A lot of people, especially other PF bloggers, want to grow their own vegetables in part to offset the rising cost of store bought foods. This is a good idea - for a few dollars you get loads of seeds where at the grocery store you often get one edible item covered in wax for the same price. But if you don't have a good place to grow the seeds it can get expensive. Having a yard would be cheapest since you have space and dirt already available, while not having a yard requires creating a space for the plants, which often leads to buying things. We wanted to create a balcony garden while spending as little as possible.

First we went and bought seeds. This is a required expense (especially the first year) simply because you have no other way to start the garden. You can buy pre-grown seedlings but they are more expensive than just seeds. If you have the time to wait for the plants to grow to maturity buying just seeds can save you a lot, and potentially yield a larger crop.

Once you buy the seeds you need to put them somewhere to start growing. You can buy the Burpee Ultimate Seed Starting System, but that costs a fair amount of money. We looked at the small cups that came with these types of systems and brainstormed to see what we had around the house that was similar. At the end of the day we decided that old egg cartons and ice trays were perfect. We don't use ice and the trays were just sitting in the closet, while egg cartons are easy to save after eating the eggs. We did have to buy soil, and chose a slightly more expensive organic mix, but the total cost of dirt, and seeds weren't much. You can see what the planters looked like during the first phase of our garden.

When the plants started getting bigger and needed to be transplanted we looked at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Big Lots, for good containers. We didn't want anything fancy, just a plastic bucket to put dirt and plants. We did find some that looked promising, like the Ames Toscana Planter and some that fit over balcony railings, but they were more than we wanted to pay. Our initial budget was only a few dollars for all the containers, and these (although cheap) were a few dollars each.

So we thought about it for a while and (with a suggestion from Ry's Dad) implemented a solution that was free; we went to Wegman's and asked the bakery if they had any empty buckets left over from the icing. The baker was more than happy to give us the butter cream and fudge buckets that were going to be thrown out anyways, and she even washed them out for us. So we got five large storage containers at no cost. Sure, they didn't look as pretty as the Toscana Planter, but they served our purpose perfectly. The only adjustments needed were drainage holes on the bottom, which were easy to do. We also got some rocks from a local dirt pile (again free) to fill up the bottom of the buckets before adding the soil.

But we wanted to have more than just five large buckets, and again had a price dilemma. We needed smaller planters to maximize the growing capacity of the balcony, and didn't know where to find them. Again we went to the stores and looked around. In the garden section of Home Depot we discovered the second free solution; we asked if we could take the empty plastic containers used to house the seedlings they had for sale. They were going to be thrown out and the garden center was happy to hand them over. These containers already had drainage holes and were the perfect size for our smaller plants like the spinach. You can see some of the free planters in Phase 3. We tied some of the smaller ones to the top of the balcony with twine, and put the rest on a table or on the floor. They are easy to move and hold a lot of plants.

It would have been really easy to spend $100 and get nice ceramic planters designed for railings and balconies, but that would have eliminated any savings we would get from growing our own food. By looking around we were able to create a great container garden, only purchasing seeds and soil. In total I would say that we spent $25 or less on everything. So far we have eaten salads and veggies about 5 times, which is $5 a meal... and that cost will only continue to decrease as the harvest increases. We haven't even started eating half of what's growing.

The downside to growing your own garden is you have to wait a while for the fruits of your labor to be ready to eat, but it's a peaceful and fun hobby, and if you enjoy it (even if you don't end up saving hundreds of dollars) it's a worthwhile investment.