My wife and I started composted this year and one thing we learned was that ants love our compost. We keep an old 3 lb. coffee can (the same Folgers can in this post) with kitchen compost waste and ants seem to love the chopped up fruits we toss inside. We fill up that can and then empty it about every other week. It really reduces the amount of trash we discard and it will make for some good fuel for our garden next year. But, it’s also a nice little buffet for ants.

The Traditional Advice

The traditional advice is to use ant traps and keep a cleaner kitchen. Talk to anyone who has actually had an ant problem and cleanliness, while important, isn’t the final solution. As clean as you get it, ants will find something they enjoy in your kitchen. It could be a speck of something that fell between the range and the counter and they’ll make it back there to get it. Cleanliness is important but it’s not the solution.

Ant traps themselves are often relatively effective but I don’t like the idea of using poisons. While we don’t have a dog, we learned that dogs love chewing on ant traps when we were watching my in-law’s pair of Scottish Terriers. Fortunately we only saw one going for the trap, he didn’t chew through anything so that was good. They’re also fun little toys for children, since they’re octagonal in shape and black so they look like toys, and while we don’t have kids and most visitors don’t, we’d still like a solution that’s safe for people.

Finally, the traps do lose their effectiveness after a while. Maybe our ants are smarter than most because I think I hear them laugh as they run around them, flicking me off as they go on their merry way. My response was to crack open the traps and mix in some Nutella (I didn’t have peanut butter at the time) and that seemed to work last year, but I would rather eat Nutella than bait a trap with it. So I went out on the internet to find a better solution.

The Best Way To Get Rid of Ants

To my surprise, I found my good friend Nickel writing about how to get rid of ants. His solution was to mix boric acid powder and table sugar 50-50 in with some water to make a slurry. Then put that slurry in the path of the ants and watch them eat it up. Eventually they take this awesome sweet boric acid concoction back to their evil dungeon lair, share it with friends, and then take a nice long nap. Boric acid is toxic to ants but safe, in low quantities, for people and pets.

I have to admit I was apprehensive when I tried it but I saw Nickel’s advice replicated on a number of sites (Wikipedia has lots of uses for boric acid, though they recommend a more diluted mixture to be used in cotton balls) so I gave it a shot.

To date, we haven’t had an ant problem in out kitchen and we’ve been happily composting away!

(Photo: squinza)

The Great Garden Harvest has thus far yielded:

• 1.9 oz. Roma Tomatoes
• 1.4 oz. Green Bell Peppers
• 3.9 oz. Patio Tomatoes

How much is that worth? I didn’t do the math but probably less than a few dollars. The bulk of the tomatoes, as you’ll see in the video, has yet to come but there are a lot of beef steaks and eggplants hanging from the branches. Mmmmm!

Before you see the video, here’s a shot of all the veggies as we potted them:

Without further ado (RSS readers will have to click through to see the video):

You can leave comments directly on the video by clicking on the timeline and then the green plus sign.

I recently bought a Flip Mino and have been playing around with it, hence this video. The video is only a few minutes long and I might ramble a little. I took two videos and nixed the first because I got motion sick watching it and I don’t usually get motion sick. So, what you get is the second, slightly better take. If you have any tips on video (or gardens), please let me know as I’m a total n00b.

Earlier this year, my wife and I started our second annual garden project, after taking one year off, by planting several eggplant plants, tomato plants, and pepper plants in pots on our back deck. So far the project has been quite successful and many thanks to those who have been writing in with their suggestions and ideas. I never had a garden growing up, my wife never had a significant planter garden (growing plants in pots rather than in the ground), and we didn’t have a good idea whether a garden would even succeed on our deck. We failed to remember or record what happened two years ago but I am certain we didn’t plant as many vegetables as we did this year.

So far, the garden project has been a success and one we will definitely continue next year. By writing about it, I also get to record all the things we’ve learned and re-read everything later (along with the valuable comments!). So, if you’re considering starting a planter garden of your own, let me give you five good reasons why you should give it a try.

Be Self-Sustainable

We decided to go all out on our garden this year because we spent our honeymoon in Hawaii. How is that related? Fruits grow like crazy in Hawaii, something about the volcanic enriched soil and the gorgeous weather I suppose, but residents have all types of fruit trees and plants on their property. We stayed at a couple of bed & breakfast type places and at least half of the morning fruits were picked from the trees and plants in the yard. We had bananas, papaya, pineapple, and even some fruits I had never heard of before (and everyone owns chickens there too!).

The thought of being self-sustainable was very appealing. Why go to the store and buy something when I can grow something to eat? I really enjoyed “living off the land” while in Hawaii and this was a small reminder of that.

It’s Therapeutic

One of my friends recently asked me if tending a garden took a lot of time. If it does, I don’t see it as a chore. Every night I water the plants, making sure the little guys get enough to drink, and every few days I check on the plants themselves to make sure they’re still happy. Sometimes I pinch off a few leaves or retie a tie, but it’s a welcomed diversion from the daily activities.

Remember bonsai trees? Those were all the rage once and the appeal of tending a bonsai tree was the therapeutic benefits of trimming a little tree. (I still remember the Saved by the Bell clip showing Mr. Belding killing his tree!) Taking care of your garden is very much like that. You take a few minutes to check up on your plants, pinching off leaves, cutting off fruit, and letting your mind take a little break.

Sense of Accomplishment

Tending a plant so that it bears fruit is never easy and is always a learning experience. We had a little problem with bottom rot on some of our Roma tomatoes a few days back, I asked a few friends and many of them came back with great information. We, mostly our friends, concluded that the tomatoes were deficient in calcium but we couldn’t fix it because we couldn’t find a vendor, within reasonable distance, that carried the supplement. We also concluded that we simply packed too many tomatoes into one pot (3 in one instance) and they were starving each other out (unfortunately there isn’t much we can do about it).

But, the beefsteak tomatoes and the other Romas, in their own pots, are all growing nicely right now. The eggplants and orange peppers are also growing very well. Watching them get bigger and bigger really gives us a sense of pride, that we were able to grow it, and will probably increase our enjoyment of the bounty. Anyone can go to the store and buy eggplant, not everyone can grow it themselves!

It’s Safe

First it was spinach, then it was scallions, then it was tomatoes, (and now jalapeños!)… seems like there are outbreaks of salmonella or other bacteria every few months because of the industrial/commercial fertilizing techniques of major companies. When you grow it in your backyard and can control the process, you it’s very unlikely that you’ll introduce salmonella or other harmful bacteria. While growing every piece of fruit or vegetable you’ll eat isn’t going to be possible for most people, growing as much as can certainly can’t hurt!

It’s Cheaper!

It wouldn’t be a personal finance blog if I didn’t talk about money right? Sense of accomplishment, sustainability, and safety are all great reasons but the bottom line is the bottom line. In our economic times, a big reason for growing your own garden is for the cost savings. In our garden, we spent approximately $30 on plants and will easily pay for it in terms of vegetables grown. While we will track the yield and the cost savings, I’m confident saying that we will clear that and likely clear the cost of the dirt and extra planters as well.

Why is it cheaper? It costs more time. You’ll have to spend time potting your plants, watering them, taking care of them, and then harvesting the vegetables. It’s a significant number of hours, especially on the front end when you’re potting, but definitely worth it. While it’s faster to drive to the grocery store and pick up what you need, growing it yourself is a lot more fun.

Try it!

(Photo: socfool)

Yeah… seriously, that’s the first fruit we’ve harvested so far this week. Half an ounce of a Roma Tomato, half of which we had to cut off because of bottom rot, is worth approximately… wait for it… 4.65 cents. Since the number was so small, I decided to go to the hundredths digit. We don’t have Roma tomatoes on sale here, from my my pricing notes, so I used the $1.49/lb. price for ripe on the vine tomatoes to reach that haul value, I recognize the two types don’t cost the same but given the small amount I think the approximation is fair.

Total Spent: $98.20 (not counting time or water)
Total Earned: $0.0465
Total ROI: 0.047% (beats the stock market!)

We didn’t take a picture of the poor little guy because we didn’t want to embarrass him (or her) but he (or she) did make a nice little addition to my wife’s salad.

Actually, we have several nice and plump eggplants and several beefsteak tomatoes nearing plucking stages so we do have something to look forward to (we’ve also gotten a lot of spices but that’s impossible to weigh on the postage scale). I think in the next week or so we’ll have our first real haul of note so we’re both pretty excited about it.

Mmmmm sustainability FTW!

For all the posts, check out the 2008 BFP Garden Project chronicles!

Thank you to everyone who commented on the last two garden posts ($29 kickoff and $60 worth of planters), it was based on those comments that we decided to buy some more “planters” (you’ll see why I use the quotes later) and move some tomato plants.

The recommendation was that each tomato have about five gallons of dirt to play in. Our solution was to buy five gallon buckets (we could’ve gone to restaurants and asked) from Home Depot and move some tomatoes out of the party buckets they were in. So, the huge planters now have at most three tomatoes and two five gallon buckets have one tomato each. We’ll be giving the odd tomato out to my parents.

Trip damage: $8 (lost the receipt, it’s something liek that)
Running total: $98.20

Our plants are growing pretty well with nothing too tragic yet. We’ve been having some wet days recently so the little guys are getting plenty to drink, plenty of sun, and things are progressing nicely.

MSN had an article recently about the best plants to grow yourself. They were fruit trees, lettuce, herbs, vine vegetables, and bell peppers. We are growing a few herbs, some eggplants, and bell peppers (orange and green) so three out of five ain’t bad (fruit is out of the question here). I wish we could grow fruit trees. In Hawaii, everyone had fruit trees (and chickens!). So every morning at the bed & breakfasts we would have tons of fresh fruit (that’s not even that much of an exaggeration).

The five plants you should skip: Potatoes, carrots, celery, asparagus and wheat. There’s no chance we would’ve grown any of those.

This weekend we took our potentially financially viable crop and turned it into a 100% guaranteed financial loss (but no worries, we’re building for the future!). As it turns out, tomatoes need about a quarter of my body weight in dirt to grow to their full potential and we weren’t even close to having that much space for them with the existing planters we had. We knew that tomatoes grew best in the ground but we didn’t have anywhere in the ground to put them that actually got any sun, so planters were our only other option. We clearly did not have enough planters for them so we visited the local Home Depot to pick up planters and some more potting soil.

Trip damage cost: $61.20
Total cost: $90.20 ($29 spent on the kickoff of the BFP Garden Project)

We bought three big pots (two 20″ wide and one 16″ wide) for some of the tomatoes and the eggplant, plus six cubic feet of potting soil. It turns out we got potting soil that was really nutrient rich and had to be mixed in with existing ground soil (it was the type of stuff that had lot of compost in it), so we really only used about 5/6ths of the $23.31 of potting soil we purchased, but now we’re splitting hairs.

As you can see in the above, we packed in 4 and then 5 tomato plants in each of the bigger planters and then stuck a tomato with an eggplant in the smaller 16″ planter. We’ll see how the packed in party goes… we didn’t have any other place for the tomatoes so we did the best with the space we have.

I considered doing the proper corporate accounting method of amortizing the pots to make the financials work a little better but what’s the schedule for plastic planter pots? Five years? Seven years? Thirty?

Anyway, it’s possible that our $90 investment can yield, in its first year, $90 worth of vegetables but who knows. We’ll keep our eyes on the little guys and you never know!

Anyone have any more gardening advice? Both of us aren’t experienced in the ways of the green so any and all advice is appreciated!

My wife and are planning on putting together a small little garden of potted plants that have had success with in the past. Our deck doesn’t get a tremendous amount of sun because of enormous trees behind our property but it gets enough that we’ve had pretty good success growing tomato and peppers in the past. This year, we’ve decided to give the garden project another go and document our progress.

This past weekend, we visited our local farmers market and picked up $29 worth of plants and potting soil and anticipate that will be the extent of our expenses besides water. Due to prior garden projects, we have a sufficient number of planters as well as some fertilizer, so we should be set in those departments.

For $29 we were able to pick up:

• Cayenne Pepper (2)
• Eggplant (2)
• Thai Basil (1)
• Hot Pepper - Kung Poa (1)
• Sweet Basil (1)
• Orange Bell Pepper (2)
• Patio Tomato (1)
• Oregano (1)
• Super Steak Tomato (6)
• Green Sweet Bell Pepper (6)
• Roma Tomato (6)
• 40 lbs. Country Boy Potting Soil

As they grow, we’ll compare them to the grocery store prices and see if the whole garden process is “worth it.” My hypothesis is that the financials will come close and the real value is in being able to say you’re somewhat self-sustainable (and gardening is fun!).

Right now, tomatoes on the vine are going at $2.79 a pound, orange bell peppers were $2+ a pound (by far the most expensive of the bell peppers), and green bell peppers were under $2 a pound. While I don’t see us getting ten pounds of tomatoes, they’re certainly the most valuable of the vegetables we purchased.