AMKuska's 2017 Garden

seedcorn

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Mowing is the most over rated and expensive thing we do..... I see people buying a $10,000+ mower, feeding and watering the lawn so they can mow. I can respect a well maintained yard but they are expensive just to look at. When kids were here, yard was rutted up from playing games, etc. Did not regret it a bit.
 

lcertuche

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Not to mention the environment using all those fossil fuels and polluting the air with lawn mower fumes. It would better to buy a couple of lambs a year to eat the grass and then come winter to butcher it.
 

AMKuska

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Mowing is the most over rated and expensive thing we do..... I see people buying a $10,000+ mower, feeding and watering the lawn so they can mow. I can respect a well maintained yard but they are expensive just to look at. When kids were here, yard was rutted up from playing games, etc. Did not regret it a bit.


And it just doesn't make sense. You could probably produce enough food to wipe out your food bill in the space it takes to grow the lawn. Just having the grass and not food is a 5kish loss right there, but we take it a step further. Half that 5k of food we buy every year we don't eat, and toss in the trash. We pay $30 a month or so to have someone else take the food away, compost it, and sell it back to us for $10 a bag. We pay in extra $10 a month to get a green waste barrel for the grass clippings on the patch of lawn we're not using to save 5k with, and again buy our same green waste clippings back in the form of fertilizer for the lawn.

Seriously. x.x we wonder why we're poor.
 

digitS'

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I have several close neighbors to the big veggie garden. None has more than about 5 or 7 but each has property of several acres.

The guy across the road sprays about 3 acres with herbicide, each and every year. I don't know, this has been going on for over 5 years - I try not to look in that direction and appreciate that I can't see it from the garden. Probably there are less than 2 weeks out of every year when there is even one green weed to be seen.

One neighbor grows alfalfa. One neighbor allows a few native bushes to grow but mows whatever comes up around them several time each year. Two neighbors have several horses. I can't see through the trees at one place but the other has essentially no grass for grazing, just some weeds. One neighbor waits until the heat of summer hits and there is little chance of much rain over the next several months, then he mows. We have had good grass growing weather and the grass in there is about 5' tall ! He took his riding lawn mower around the acreage a couple of times and quit. We will see if he is able to continue or what. It always, always looks a mess over there!

One neighbor has sheep. The field is "mowed" close to the ground but looks like it's providing a good part of their diet. He keeps it watered. The neighbor with alfalfa uses the water also. ALL the neighbors pay for water because of the power of the district to tax their property. They pay whether they use it or not. I believe that only one neighbor has a vegetable garden.

Steve
 

baymule

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At our old house, I would have put a garden bed smack dab in the middle of the front lawn, because it got the most sun.......but DH made ugly threats is I did......:gig
 

Nyboy

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Bay the front lawn was where my grandmothers tomato bed was ( got sun all day) Not only that but she would stake them with a collection of broom and mop handles and old hockey sticks anything was fair game
 

AMKuska

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Well the chickens managed to completely strip a potato plant, and it didn't look like it was going to make it. I decided to pull it up and see how the potatoes are coming along. I was surprised to see the one potato has produced more potatoes, and also that it would have made 4x what I harvested if it had just been given more time. Fixed the hole in the potato fence, so hopefully I'll see more when I pull them.
 

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