How we built our veggie garden for under $500

I have killed a cactus. For real.

I mention this, because I don’t want you to think I come from a long line of gardening savants. My yard growing up was ruthlessly manicured lawn, coniferous shrubs, and Nana bushes. Neat, no fuss, elegant. Till a little over a year ago, I knew LESS THAN NOTHING about gardening. Then the pandemic hit.

Like far too many people, I gave little to no thought about how my food came to be. I knew all about food standards (I was a professional cake decorator after all), but that was about it. Like many people, I just assumed the store would always have food, because that’s where food comes from. I was wrong.

At the beginning of the pandemic, idiots panic bought toilet paper, and while we memed that to death, it soon moved to limits on rice, flour, pasta, as well as other staples. Whether these items where actually in short supply or if people were panic hording is unclear.

What BECAME clear though, to me and lots of poeple, is that we NEED to stop thinking of the grocery store as where food comes from, and instead, as the back up plan.

I have a plan

Cards on the table, I’m a very detail oriented person, wrapped in someone fuelled by urgency. That ends up looking like someone with constant plans that must be executed NOW.

When I suggested we turn our dodgy front lawn into a vegetable garden, my husband barely raised an eyebrow. He’s used to me now. Its been 21 years.

At this point, I had had one small, fairly unsuccessful raised bed in our back yard. I successfully grew baby spinach, and a mangled mass of moldy pumpkin leaves. Pro tip, don’t plant 12 pumpkin seeds in half a metre (20”) of space. Its BAD.

We also had next to no cash, as like most of the country, we were coming out of lockdowns and holiday pay and savings had been eaten up by nearly 3 months of leave. We needed a cheap solution. Enter, Facebook Marketplace.

Facebook Marketplace is now what eBay was 10 years ago, a great place to find cheap or even free stuff. We needed bricks, lots of them.

Thankfully, bricks come up all the time where I am, and as luck would have it, someone was giving away nearly 3 palettes worth, completely free. BOOM!

While my husband picked up bricks, I visited the local recycling drop off daily, collecting all the sheets of non laminated cardboard I could get. The guys there were initially thrown by someone picking up instead of dropping off, but soon started keeping good pieces aside for me. They loved the idea of a front yard veggie garden.

We laid out all the cardboard over our front lawn, ready for the soil delivery. Oh the soil. Let me tell you about the dang soil.

Pick your poison

Bulk soil is having a rough run. I’ve seen a bunch of folks I follow in the US struggle with poor quality bulk soil, and sadly its a problem here too. Its not the organic black gold you hope for, more like mining scraps and weedy mushroom compost. It was also the only thing that really cost us money to get going. $400 bucks worth, but hey, at least it was rubbish.

Healthy soil has a ph around 7. Nice and neutral (and yeah, if you’re planning to garden good news, you care about soil now) Ours was 8.5 to 9. That’s basically organic paint stripper. While I researched how to fix that, we sorted the soil into shapes and edged them with bricks, creating our new garden beds.

We were told by anyone we spoke to that it would take about a year to get the soil healthy. That didn’t mesh well with my need to do the thing now. So I set to work. I treated the soil with fast and slow release fertiliser, compost, and sugar cane mulch. I mixed them through in two batches, watering like heck hoping to leech the dodgy stuff, and release the good stuff ( we have a fairly good slope in our front yard, so fingers crossed).

I planted some seeds, fully expecting that they wouldn’t grow well or at all, but at least they might go some way to helping fix the soil. It felt better than doing nothing at least.

We had a bunch of dead seedlings to begin with, then if you can believe it, some stuff started to grow. And them more things started to grow. We had a garden.

All for under $500?

Yes really. The cardboard was free, the bricks were free, only the (stupid crappy) soil cost money. $398 on the dot. I spent a further $40 on fertiliser, $40 on compost, and $11 on seeds (initially). Grand total - $489.

Honestly, this was a LOT of work. Like a LOT. Lots of heavy lifting (bricks) lots of bending and shoving (moving dirt), TONS of research (soil improving), but now 9 months later, we have a fully functioning and productive garden, on track to provide 50% of our food this year. Talk about accomplishment.

As you may know, I have a chronic illness (EDS), and physical work is very hard for me. It’s also hard to sit by the sidelines and direct someone else to do it, in this case my husband. I tried to help as much as I could, which lead to a fair bit of injury. This would absolutely be a complication if you can’t do the physical work yourself, or bribe someone with Anzac cookies like I could. Any help you have to pay for will massively increase the set up costs, so I acknowledge my privilege here.

We have since added a rebar arch (free recycled material), some bush rock from our back yard, and hopefully soon we’ll have a fence around the garden, which will extend our potted area, and hopefully keep the neighbourhood cats out!

Whether you are owning or renting, on a property or an apartment, you CAN grow something (probably more than you realise!). Its crucial that we take some responsibiity for how we get our food, not just during pandemics, but to live sustainably, consciously, and hopefully cheaper!

Kerrie x