Letz Eat: Growing beans without the means

Growing up my childhood was filled with wonderful garden memories. We have always had a garden as long as I can remember. We had loads and loads of vegetables. We always joked that my dad planted enough stuff we could feed several counties. LOL Speed up to adult years :-) We live in an apartment with a tight budget. We had started out by taking a piece of land that our land lord had given us permission to use. Well as the leaves grew in we realized that this spot was shade 24/7. We decided we really couldn't use this piece of ground. We were kind of disappointed since we spent a lot of time digging and turning up the soil by hand. We had gotten sea weed and everything getting the soil ready. But nope couldn't use it....So J and I put our heads together. We had only 30 dollars we could spend total on this garden. That included everything.

We had thought about a kiddie pool but that was going to be a lil expensive and not easy to keep out of the way. Then we came up with the idea of Totes(or plastic bins)...This was going to be an easy idea. But as we began to look at totes they were going for 7 dollars a tote. We needed at least 4 of them.. We then called Js mom and she said she had totes we could use. SCORE!!! We had one large one and 3 smaller ones. This was going to be great.

So we drilled holes in them to get good drainage. Took those home, then went shopping for plants. We had grew some peas from seed but nothing else. I really didn't want to get plants from Kmart as there plants were for one expensive. 1 lil plant for almost 2 dollars. That wasn't going to work and they did not look good.. So we checked out some green houses. We went to two of them and got:

6 pack of cucumbers
6 pack of zucchini
6 pack of summer squash
6 pack of larger tomatoes
6pack of grape tomatoes
1 strawberry plant
1 orange pepper plant
6 pack of green peppers
2 Green bean plants
6 pack of basil
Total for all this: $20 dollars

Remember we had a spending limit of 30 dollars :-) We were impressed with ourselves. So when we got home with the plants, we began filling our totes with dirt. J dug and I dumped the dirt in the totes. It worked awesome for us. J told me that he is glad he found a farm girl :-) I don't mind getting dirty if I have too. LOL We finally got ALL our totes filled with dirt, then we took off to get our girls from their grandparents. We really wanted our girls involved in the planting of the vegetables. Get home and planted veggies with a 3 year old and a 2 year old. They helped some and then ran off to play. LOL

We planted all the vegetables in their totes. Then we decided since we had some extra plants we'd try to see if they'd grow in our shade garden.

We planted 2 of everything in each of the totes :-) So now we have a totes garden :-) I'm excited to see what the future holds. Stay tuned for more pictures and updated on how this is working out for us.