Every where we turn, it seems that the cost of living is going up, especially at the grocery store. So who wouldn’t want to save on your grocery bill by growing your own fruits and veggies at home?

If your yard has at least a 20-by-28-foot space that gets full or almost full sun, you can grow enough vegetables to have fresh food all season with surprisingly little effort! Go ahead and dig beds if you’re lucky enough to have naturally fertile, well-drained soil, but don’t let soil flaws stop you from starting a food garden. Instead, try bag gardening. This method is almost too easy to believe, but it absolutely works! Gardening in bags of topsoil lets you get a garden going today, and offers these additional benefits:

Bag Gardening Benefits:

• In the course of a season, the topsoil bags will smother the grass underneath them, so you won’t have to dig up and remove the grass sod.
• The bags eliminate aggravation from seedling-killing cutworms, which are caterpillars commonly found in soil where lawn grass has been growing.
• Bag gardens have few (if any) weeds, because bagged soils and planting mixes are pasteurized to kill weed seeds.
• You can eventually gather up the plastic bags and dig their contents into permanent beds, or just lay down a new batch of bags.

In addition to plenty of fresh veggies to put on the table and to store, you can also easily produce a year’s supply of several tasty herbs, which will attract droves of pollinators and other beneficial insects.

If you’re new to food gardening, your biggest challenge may be planting crops at the right times. A food garden should be planted in phases, so that every crop gets the type of weather it prefers.

In early spring you should prepare your site. You can dig beds in the traditional way, or you can plant most of this garden in bags. If you’re using bags, you will need about 25 40-pound bags to cover the five main beds.

The skies the limit, whatever vegetables you like you can plant. Onions, beets, lettuce, potatoes, peas, collards, the list goes on. Go to your nearest library and check out a simple gardening book that lists when it’s best to plant each fruit and vegetable. Waiting a few weeks until it’s the ideal planting time can be the difference between decent fruits and veggies and the best produce you’ve ever had!