Search online for "how to start a vegetable garden," and you'll find an abundance of advice. You'll be told to start a compost pile, build a raised bed in an area of your yard that's in full sun, set up a watering system.
All that advice is well and good, but it largely ignores one thing: not everyone has the perfect circumstances to build a perfect garden (which doesn't exist, by the way, no matter what Instagram leads you to believe!). In fact, many people who truly want to grow their own food, at least a portion of their vegetables, run into snags early on in their endeavors.
I'm going to address three of the most common hurdles that keep enthusiastic would-be gardeners from getting started, and show you how they're not as difficult to overcome as they may seem at first glance.
First hurdle: Not enough space.
Perhaps you rent a house, and your landlord/lady has forbidden you from digging up the yard. Or you live in an apartment. Or both your front and back yards are the proverbial postage stamp-size.
For the last one, check out my post about gardening ideas for tiny backyards. For the others, container gardening is the way to go. Even if you live in an apartment that has no deck or balcony, you can set up a few pots in the bathroom, the corner of the living room, or the closet with grow lights hanging above them. When I lived in a condo, I had a few pots outside on my balcony, and against my dining room wall I had a plastic utility shelf with fluorescent light fixtures attached to the bottom of a couple of the shelves and grew herbs in pots underneath the lights.
It would be fifteen years before I'd learn that one can be self-sufficient in lettuce by growing it in a similar way, semi-hydroponically.
Second hurdle: Not enough money.
Watch a dozen random videos about growing your own food, and you'll come away thinking that gardening is an expensive endeavor. While it can be, it certainly doesn't have to be, especially if you're not in a hurry.
You can find garden tools at a discounted price, or even free, on places like craigslist or freecycle. There, you can also find cast-off lumber to use to build raised beds.
But raised bed borders are a convenience, not a necessity. You can build up a borderless raised bed simply by gathering and piling up leaves and other organic matter until you have a good eighteen-inch pile, then placing broken-down cardboard boxes on top of it all and weighting the cardboard down with rocks or bricks. Wait a year - two is even better - and you'll have rich, nutritious soil in which to plant seeds and seedlings.
Speaking of seeds, if you don't even dare shell out to purchase those, ask your gardening neighbors or your social media acquaintances to give/send you some.
Gardening will cost you some money, at least in watching your water bill go up in the summer. But it certainly can be done on a budget.
Third hurdle: Not enough time.
If you're reading this blog post, you have enough time to garden.
Seriously.
Because, if you worked sixteen hours a day, you wouldn't have time to mess around with researching vegetable gardening online, or fiddle around with social media, or watch Netflix. I must therefore conclude that you work the typical eight- to ten-hour day, and typically have two days off per week.
You. Have. Time. To. Garden.
It's a matter of priority.
Ever heard of Nora Roberts? The author who cranks out four number-one bestselling novels every single year? She writes Monday through Friday, about eight hours per day. And when the weather warms up, she gardens.
On the weekend. Only.
It's a hobby she enjoys, so she makes time for it on the days she's not committed to working on her next blockbuster novel.
Whether you want to take up gardening as a hobby, or save money on your grocery bill by growing some of your own produce, or even make supplemental income with a market garden, you have plenty of time to do it.
As long as you prioritize.
A basic backyard garden requires fifteen to thirty minutes a day of maintenance. That's it. If you can't carve out that much time, or dedicate a few hours on the weekend, for weeding, mulching, watering, harvesting, and pest control, you really don't want to garden.
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There you have it: the three most common hurdles to growing a vegetable garden. Now you know that they aren't nearly as high as you originally thought.
Get out there, and get growing!
