Grow and Save!

Freshly picked melongene from our back yard

All the talk these days is about eating healthy and adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet. We are therefore propelled to purchase them, but bottom line is "they are not cheap". Long time when you went with your mother to Central or Tunapuna market, you came home with two or more large bags full of fresh produce. Nowadays you come home with one small bag and over $200 spent with some added pesticides thrown in.With the need to stretch the dollar to include healthier food options a good way to do this is to GROW YOUR OWN.
What started out as a school project for my daughter came home from school with two straggly plants - a lettuce and a cabbage which we were sure would not survive a week. To our surprise they grew so big we had to transplant them from their small pots on the window sill to a trough on our deck out back. This class project inspired us to start growing our own vegetables. Space was an issue as we live in a townhouse, so we looked to find ways to maximize our small space. We did some research and started growing our vegetables in buckets (pigtail buckets to be exact), pots and troughs. We bought $5.00 seedlings in Aranguez Nursery, some packets of seeds and potting soil and the rest is history.

On our small deck we have managed to grow ochroes (by far the easiest to grow), tomatoes, sweet peppers, patchoi, melongene, herbs and different types of lettuce. This has saved us quite a bit of money and time. There is a sense of great satisfaction from growing your own produce without pesticides. You can easily grow chives - simply put the buds in water and it will shoot out roots which you can then put onto a pot.  Try growing something today. 

Melongene plant in a pigtail bucket

Hint: To treat for blight and insect without the use of pesticides, try a mixture of Sal Suds and Neem for a natural and safe pest control. Trust me it works. 

Here's the mixture:
Dr Bronners Sal Suds-2 Tblspoons + Neem Oil-2 Tblspoons + 1 gallon water spray on plants