The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

First ever CVG giveaway “ Free one year subscription to GrowVeg.com

15.5 years ago computer, free, garden planning, giveaway 57 Comments

GrowVeg.com has graciously offered us a free one year subscription to their site ($25 value) to give away.  To enter simply enter a comment to this post and a name will be randomly selected using some sort of complicated means.

We will pick a winner in a few weeks but if you can’t wait to get started planning your garden go ahead and sign up for the free 30 day trial and if you are lucky you can continue using it for free.  Good luck.

UPDATE: Just for some shameless self promotion, if you mention this contest on your site you are free to add a second comment to double your chances to win.

UPDATE #2: Drawing will be on 03/31/09, so if you have not entered time is running out.

Win a Free one year Subscription GrowVeg.com

13.6 years ago computer, free, garden planning, giveaway 40 Comments

GrowVeg.com has graciously offered us a free one year subscription to their site ($25 value) to give away.

If you haven’t heard of GrowVeg it is an online program that allows you to plan you season of gardening and provides you reminders when you should start seeds and move transplants outside.  You can check out my first review and my more recent review for some more specific details of this years new feature enhancements..

There are multiple ways to enter:

• 1. Add a comment to this post
• 2. Like CheapVegetableGardener on Facebook (add an additional comment to the post)
• 3. Mention this giveaway on your site/Twitter (add an additional comment to the post)

We will pick a winner on 02/12/11 but if you can’t wait to get started planning your garden go ahead and sign up for the free 30 day trial and if you are lucky you can continue using it for free.  Good luck.

Gard’n Gro Garden Filter review and giveaway

14 years ago giveaway, water 25 Comments

As I have mentioned on my post on watering, I like to dechlorinate my water by filling 5 gallon buckets with water and letting them sit overnight.  Though this year I always seemed to not have enough time (or foresight) to be diligent about this and ended up just dragging the hose out and watering the plants chlorine at all.

Fortunately our friends at AllFilters have a solution to this problem with the Gard’n Grow Garden Filter, by simply adding this small inline filter it can remove at least 85% of the chlorine in your water without needing to prefill or carry around heavy buckets.

After opening the package the installation process was a piece of cake.  You simply attach one end of the hose to your outdoor faucet and the other end to the filter.  Attach your garden hose to the other end of the filter and turn on the water.

Now to test this thing out, unfortunately I don’t have any equipment to test for chlorine, but given I am under city water I can smell the chlorine pretty easily.  So for my first test I went with the very scientific smell test and confirmed a huge difference between using the Gard’n Grow Garden Filter.

To try to redeem myself a little more, given I had two cups of water I was sniffing anyway, I put my TDS meter (which for non hydroponic readers measures the total dissolved solids in the water) and though this does not measure chlorine specifically it does pick up various salts in the water.  Actually to my surprise there was a significant difference between the filtered water and the water straight out of the tap, given this benefit was not mentioned in the Gard’n Grow’s literature.  With the tap water the reading was 38ppm and the filtered water 33ppm.

Tap Water                                                        Filtered Water

Last the instructions mentioned that you may have a slight reduction in pressure after installing the filter.  Now this is definitely expected, but I needed to confirm how “slight” we are talking here.  For this I did the 5 gallon fill test.  For the unfiltered test I was able to fill the bucket in 71.6 seconds or 4.18 GPM and the filtered test finished in 79.9 seconds or 3.76 GPM.  Though this is a reduction of volume of about 10%, given my small garden I don’t think I would notice the extra 8.3 seconds I would spend watering.

Overall I was very impressed with this filter and am looking forward to using it to fill my reservoirs for my hydroponic experiments this winter and my garden next spring/summer.

AllFilters has graciously offered to sponsor a giveaway for one of these filters, so as in our other giveaways just leave a comment and a winner will be picked at random on 9/20/2010 Midnight Pacific Time.  If you haven’t already became a fan of CheapVegetableGardener.com on Facebook add us and you can enter an additional comment for a second chance to win.

Make your own seed packets (packet templates)

15.1 years ago seed saving, seed storing 14 Comments

Last year I did origami seed packets last year which worked out pretty good though I only got two per sheet of paper and didn’t hold too many seeds (especially large seeds like peas) with the many types of seeds I am collecting this year I decided to try another option.

I looked online and found many templates, though I couldn’t find any with standard seed package sizes.  Eventually I gave up and created my own and thought I would share.

Basic idea is pretty simple, just print them out and glue the flaps on the inside.  I used a plain old grade school glue stick which worked out great.  Not only does this work great for new seeds collected, but I also used them to reduce much of the space my large seed packets were taking for a small number of very small seeds.

Cheap Vegetable Seeds

15.7 years ago cheap, coupon codes, free, seed saving, seeds 22 Comments

Looking at my web logs I have seen the query for “cheap vegetable seeds” a few times so figured would be good to help people find what they are looking for. Being The Cheap Vegetable Gardener, I can do better than “Cheap vegetable seeds” how about some “free vegetable seeds” as well.

Cheap Vegetable Seeds

• Buy online — You can find a much greater selection and some great prices compared to your local home and garden center. For example right now:
  • One of my favorites is Burpee Seeds, they have been around since 1876 and definitely know their stuff. The actually have a seed sale going on now where you get $15 off on order of $75 (just use code AFFB4A35) expires on 1/15.
  • The name is not too exciting but Generic Seeds offers no thrills packaging with quality seeds and very reasonable prices and if you spend $20 or more shipping is on them.

Free Vegetable Seeds (pretty much)

• Ask your neighbors — Notice your neighbor is a gardener, check if they want to go in on a seed order and share unless you really need 200 carrots this year.
• Harvest your own seeds — If your plants bolt to seed early this year, don’t pull them out let them create some seeds for next season. Notice your neighbor has some seeding plants, ask if you can get some (important part is to ask though)
• Get seeds from the grocery store — Before putting those vegetables in the compost bin, set the seeds aside to let them dry and you got some free seeds. Though a word of warning many vegetables are hybrids and may be infertile or not produce the same quality of product but hey its free.
• Check your spice rack — Many cases you can plant seeds from your spice rack. Some ideas, mustard seed, dill seed, coriander, poppy seed, celery seed. If your spice rack is lacking you can pay a few cents buy a teaspoon of organic spices in bulk, last time I bought dill seeds got about 100 seeds for $0.05.
• Seed swap web sites — Below I have listed a few links where you can share seeds with others. This is a great way to find some heirloom seeds you might not be able to find in stores/seed catalogs. In many cases people will offer seeds for free by just sending a SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope) Just remember to pay it forward when you come into a plethora of seeds yourself.
  • http://www.almanac.com/forums/seed-swap
  • http://wwwsrc.thriftyfun.com/boards/seeds.lasso
  • http://www.garden.org/seedswap/
  • http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/exseed/

Free Gardening Books

11.7 years ago book, free, vegetables 2 Comments

The great thing about home gardening is that people have been doing it for thousands of years and even better writing about for at least the last few hundred.  Fortunately this provides us with a great amount of knowledge of from many generations back.

What’s even better many of these get gems are under the public domain so they are completely free gardening books to have as a resource to read online and is even available in EBOOK format to take with on your favorite.  To check out these great books yourself check out Google Books with the public domain filter enabled.

Currently I am checking out “The home vegetable garden” by W. R. Beattie in printed in 1906. Sure it doesn’t have a real catching marketing title but provides some great tips and makes use of low cost solutions to the same problems we come across today.  One of my favorite finds was this handy Planting table:

Click on image to enlarge

Update: Max mentioned in the comments of another great resource your local Cooperative Extension Service just go to Bing.com and type “Cooperative Extension Service” and then your zip code to find your local office and get some great local info.

So check these out and let me know what treasures you find in the comments.