"I don't keep a vegetable garden
Flaming fireworks, comrades summer residents! Today on the agenda is how the attitude towards your garden and the material benefit from it has changed. The other day, my friend Alexei clearly voiced his position: “I don’t keep a vegetable garden anymore - it’s expensive. It used to be the land that fed, but now it's easier and cheaper to buy in a store. "
Garden-breadwinner
I remember that my family was always in the garden. Even an elderly grandmother, despite the protests of children, spent the afternoon steadily among the beds and bushes. We did not have a greenhouse, but cucumbers, potatoes, cabbage, zucchini, root vegetables, berries always grew. And dill. You know, such a self-seeding dill that sprouts independently every year somewhere between the rows of strawberries and among potatoes. Gentleman's set!
Sometimes they planted something "exotic" by our standards, like beans and cauliflower. Exotic - because it was not an essential product. And I wanted to diversify the potato and cabbage plantings.
What petunia? What are the annuals from seedlings? There was still not enough time and space to waste.
I scattered calendula seeds - here you are, orange islands, and you don't need any fertilizers. I stuck plump nasturtium seeds into an old, leaky pan and put them on a stump (for some reason everyone used to have stumps in their gardens) - here's a blooming cascade all summer long. These are not modern Tidly-Waves petunias, over which you have to shake since February. Online ordering of professional seeds from American breeders? Have these breeders seen the seeds of marigolds collected in the fall or exchanged from a neighbor?
Such a vegetable garden really fed. Especially in the 90s, when sometimes there was nothing to pay for the communal apartment. "There are potatoes - we will live!" The main diet consisted of food collected from their own garden. And the goodies were: what is one "Royal jam" from green gooseberries, which only my grandmother knew how to cook correctly (TsN!).
The vegetable garden is an object of luxury
Today people have changed their attitude to the garden. Why? I do not know. Maybe because it has ceased to be the main source of nutrition. Probably, in distant villages where there is no work, they continue to grow from what they have. But for the majority of citizens, their economy has become a funnel, where energy, time and money are poured.
One installation of even a cheap polycarbonate greenhouse, at best, will pay off with a harvest of one season. If the garden needs to be plowed, for liquid currency, as before, no one will do this.
The advent of the Internet convinced everyone that if you do not apply nitrogen fertilizers in the spring and potash fertilizers in the fall, then nothing will grow. Summer residents buy means "For strawberries", "For cherries", "For tomatoes"... For-for-for. Hmm, and earlier fertilizers were limited to the contents of the bucket, collected in the field with grazing cows. And it grew, after all, his mother!
Add to this the cost of planting material, soil for seedlings, all kinds of stimulants growth, remedies for diseases and pests, an endless series of all sorts of bells and whistles like baskets for tulips.
Alexei: “More money is spent on a vegetable garden than buying vegetables. I take potatoes in bags in the fall and all this fuss with hilling, watering and weeding is not needed. It takes a lot of time for the garden - it is more profitable to take an additional shift at the plant. "
What do you think?