Inmate-Grown Vegetable Garden Trims $15G From Food Budget
You don’t need a jail full of inmates to grow a garden that will save your family hundreds of dollars every year.
Even a small garden spot can provide you with enough fresh vegetables to reduce you market vegetable cost by $15 or $20 dollars a week during the growing season. That can easily add up to 4 to 6 hundred dollars a year.
Unless your rich and simply want to grow funny looking vegetables with strange names Plant what your family will eat.
Don’t over plant anyone vegetable. Two or three squash, zucchini, tomato, sweet {Bell} and hot peppers plants and cucumber vines will keep your family well supplied every week. Plant a second crop three or four weeks after the first planting. A second planting will keep your family well supplied with fresh vegetables well into late fall or early winter.
Make it a family garden, encourage them (by force and threats if necessary) to go to your garden to help harvest vegetables and to control garden pest. Remove insects by hand or use an approved insecticide as needed. Check your garden daily, keep picking size vegetables harvested, store them in your refrigerator until needed or give them to some of your friends and neighbors.
Don’t skimp on buying quality garden seed. One package of seed will plant a very large garden! Don’t buy plants from your local nursery that are in bloom, or simply do not look healthy.
Limited on space? There’s no reason not to grow your family garden in containers. Successful container gardening demands that you pay extra attention to your containers. Containers dry out quickly in summers hot dry weather and may require that you water then early morning as well as late late afternoon. Containers also require that you fertilize them with a water soluble fertilizer about every two or three weeks.
Madisonville, Kentucky – A vegetable garden tended by inmates at the Hopkins County Jail helped trim the food budget at the facility by $15,000 this year. Hopkins County Jailer Joe Blue tells The Messenger of Madisonville that he started the program in 2006 with little planning. He said 2011 was a very good year.
The jail started a master gardener training program this year, graduating 10 inmates. Blue says the program helps give different kinds of job skills to inmates, many who are from the cities of Louisville or Lexington and don’t know anything about agriculture.
The Madisonville-Hopkins County Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday cited the savings as one of several reasons the jail received special recognition at the annual Farm-City Breakfast.
One local business donates fertilizer for the garden, and another provides seeds at reduced prices.
Why is common sense so uncommon?
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What a great article! So common sense! I had to tweet it out.
Reblogged this on inspiredweightloss.