Some 43 million U.S. households are expected to try their hand at food gardening this year — including the Obama family — and 21 percent will be newcomers looking to green their thumbs for the first time, according to the National Gardening Association.
The association says the average 600-square-foot garden costs $70 to plant, and produces about 300 pounds of fresh produce worth $600. That’s a $530 return on your investment.
Here is a little video that I created last week. I am hoping that this will become a regular feature now that I have a video camera and my garden is becoming more user friendly.
Well the statistics are in for the month of June, and Blue Ridge Gardener has set some new records…
Number of visits to the site- 3550 visits (up from 3381 last month, the previous record)
Number of pages viewed- 23, 591 (up from 20, 753 last month, the previous record)
Number of hits- 32,313 (up from 27,032 last month, the previous record)
We were featured on Alltop.com several times during the month in their standared sidebar listing, and we continue to get lots of referrals from Google for various garden related searches.
Though about 70% of the visits are short (30 seconds or less), there are enough longer visits that the average visit to the site is 12 minutes (up from 10.6 minutes last month)–That means of the 3550 visits to the site, the servers have recorded 42,600 minutes of use. That’s a bunch.
One of the most obvious and critical first steps toward community resilience (in tandem with ruthless debt reduction) is to start a garden. This provides you with:
Fresh, low cost, and high quality food during the growing season.
The skills and the head start needed to deal with systemic breakdowns in the agricultural supply chain or rapid price inflation of foodstuffs.
Income potential/community connection through your local farmer’s market.
What would be interesting is to do an ROI calculation on this method. Essentially, compare the investments in time/money etc. vs. the output (and the equivalent cost in food from grocery stores). Given the ease of installation, almost zero reliance on tools, and low mx requirements.. I suspect it would do very well. This method also looks fairly interesting for lawn gardening entrepreneurs (as in, everyone currently selling lawn mowing services should also be offering low cost garden services).
