From the street, Judy Griepsma's suburban Modesto home looks pretty much like every other house on the block. There's a walkway, flowers, a well-groomed lawn and a welcome mat.
But peek at the back yard and you'll find Griepsma's farm. Several chickens roam the lawn. The vegetable plot is bigger than the pool. Wheat shafts — she plans to grind the kernels for flour — dry in the shed.
Griepsma, 51, isn't a farmer. She's more of a do-it-yourselfer, one of many people who raise food to save money.
In these economic times, more people are growing their own food and pocketing the savings. Forty-three million U.S. households planned to grow at least some of their own food in 2009, a 19 percent increase from the estimated 36 million who did the year before, said the National Gardening Association, citing the most recent figures available.
Griepsma doesn't doubt it. A single mother with one son at home, she started growing vegetables years ago to save on groceries.
Then she got hooked. She now bottles honey from a beehive in the corner of her vegetable plot. She uses camomile flowers to make tea. She dries stalks and pods in hopes of saving the seeds and using them the following year.
She's reading up on raising fish and has considered getting a goat or two for milk.
"If I could figure out how to grow coffee, I'd do it," she joked.
Griepsma doesn't spend much at the grocery store. She doesn't buy vegetables, rarely buys meat and soon she'll have homegrown wheat flour to make her own bread.
Why stop with bread?
Delphina Souza, 60, of Turlock rents three acres down the road from her home where she raises steers for meat. She has one butchered each year, selling half of the meat and keeping the other half for herself and her brother, who lives with her.
"This way you know what you're eating," Souza said. "There's no growth hormones or those kinds of things."
Souza grows enough fruits and vegetables at her home to fill a farmers market. Onions, potatoes, kale, peaches, apricots and apples are among her crops. She has bees for honey and chickens for eggs.
"The only things I buy at the store are milk and cereal," she said. "The rest, I grow my own."
Doesn't it cost money to grow your own?
Not much, Griepsma said, whose son built her a chicken coop with salvaged boards.
Her chickens feast on the compost pile, which makes the $15 bag of scratch she buys at the feed store last longer. Plant waste provides fertilizer. Seeds are saved from one year's garden to use next year.
What if you don't have space to grow your own food?
Get creative. Take Sheila Ruiz Harrell and her husband, Al Lopez, who live in Friendly Village, a mobile home park for seniors in Modesto. Harrell was laid off from her job as a Web site manager two years ago. Lopez recently lost his job as a warehouseman after 26 years.
The two needed to save money, so Harrell asked park management if she could turn the empty lot next door — a foreclosure — into raised planting beds for a community garden.
"Not only did they like the idea, they liked it so much that they bought all the wood and 16 yards of dirt," said Harrell, 63.
The park supplies the water, too. Residents supply the labor. Among their crops: lettuce, broccoli, chard, greens, squash and cabbage.
Harrell figures the garden has helped her cut in half what she and her husband spend on food. It's also had another benefit.
"Our whole lifestyle has changed," she said. "It's so peaceful and quiet and stressless."
Bee staff writer Kerry McCray can be reached at (209) 578-2358.
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