’ve seen available to the general public would take over a decade of useable electrical production before they had recovered their purchase price. In my thinking that’s just the big companies trying to steer the people away from something that is a treat to their profits in the long term.

Wind power is a little more cost effective but there are associated dangers to wildlife, such as bird deaths, that tend to get people into an uproar so most people just avoid the subject to avoid the confrontation. As I look on eBay right now you can purchase one of several 500 watt wind turbines starting as low as $300. Okay, time for some math. Working at it’s peak off 500 watts for an average of 2 hours a day seems like a nice minimal starting point. So that boils down to 1Kw produced every day or 365Kw per year. Since I don’t know what you pay for power I’ll use the local price for my calculations, which is about ten cents per kilowatt. So easy math says that wind turbine is paying you back at a rate of a dime a day or a whopping $36.50 per year. Okay so, $300 to purchase divided by $36.50 per year means it will take about 8.2 years to pay for itself. Still faster than a solar panel, but let’s face it if you don’t live somewhere with a steady wind solar is pretty much your only option for green power supply. What if you do live somewhere windy enough to keep your turbine spinning long enough to produce 5Kw per day? Then it would have paid you back in only 600 days or about 1.6 years. After it’s paid for itself that electricity is costing you nothing and even more important that money is no longer being spent to feed the Billion Dollar Corporations. The really good bit about it all is that once you do invest in something that can generate some electricity you can start keeping pennies back right away. It may not seem like much when it’s just you and me, but let’s think about those New York numbers again. 8.3 million people, each keeping 50 cents per day from the Billion Dollar Corporations, over the course of a year would be … around 1.5 billion dollars per year.

The real problem is, most of these things require a large payment up front which, let’s face it, most of us can’t or won’t pay. What a surprise! Big business wins again … so again we must ask ourselves, is there ANYTHING we can do right now that doesn’t cost a fortune and take years to pay us back? The answer is yes. Yes there is!

One of the easiest and most affordable things that you can do to start starving the Billion Dollar Corporations is to start feeding yourself. Start a garden and grow ANYTHING you can eat. Seeds cost pennies each and grow foods that cost you dollars, that sounds like a good trade to me! Everything you eat from you garden takes a bite out of their income. That is why hobby level gardening is under attack in some parts of the world. The last thing the Billion Dollar Corporations want is for people to remember how to grow their own fruits and vegetables. During war times it was considered a citizens duty to have a Victory garden and produce some of their own food at home, before then it was just how we lived.

Anyone can garden at a hobby level. I don’t care where you live or how little space you think you have. Anyone can do it. There are so many videos available these days on YouTube showing different systems for different situations there really is no excuse to not at least try. Those pennies you save will begin to have an immediate impact on the wallets of the elite as well as your own. If you grow enough of your own fruits and vegetables to save $300 you can buy yourself a wind turbine! We can take slow and steady steps to save ourselves from these Billion Dollar Corporation and one by one, they will add up to something HUGE that cannot simply be brushed aside or ignored any longer. Are you ready to become a part of the one cent revolution?

JT Bear