Pick and mix

Keeping food costs down is a constant battle, but there are ways to make sure your family gets all the good things in life without it breaking the bank. EMMA GOODWIN looks to the backyard for some inspiration.

Buying locally and eating seasonal fruit and vegetables are statements that have been touted for several years in an effort to save the environment and cut carbon miles.

While that is admirable, charity begins at home, so if saving the environment isn't top of your priorities, saving money probably is.

So how about growing your own food?

Before you put this into the too-hard basket along with your shop-bought lettuces, cauliflowers and out-of-season strawberries, think how good it would be to pop out into the garden and bring in enough vegetables for the family meal.

You don't need the skills of Maggie Barry or the Kiwi quarter-acre to do it.

There has been a resurgence of people growing vegetables at home, with raised vegetable beds popping up all over the suburbs, taking spaces from where unwanted spa pools once sat.

Trade Me listings are overflowing with enough ready-made boxes to set up a market garden.

Most people have a bit of a garden and even if they don't, a small courtyard or balcony can give enough room to grow something, and it is surprising just how much.

A few packets of seeds, a little patience and time, and the rewards are not only tasty but financial, as long as you do things on the cheap.

Buying ready-made raised beds that just slot together might be convenient, but they can cost a small fortune, which puts paid to the "growing your own vegetables to save money" school of thought.

So make your own. It's not hard and can be a fraction of the cost of ready-made ones.

After buying timber, screws, black plastic to line the sides and weedmat to line the base from a large hardware store, a 1.2 metres x 2.4m x 0.3m vege box costs $45 to build.

Filling it with a mix of topsoil and compost costs another $44, so one large vege box comes in at less than $90, which is less than a ready-made box 1.2m x 1.2m square would cost. And you can grow twice as much.

Raised beds too expensive? Look at what you have already.

If you have lawn, which more often than not is a pain to mow, there could be a case for turning some of that into a vege patch. Less to mow and more to eat.

Dig some ground, line the edges with timber planks and decide what you want to grow.

Plastic recycling efforts boosted | ObserverXtra.com | Woolwich ...

The modern horticultural industry, much like the rest of our society, has been built on plastic. Every spring gardeners are reminded of this when they step back to admire their perennials or vegetable patch but are left with a wide assortment of plastic pots and trays. While planting flowers, trees, shrubs and vegetables helps to green the natural environment and make our communities a more enjoyable place to live, gardeners are invariably left with having to dispose of what amounts to millions of pounds of plastic waste annually.

While Halton Region has recently launched a pilot-project to study whether or not their recycling system can accept plastic pots and trays, most municipal recycling programs can’t or won’t accept these plastics, meaning most of them end up in landfill.

Landscape Ontario is trying to change that trend and from June 25 to July 4, more than 40 garden centres in six provinces joined together for the organizations 2011 National Plastic Recycling Event.

The program started back in 2008 as a pilot-project involving six garden centres in Ontario with the goal of diverting plastic waste from landfill and into the hands of recyclers.  It has grown considerably since then, and last year alone the program diverted 24 metric tons (53,000 pounds) of plastic.

During the pilot project, garden centres would travel to the Landscape Ontario offices in Milton to drop off their plastic to be recycled, but everyone involved quickly realized that wasn’t sustainable.

“With Landscape Ontario being the only recipient, well, what do the people in London, or Waterloo, or Ottawa or North Bay do? They can’t all drive down here,” said Lorrain Ivanoff of Landscape Ontario who started the project after seeing a similar project in St. Louis.

“This year I said we needed to get the garden centres and landscapers on board.”

The organization partnered with plastic recycling companies across Canada – Plastix Canada and Agricultural Plastic Recyclers in Ontario – to help facilitate the dropoff of plastics at local garden and landscaping centres by customers.

Plastix Ontario agreed to handle all of the waste collected in the GTA and the surrounding area, while Agricultural Plastic Recyclers agreed to cover the rest of the province. In total 25 garden centres across Ontario were involved in this year’s event.

In Waterloo Region, Waterloo Flowers in Breslau was the only garden centre that participated, and although it was their first year as a part of the project, the company has always taken an interest in ensuring their plastic waste gets recycled or reused in an environmentally sensitive way.

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