Six Groceries You'll Never Have to Buy Again Once You Listen to This

If you've heard much talk about the garden, you know that everybody says you can replace your grocery store with your garden. Well, it's harder to do than you think. But today I'm going to teach you six things you can stop buying from the grocery store forever once you start a garden. So if you're interested in replacing your grocery store bill with some good stuff you grew in your own garden, you're gonna love this episode. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self Podcast. My name is Nicole Burke. I started Gardenary in 2017 in order to make gardening ordinary for everybody, including you. So thanks so much for being here for listening and for spreading the word that gardening is for all of us and we can do it in just five minutes a day. Today I want to show you six things you can start growing right now in order to replace your groceries for good. Now, we're not talking about homesteading, we're not talking about self sufficiency, living off the grid, hunting squirrels for protein, not talking about any of that kind of stuff. We're just talking about some simple things you can grow in a very small space and you can never buy from the grocery again because you grew it yourself. And you've got plenty to have to enjoy right now and to enjoy later in the year as well. So these are going to be from a few different plant families, but you are going to see some trends. So let's start off with one of the easiest things to grow and definitely one that you can replace from the grocery. And that would be chives. Chives are like, they are the, they're like the easiest, easiest thing to grow in the garden. They're so forgiving. I mean, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but chives, like grow, volunteer in gardens. I walk around my neighborhood and we have a couple of neighbors. I swear they have like a chive farm. The chives just come up naturally through their grass. You can grow garlic and onion chives. Garlic chives are going to be have a flat stem and onion chives are going to be hollow. And they're so fresh and delicious and you literally can't buy them from the store. They're not going to taste good from the store in those little plastic pouches, but they're going to be so pungent, so delicious from your garden and so great when you store them. So chives are a perennial, which means they're going to come back in the garden year after year. Totally worth buying from the store, from a local nursery if you haven't grown them from seed. I highly recommend just starting at the store. They're so easy to get there. They're only going to be like two or three dollars, and you're going to have chives for life from this. Okay? So, yes, you can start them from seed, but it's really not worth it. It's very small investment, and you're going to get a lifetime supply. So you plant these chives in your raised beds or a container, and then you just harvest from them. And you harvest from them the minute they're planted. You can start harvesting a couple of leaves. They're gonna go grow all year long, so they'll start as soon as the soil can be worked. You can put the chives in and start harvesting from them. And you can harvest from them all year long, like spring, summer, fall, winter, all the way through until there's a really hard frost that's gonna kill them. And it has to be a hard frost. Like, we've had frost all through the fall, and the chives just hung on. It wasn't until we had, like, a really, really steep drop in temperature that the chives shut down, turned brown, and died back. So from, like March all the way until December in a mild climate, a little bit earlier in a colder climate, you can harvest chives each and every day, each and every week. And when you harvest them, you want to harvest some for today and some to save. And so you can save them by washing them, drying them, and putting them in an airtight container and freezing them. That's the easiest. You can dry them so you can dehydrate them, chop them up, put them into a little spice container, or you can even preserve them in olive oil. So you can chop them up, put them into some oil, and then put those oil like ice cubes into a bag, and then use those to season your cooking and your soups and things like that in the winter. So you can either freeze it whole, you can dehydrate them and store them in sealed containers, or you can. You can freeze them in an oil and use them in your cooking. So you're going to have chives year round. There's no reason to buy any from the grocery store, because they're coming either straight from your garden or from your pantry or freezer. And the magical thing is, these things come back every spring. So the minute that the weather warms up, the minute that the soil gets a little bit warmer, the chives are going to be the first thing to come back. And then they multiply themselves. So it's not just that they come back and like stay in their one place. They're going to spread out and add, you know, more, two or three more plants in the area so you can come back, divide those plants into two or three, spread them out into new parts of your garden, and they keep doing it year after year after year. So chives number one, no more groceries for chives. Okay? And even if you're in a, like, apartment, wherever you are, you can grow these in a container. This is a small, easy plant. It's so forgiving. Everyone should be chiving it. Okay? You just have to chive with me. Got it. So chives are number one. Number two is kale. I recently did an episode of how to grow a year round supply of kale. Essentially, you're doing almost the same thing that you're going to do with chives and you're going to double harvest. So you start the kale early in the year, put it into the garden, and then spring and fall, you're going to do double harvest. So one to enjoy fresh, one to. What do you call that? Freeze and push through the summer, do it again in the fall, and then you're gonna have kale, frozen kale all winter long. You can use it for every other dish besides, like a fresh salad. That's the only way, only place where you would miss your kale and possibly wish that you could buy it from the grocery store. But you can make all the other things with that frozen kale. So you can make juices and smoothies, you can make sautes, frittatas, omelets, pretty much any other kale dish. A kale soup can all be made with that frozen kale. So you have it fresh during most of the year, frozen during the winter, and then boom, you never, ever, ever have to buy kale from the store again. So if you missed that episode, go check it out. It's how to grow a year round supply of kale. But you're going to start it, plant it in a raised bed and just harvest again and again and again and then do it again. All right, so we've got our chives. That's from the onion family, the amaryllis family. We've got our kale, that's from the brassica family. And so next up, let's talk about a new plant family, the mint plant family, lamiaceae. And we're going to talk about oregano. So oregano is a perennial herb. That means it comes back year after year. It is an aggressive grower. It likes to put on lots and lots of leaves. It's from the Mediterranean, so it loves sandy soil, good bit of sunlight, but it can do even with less sunlight. And it's also a cut and come again. So the more you cut from this oregano, the more it produces. I planted four oregano plants in the corner of the center of my raised bed set up here in Nashville. Four tiny, tiny plants. And last year, I want to say I harvested probably four pounds of oregano. I mean, it's crazy prolific. So you're going to harvest oregano to use every week, and you're going to do the double harvest things. So you're going to harvest to enjoy fresh, and then you're going to store it so you can hang it up to dry. You can put it in a dehydrator. You can also preserve it in oil, just like we did with the chives. So you can chop it up, put it with some olive oil and freeze it into cubes that you use for cooking and seasoning things like that. My favorite way to use it is just to dry it because dried oregano really locks in the flavor. And then I just use it year round. I currently have, not kidding you, about 2 handfuls of dried oregano that I need to process and put into the containers sitting in my basement. So there's so much that I don't have the jars for it. That's how much oregano you can get. So if you're buying that $5.99 oregano from the grocery store, if you are buying the plastic wrapped oregano from the grocery store, do it no more. You just need one plant. Okay, pay $2.99 for a plant at your local nursery this year. Harvest twice, once to use fresh, once to keep for later, and you're going to have oregano for the rest of your life. And you will never, ever, ever have to buy it from the grocery again. All right, so we've covered garlic and kale and oregano. So next, let's talk about spinach. Spinach is another one that you can get from the garden and never have to buy from the grocery. And you're going to treat it the same way you do the kale. So you're going to start the seeds instead of inside. You actually just start the seeds directly in the garden. Spinach is a wonderful green to do what we call winter sowing. That means you put the seeds in the garden before it's time for them to really come to life and sprout. They're going to just lie there dormant, and then as soon as things warm up, boom, they're going to sprout, turn into these gorgeous spinach plants, and you're going to do the double harvest thing. So you're going to harvest to enjoy today and then harvest to freeze. Spinach freezes so well, so easily, and you can use it in so many ways when you're not getting spinach from the garden. So you're going to harvest, harvest, harvest, enjoy fresh salads, freeze the rest. When we hit summer and it gets warm, like over 75, 85 degrees, the spinach is going to be done. It doesn't like growing in hot temperatures. This is a time where you could replace it with other kinds of what they call spinach, like longevity spinach or New Zealand spinach. But let's say you don't want to do that. You just want true, true spinach. No worries. You've got all that spinach that you froze throughout the spring, right? All your extra harvest. So now you're going to enjoy that through the summer. So you can make spinach smoothies and spinach soup and spinach saute and spinach frittatas all through the summer with your frozen spinach. And just about the time it runs out, you're going to be hitting the fall season, and that's when you're going to plant it again. So you'll do the same thing that you did with the winter sowing, except this time you're going to be doing summer sowing. You're going to plant seed underneath some of your tall plants. You'll get spinach all through the fall season, do the double harvest. So you're going to harvest two times, one to use fresh and one to save. And then when winter comes and the garden is shut down, you're going to have all that spinach that you can enjoy that you froze to use previously. So you basically have spinach from the garden, then you have spinach from the freezer, then you have spinach from the garden, then you have spinach from the freezer. And if you use that system, then you can go a whole year and many, many more years after that with never, ever buying spinach from the grocery store again. Next up is garlic. Yes, you heard it right. You never have to buy garlic from the store again. Garlic grows in such a magical way, you put it in in the fall. You can also do spring garlic. Depending on. When you're listening to this, you're going to start with one big clove, one big bulb of garlic, break it into cloves, and you plant each and every clove. Give everyone about, you know, a 4 inch diameter space. And that garlic is going to take about six to nine months. But each clove will turn into a brand new bulb. It is the craziest thing. You're like, whoa, nature is amazing. So each clove, when you come back to it, six to nine months later, it'll create these huge tall greens, but it'll have a new bulb at the base of it. So you pull up those bulbs, six to nine months later, you enjoy them in the kitchen, and you're going to take about two or three cloves from each of those bulbs that you harvest and you're going to save them. Because guess what you're going to do a few months later, you're going to plant them. So this is what it looks like in the garden around October, November, depending on when your first frost is, you put in cloves. All right, you plant the cloves for your garlic and you're going to plant as many as you need to have a year round supply of garlic. So let's say you use one garlic head a week in your cooking, then you need 52 heads of garlic, right? So that means you need 52 cloves of garlic right now. So you're going to plant your 52 cloves of garlic in the garden and you'll put it in October, November, and then you're just going to let it sit. It is the lazy woman's plant. You really don't have to do anything to it. And it just grows throughout the winter, it puts down roots. Spring, it sends up its green, and then through the summer it turns into a complete bulb. You get to, you know, July, August, you're going to pull all those garlics, you've got all These beautiful bulbs, 52 bulbs actually, and you're going to start to enjoy them. And every time you make use a head of the garlic, you're going to pull off one or two cloves and save them, because those are going to get planted when it comes around to be October again. So you'll have all this garlic from July and you'll get to use it. July, August, September, October, you'll use it all through the next spring. And then by the time that runs out, you're going to start pulling the bulbs again that you planted that second fall. And it happens again and again and again. You buy those first cloves that you need to plant 52 cloves of garlic. And you're going to have way more than 52 bulbs of garlic when you get a year, two years, three years down the road. And so you never have to buy garlic from the grocery store again. The very last one I want to talk about is mint. So if you're like me, you love the flavor of mint. I love mint tea. I probably drink at least one or two cups of mint tea a day. And when I first started doing this, I would go to Whole Foods and buy their peppermint rooibos or something. Anyway, that stuff is so pricey, I put some in a bag and checked out. And $20 later I was like, what did I just do? And so I've learned to grow my own mint so that I can make my own mint tea year round. And you can do the same. So if you like the mint flavor for fruit salads, or to put on your other salads, or to make mint ice cream or mint tea or mint, whatever, mint flavored, anything, you want to grow your own mint and you can do that with a year round supply, just the way we do with oregano. So you start with your plant, you want to put this in its own pot, its own container, and same thing we do with oregano. You're going to double your harvest, enjoy some fresh and then dry it and save it for later. Once it's completely dried, it's like papery, crunchy. You break it off the stem and you put it into a sealed container. I like to use a dark container so no light gets in. And then boom, you've got leaves to make your own mint tea, your own homegrown mint tea, or to make anything else you want to do with dried mint. Now, there are other ways you can preserve the mint. You can freeze it, you can put it into little ice cube trays. For me, I love just, just drying it out. But if you wanted to keep it more of a moist texture, you could freeze it in water or in some simple syrup, something like that. If you want to use it for drinks and cocktails or smoothies, something like that, probably wouldn't want it to be dried. So those are the ways you can preserve your mint. And essentially mint is like it just grows and grows and grows. The more you cut it, the more it goes. And so you're going to do double harvest when it's thriving and enjoy some fresh and then put some away. And then as soon as you hit the wintertime, you're going to have loads of mint to enjoy for all the cold months. And then by the time you run out of all that you've stored up, boom, it's time for your fresh mint to be ready again. So are you seeing the pattern here? Number one, we've got plants in the onion family. We've got chives and garlic. We've got greens, kale and spinach. And then we've got herbs, oregano and mint. And I just covered six of these plants, but there's actually a lot more in each of these categories that you could easily grow a year round supply of without being a homesteader, without having a ton of property, without gardening like for your life, just gardening five minutes a day. And so it's three types of plants, right? The onion types, the mints and the greens. And then for each of these, we basically grow enough that we can harvest fresh and then preserve some for later. And that's the practice you're going to keep with all these different plants is two harvests when they're in their thriving time. So harvest some to enjoy right away and then harvest some to save and enjoy later. When you see your garden this way, that the garden today is not just feeding you and giving you a harvest for today, it's giving you something for today, plus tomorrow, then you're going to harvest in a different way and see that you can actually truly replace a lot of your groceries with this method. I'm not a homesteader, I'm not a canner or a person who puts up food, but I definitely have replaced these six things in my kitchen with things that I grow in my garden. And if I can do it, I know that you can too. All right, I would love to help you grow these things. You can get instruction for all these plants in my book, leaves, roots and fruit. And if you need to set up your garden in the first place, you can get instruction to do to do that. In my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, we have a calendar to show you when you should plant all these things. And you can get that@gardenary.com calendar you just put in two dates. We tell you all the rest of the dates you need to know and then you know when to put in the mint and the oregano and the kale and the spinach and the garlic and the chives too. Thank you so much for bringing the garden back with me, for making it ordinary for all of us. And thank you for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. It would mean the world to me if you would leave a review, let me know how we're doing and how we can make the show better for you. Thanks for watching and listening. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. 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