How to cut your food budget spending, eat healthier and find peace ...

Growing up in rural Jamaica, I was forced to do the hard work associated with subsistence farming. Yup growing up with grandparents and extended family without mom or dad is challenging but enlightening; you learn to depend on yourself.
So learning at an early age how to grow crops because it meant you could eat, feed others and send yourself to school was a lesson learned early.
I was never full acclimated to using the machete to clear the land, but I believe I could hold my own on the fork, used to till the soil.
I took agri-science in high school, so I learned early on that cash crops were the way to go while my granddad, uncles, and many elders toiled planting mounds of yam that produced no significant return on investment.
Thanks to messers Campbell and Bascoe, my agriscience teachers, cabbage, peppers, and pumpkins were my thing. Those crops required little labor and turned a better return on investment.
I had figured out a way to finance my way through high school.

Today, I am no longer forced to plant crops out of necessity. I crave planting small vegetable gardens because it gives me great joy to watch the small saplings I plant mature into plants that produce food that people actually eat and enjoy.
Even though I am well aware I have nothing to do with their growth, I sometimes bask in the unearned glory of their growth; I tell myself, “yea, I did that.”
For the record, no, I did not do that; God did.
Anyway, enough about me, if you have land around your house, one of the ways to cut your food spending, improve your eating, and get some peace and joy is to grow a vegetable garden.
Even living in a high-rise apartment complex, you can grow a few vegetables in pots on your patio. For Jamaicans like myself, we all know we can grow veggies in old tires and all kinds of containers. The trick is to fertilize them, use good topsoil, and, where necessary, give plants lots of water.

Seeing my struggles, my wife decided to help a brother out. She got me a greenhouse for fathers day, which my son and I erected on Father’s day. I placed some plants inside to see what they would look like…

In the image above is a lean-to I cobbled together at the side of my house. I have more than enough space to grow vegetables, but I also have more wild animals willing to rob me blind. So lean-to it is. Now truthfully, there are costs associated with securing the meshing for protection, seedlings, fertilizer, and other costs.
This can get expensive and, admittedly, eat away at the rationality within the cost-benefit thinking. Nevertheless, not everyone will have the woods and an open yard, so that may not be a problem for everyone.
The upside for me is that that small space produced more callaloo than my family needed so that we could give some to others.

The jury is still out on how much I will produce this go around, and yes, I lost some lettuce, cabbage, and broccoli seedlings that may have been exposed to too much heat. Still, I replanted and gave them exponentially more water, and the image above tells a better story.
Seeds and seedlings can be a little pricey, but if you tackle this project with one or more of your neighbors, each one planting something different, this may not only be fun but a worthwhile experience, not to mention that you get to say “I did that.”
Callaloo and tomatoes are the gifts that keep on giving; callaloo produces seedlings each spring in large quantities, allowing owners to gift seedlings to others willing to grow their own vegetable gardens.
Tomatoes will produce seedlings next spring, but only if some tomatoes are allowed to ripen on the vine and are left there.

Depending on where you live, community organizations may give free seedlings to those who desire them; this reduces cost and gives gardeners an opportunity to grow a wider variety of vegetables at a lower cost to themselves.