By Clif Knight 

 Hardwood trees are budding out, flowers are blooming, grass is turning green and daytime temperatures are warming up.  

It’s springtime, and outdoor temperatures are ripe for planting and growing vegetables in your home garden.  

The amount of space you’ll need to grow fresh vegetables – that far outshine those found in grocery stores – is optional. Locate the sunniest part of your back and side yards, build a border, dig up the dirt and choose plantings that require a minimum amount of space in which to grow and mature.  

Tomatoes, red or white potatoes, squash, radishes and turnips are good choices.  

Spread 3-4 inches of mulch around growing plants. This will conserve moisture, enrich the soil and control weeds.  

A neighbor who lives a few blocks from me came up with an even simpler way to grow tomatoes in his back yard.  

He set up about a dozen 5-gallon cans in his back yard, filled them with garden soil and planted a tomato plant in each one. From start to finish, I watched them grow and bear fruit. It was amazing to watch half-pound ripe tomatoes going from backyard to kitchen table for several weeks.  

I learned from experience severable years ago that it’s possible to grow tomatoes in large containers sitting on the patio.  As they grew, we supported them on a swing set and harvested two or three ripe tomatoes every day for several weeks.  

Inflation has become a pocketbook issue for most low- to middle-income families in recent weeks and is likely to grow worse over the next two or three years.  Fossil fuel mandates by the Biden administration have gutted the nation’s fuel supply and left motorists wringing their hands at the fuel pump. Shopping at the grocery store is all about paying higher prices for meats and most other products with no end in sight. Grain shortages brought about by the Russia-Ukraine war are likely to trigger another inflation surge and make $4/gallon gas seem like a small bump in the road.  

Growing your own vegetables is one way you can make a dent in the cost of inflation.  

Making do with what you’ve got is how we put food on the table when I was a kid growing up on a farm. You ate what you harvested with your hands.