2024 Grow Food/Garden for Free Challenge

This is a spin off from the Garden Balance Sheet thread.   https://gardenandgossip.org/showthread.php?tid=2069
I've already said that I'm aiming not to buy any seeds this year and was mocked.   At the end of the year you'll see how strong my will power can be (or not). 

I'm sure most of us aim to be as frugal as possible in the garden so maybe we can share our tips and hints for economising in the garden. 
Apart from tools and structures, like GHs, most money is spent on seeds, plants, compost and feed.

Seeds we can save or swap. Seeds saving Guidance and Seed Swap events at https://gardenandgossip.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=57
Plants we can grow from cuttings or seed and grow, swap or sell. https://gardenandgossip.org/showthread.php?tid=478 https://gardenandgossip.org/showthread.p...t=cuttings
Compost we can make from all sorts of waste materials. https://gardenandgossip.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=75
Feed/fertiliser can also be made from a variety of ingredients. Apart from making comfrey tea and using the runoff from the Hotbin. I haven't explored this area much. I'll have a nosey around G&G for relevant threads. https://gardenandgossip.org/showthread.p...omfrey+tea

I’d like to think I was pretty frugal when it comes to the garden. I know I definitely need to up my game when it comes to compost and liquid feed.

I'm with you SC. Although I'm just tight. I make 'tea' to feed things but don't have the confidence that my tea has all the goodness of purchased liquid fertiliser or what my tomatoes need so end up using commercial stuff. I'm going to continue to make my own compost if I can source some reasonably priced coir. It narks me that last year's £1 (10 litre) blocks of coir are selling for £7 or more on ebay. As for seeds no promises not to buy any but always look for the best deal.

If you want to save money on fertiliser it's best to buy soluble powder, since ready made liquid is always going to be more expensive. I like the Bumper Crop line from Elixir Gardens (https://elixirgardensupplies.co.uk/produ...ubleferts/) and they also have free delivery to mainland UK.

They do just repackage Solufeed's product though, so it may be cheaper to buy direct from them - https://solufeedshop.com/solids-10-c.asp - and they also have free delivery. Of course it's much cheaper to buy a 20kg bag, which works out at ~£4 per kilo, but that much would last for decades at my usage rate and it's hard to keep it dry.

You can also get 2kg of soluble Phostrogen for just over £13 on Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phostrogen-All-...r=1-4&th=1), though the last time I bought it was in 2021 when it was on offer at £3.99!!!

The price of coir has exploded over the last few years, I just don't bother buying it anymore unless it's on offer. All of the bagged compost I plan to use this year was bought from Morrisons when they were £3 a bag. I'm probably done buying seeds until October when the sales start again.

I really like the look of the bumper crop ad the chilli feed.

Having a look at how much it actually mixes up to. I noticed someone has got there maths wrong! Or am I going mad ?

   

It seems a reasonable price to. Not put it in basket to see how much they’re going to sting me for delivery

Yeah that's wrong, it should be 5g/10L which makes 2000L. The standard rate is 1g/L, you can go down to 0.5g/L or up to a maximum of 2g/L depending on the growth rate of the plant.

5kg is where it starts to become more reasonably priced, for example 5kg of the tomato feed would cost £5.50 per kilo, whereas a 1kg bag costs £9.99. I would recommend getting the resealable bucket (if you don't already have a spare one) and then any refills can be in polythene bag. The fertiliser absorbs a lot of water from the air, and even in the house it's got wet in the bag, whereas the stuff in the bucket is still dry.

The tomato feed has a bit of a strange NPK ratio though: more phosphorous than nitrogen, and a really high amount of potassium. Most other tomato feeds in my notes only have twice the amount of potassium to nitrogen, whereas the bumper crop has almost 5x. For my tomatoes I've only ever used the high potash feed which has an NPK of 2-1-4.

I didn't spend a penny on fertilizer last year and won't be spending anything this year either. I am fortunate in having a large plot to garden in and have an area of comfrey which I harvest a few times as needed in the year. I stuff as much as I can fit into a 200L water butt. I used to then fill it with water and leave for a few weeks before using and used mainly in the greenhouse. Well during the lockdowns,  we bought an outdoor composting toilet for visitors to use when meeting outdoors. This has a urine diverter to collect the liquid separate from the solids and pretty well prevent smells. I started adding this to the comfrey instead of water as the 2 together are be very rich in all P,N and K. I then use this quite liberally for watering lots of veg. I put 2 to 4 inches in bottom of 10L watering can and top up with water and use for onions, tomatoes, peppers, carrots cabbage... For potatoes, I dig a shallow trench, line with garden compost from a 2 year old heap and water well with the mix before planting and filling in the trench.

When you think about it there are about 8 billion people alive now and it isn't possible for everyone to use fresh drinking water to flush toilets with. It is a great waste of natural resources. People are quite happy using animal waste products even valuing it. May be more people should consider using 'liquid gold'. I have mentioned this before.

I agree, Mark. Its a criminal waste to purify water then flush it down the toilet. When I was renovating the little cottage down west I had it set up to catch rainwater from the roof into a tank which was diverted to flush the toilets. Wish I could do that here.
I didn't buy any fertiliser last year either. I watered all the GH plants with the liquid runoff from the Hot Bin. I have lots of it bottled up ready for this year.

Well said Mark.

Robert Milne in 'Organic Vegetable Growing' quotes Shirley Hibbard:

"If a given quantity of land sown without manure yields 3 times the seed employed, then the same quantity of land will produce 5 times tge quantity sown when manured with old herbage, putrid grass or leaves, garden stuff etc. 7 times with cow dung, 9 times with pigeon dung, 10 times with horse dung, 12 times with human urine, 12 times with goat dung, 12 times with sheep dung and 14 times with human manure or bullocks' blood."

Shirley was a popular gardening writer in Victorian times, a latter day Bob Flowerdew may be. He wrote of Amateur Gardening all those years ago.

Robert Milne.recommends using urine throughout his book which is also written with school gardens in mind. I thought that adding comfrey would be a good idea and the combination doesn't have too much of an odour. There is a bit of a whiff but it is gone in a very short time.