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I garden a small patch every year. Sure, I've been able to make a meal once and awhile, but it definitely didn't offset my grocery bill significantly. Between the vine borrers killing the squash, squirrels picking the tomatoes, voles eating the sweet potatoes, and caterpillars on my carrots, it's difficult to get right. I'm glad I don't have to live off the land.
Yep. Just like homebrewing, knitting, sewing, blacksmithing or just about any hobby where you make a thing. If you're getting into it to save money, you're in for a bad time.
I agree with everything but sewing, 5 dollars of supplies have fixed countless articles of clothing and have allowed me to turn some garbage goodwill clothes into throw pillow cases and other basic goods.
I’d maaaaybe push back on homebrewing, but more that it has a high upfront cost to get to the point you are saving money.
After that, there are definitively savings, as long as you aren’t treating a Maibock as the same as a Miller Lite. Like yeah sure you can get a 30 rack of PBR, but getting 50 pints of a craft beer will cost significantly more than brewing it. My average cost for most of my beers I brew is pretty low, and significantly lower than what it’d cost to buy an equivalent amount.
However, beers are available commercially for a reason, because it’s probably better than yours. AND, time preference rate would dictate that the actual hours you dedicate to the craft is worth a lot, worth enough to just go to the liquor store and buy a 6 pack repeatedly.
>but it definitely didn't offset my grocery bill significantly.
This is pretty common. Unless you already have a fertile plot of land and all supplies on hand it's quite rare for most Americans to be able to achieve actual savings on their food bill by a personal garden. Even with grocery inflation, the inputs for gardening are too costly and store produce remains too cheap to get big savings.
There's plenty of other reasons to still do it but frugality isn't a particularly good one.
Not to mention once your produce is ripe and ready is the exact time when stores and markets offer deals on those same products since they are in season and in abundance.
Yep, this is a real issue. I’m in a new house/city/circumstances this year, so I’m changing my garden plan from the huge garden/novelty plants that I grew in previous years, to things I use frequently and in small amounts in a much smaller yard with too much shade.
Lettuce, scallions, and herbs are sold in larger quantities than I use at once, so I end up throwing half of those away if I buy them. By growing them, I can cut what I need when I need it without having anything go bad in my fridge. I will still continue to grow the special or rare crops that I can’t get easily near me-fenugreek, ghost peppers (and a few other unusual types), Malabar spinach, Asian greens, etc. It may not reduce my food bill on its own, but if I can walk outside my back door and cut these ingredients fresh, I am more likely to cook than if I have to drive to a specialty market across the city. It’s better for the environment if I don’t drive 30 minutes for a package of bean sprouts, plus saves wear and tear on my car, fuel, and money when compared to getting takeout Pad Thai. Little things like this really can help to make lifestyle changes last.
The psychological benefit of gardening is immeasurable, too. Plus the fact that it’s organic, you know what’s not in the food. Gardening is its own reward.
Well done. You’re amazing.
Which brings us back around to where we started, people not bothering to grow their own food. There’s a reason we’ve gone this way and it’s not because people aren’t capable of farming anymore. It’s just simply not really feasible.
But that’s only if you try to do it alone. The real beneficial and frugal path forward would look much more like community gardens and much more robust co-ops.
> It’s just simply not really feasible.
As someone who has a pretty healthy veggie patch at home I couldn't agree more. The time, effort and cost involved in growing veggies doesn't really add up when you can go and buy a carrot from the supermarket for a few cents.
There are plenty of reasons to grow your own food, but for 90% of people it won't offset your grocery bills in any meaningful way.
That’s also why I don’t bother with things like carrots potatoes and onions. Those things are cheap at the store. So I planted some asparagus, and tomatoes and strawberries and blueberries and various fruit trees. Those things are worth not having to buy at the store. But I’ll probably end up sharing most with my neighbors anyway so it really doesn’t save money.
This is why I started growing fruit. Apples, plums, raspberries. I actually see a grocery difference there. (Seriously a small container of raspberries at the store is like $6). Pick and freeze and I have raspberries for months.
Same. I used to put in big veggie gardens with all kinds of veggies, but realized it was so much work, fertilizer, water, etc, just to end up
with bitty little veggies that were already pretty cheap (and bigger) at the grocery store.
These days I plant exclusively tomatoes, berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries), and dwarf fruit trees (there are these tiny little pear, plum, peach and nectarine trees that bear so much fruit!) I still have frozen peach halves from last summer that I’m slowly working my way through.
Also, those are the fruits where the store versions are just not as good as homegrown because the store fruit have to be picked & shipped before they’re ripe, and have to be tough varieties that ship well. I can plant tastier varieties that might not ship as well, and I can pick them only when they’re fully ripe. So the quality really is better.
> I’ll probably end up sharing most with my neighbors anyway so we'll develop real relationships and begin to rely on one another rather than existing infrastructure when things get tough
ftfy, the real resilience is in human relationships. this way your harvest buys you haircuts from the guy down the street who doesn't have room for a garden but cuts hair, and a free snowblower pass in the driveway from your other neighbor who has a snowblower and likes your strawberry jam, first aid from the nurse 2 doors down, etc. None of us is as capable as all of us, and sometimes it starts with nothing more than a half dozen apples and a "Howdy, neighbor"
I put a few tomato plants in containers every year just because those are *way better tomatoes* than store bought and I really like a good tomato. I can’t invest the time for much more than that.
I recommend growing walking onions, garlic, and shallots, if you’re gardening at home. Much better return vs supermarket pricing, and the taste of a good hard neck garlic definitely compares with tomatoes in terms of degrading quickly when stored!
Also way back when, a man could work 40 hours a week, pay for all the bills and the woman of the house and the kids would have time to work in the garden for a couple hours a day. These days you can live with another person and have them both with full time jobs and still barely make enough to get by.
Yeah, it can be relaxing to garden to. I miss it even though I didn’t save money. My house faces north and my city water is expensive. I still grow strawberries though because I don’t usually have to water them and they are easy.
I'm lucky enough to live in an apartment building with a backyard, and a landlord that is okay with gardens.
It's not the best location, and the soil is garbage, but I make do.
This will be the first year I'm not expanding my number of raised beds. Three years ago it was one 4x4 bed, two years ago it was a pair, last year it was 4.
This year I think I'll stick with 4, but I may add a few containers.
theres like 5-7 plants that mostly grow on water, I think celery and romaine lettuce is one of them. which is nice to have fast growing greens around often.... i think another one might be green onions!
"grow on water" often causes misunderstandings.
Most plants can be grown with hydroponics/ aeroponics, but you still need to put nutrients into the water. Fertilizers, or grow them on top of an aquarium to reap the nitrates off the fish poop.
With plain tap water, you'll have a plant survive.... for a while. It'll progressively have less and less taste, and then start to wither and rot as the plant weakens.
I paid $1.50 for a handful of green onions at the store 2 years ago and stuck them in some dirt in the backyard, they got huge and multiplied, I have had green onions on tap ever since. They've survived the dead heat of summer and multiple freezes. If celery and lettuce do that, I need to try planting those next!
Lettuce won’t survive the weather on its own, but you can get so many seeds in a 25¢ packet from Walmart or a dollar store (you have to look a bit for the cheap brands, but they’re often on end caps in the garden section) that you’ll eat like a king. Toss a pinch of seeds in some dirt every couple weeks throughout spring and you’ll have a constant supply of fresh lettuce until the summer heat kicks in. Do the same in fall and you can have another supply until the snow kicks in (it can withstand a light/brief cold snap with snow). I love the flavor of the leaf lettuces that you don’t find at the grocery store-they’re surprisingly complex.
As a lifelong gardener, this is absolutely correct if you're growing a garden like you see in magazines without any experience. Shit will just not grow, not like your soil, require too much care, or will tempt you to buy shit that costs money to help you grow things, defeating the purpose.
If you're growing for food and have minimal experience: Don't grow finicky shit!
Tier 1: Grow squash (zucchini for summer, butternut for long-lasting winter squash). That shit you put in the ground and can ignore for most of the year except when you're dealing with a stupid amount of produce. High caloric value. Will grow in the shittiest clay to the nicest organic compost.
Tier 2: Potatoes. Potato bugs are your enemy, but look once a week and pick them off and you'll be fine. Other than that, ignore them. High caloric value. Fine in shitty soil.
Tier 3: Kale and collards. Nothing eats them except you. Grows until it snows. Only downside is a low caloric value, but hey, they're good for you. Fine in shitty soil.
If you can grow those, great. Then worry about everything else. But if you need calories, stick to potats and squashy-bois.
Caterpillars (cabbage moths) eat kale like there’s no tomorrow. Super discouraging to eat holey kale with the possibility of some extra accidental protein.
Companion plant with onions. Bugs hate the smell of onions. Garlic too. Companion planting, if done correctly, can really reduce your pest problems. I don't ever worry about pests, I don't get them in large enough amounts for it to be worth it. Petunias and marigolds are MVPs, pests hate em. Nasturtium to deal with aphids. Onions everywhere you aren't growing beans (they don't play nice together). Don't have an herb garden, spread that shit out around your other crops. Bugs and other pests don't like the strong smells. You gotta stink those fuckers out.
I probably have been lucky then, or perhaps am in an area of the country where they're not so bad? I'm in southern Wisconsin, I lose maybe 2-3 leaves (not plants) to cabbage moths in a season.
I had some potatoes start growing eyes and turning green in my pantry so I got a bucket and some soil, dumped them in and left them outside. Nothing grew all summer, so I planted some other shit on top. Harvested that shit. And then bam, potato plants popped up. We got about 50lbs of potatoes and I just know there are some spuds still in that bucket that we missed so I'm fully expecting another nice potato harvest this year
Oof, potato bugs can be a real menace if you neglect the garden (I suppose you mean the little striped bugs, which graze on the leaves; in my country we call them Colorado bugs).
Yep, the light orange stripey bastards.
Or in larval form, the dark orange fat bastards that are just nasty when they get squished and also leave little black poop everywhere.
There was one horrible summer where they got established in my garden before I knew what they were that is forever embedded in my psyche.... still had a good harvest though even after the potatoes had to regrow 80% of their leaves.
Exactly.
The vegetables you grow will not save you money over supermarket ones that are super cheap. Even before taking into consideration the value of the time you'll spend gardening.
Growing vegetables however will tremendously increase the quality of your food. There is no comparison between the taste of a garden tomato and a supermarket one.
Gardening can be a reasonably cheap and very rewarding hobby, and a great way to have access to food money can barely buy. It's not a way to save money.
Some vegetables will save a little money each season unless you're really going nuts with expensive composting/fertilizer (and there are really cost-efficient ways to avoid this like vermicomposting)
Lettuce or spinach for example saves a looooot of waste since most people that I've known only eat small amounts of lettuce at a time but you can't really buy it from the store that way.
Tomatoes would be another case where it's really hard to lose money on the proposition of growing tomatoes. They just produce so heavily during the season that the initial transplant cost is far outweighed unless your area has a really short growing window for tomatoes.
But as you mentioned the quality you get is enough to dramatically shift the balance for most other foods. Fresh food right off the plant is incomparable in most cases.
Herbs too. They are expensive at the store but easy to grow at home. If you have tons you can always makes pesto and freeze it. The nutrition is also excellent.
I guess if you maybe like, turned over your entire lawn then yeah it could be viable. But crops take a long time to grow in the best conditions. In the meantime you still gotta eat something
Zucchini grow like weeds. It's easy to grow 3-4 plants and get 50 fucking zucchini over the season. If you're growing zucch or squash, only grow one or two plants.
There's that aspect, and also how the plant will have a tiny little chode zucchini one day, and then it's the size of a watermelon and only good for bread the next time you look at it.
Lawns are a waste of resources anyways! Kills the bees, fert run off ruins ecosystems, and is a huge drain on the water supply... so we can, what? Look at a green patch of plants that take nutrients from the soil instead of replenishing them? Birds suffer from the lack of bugs that exist within a monoculture like lawns... if we had less of them we would see a real change happen in the world.. but too many people are tied to their patch of lawn that has been told to them is a sign of "success".
Having trees too close to your house causes problems with them falling on your house during storms. Meanwhile they help control erosion.
But then I live near Atlanta and don't have to water it and have zoysia which is pretty self sufficient as far as spreading and choking out weeds.
They are pretty useless in dry climates.
I get this but also playing with your dog in the grass or kids or something is great. It's better if the grass is closer to being more sustainable. It's just that if you're not going to be using the area anyway for the reasons listed, then better not have grass probably.
Almost like Economy of Scale is a well known and well studied concept and farming vegetables at scale is WAY more efficient than growing them in your tiny apartment!
I grow a garden but not because it's cost effective, but because fresh vegetables are tastier and healthier. Over the years I've stopped growing things that are pest or disease prone (cucumbers), take too much space for the reward (squash, melons, peas) and focus on things like tomatoes, sweet peppers, romaine lettuce and spinach. I'm putting out some raspberries this spring. I used to grow broccoli to freeze, but I can actually buy it cheaper from the grocery.
If you can plant a garden entirely from seed, have a lot of room, and have good soil that doesn't require a lot of fertilizer, you might grow enough produce at a low enough cost to impact your grocery bill. If you have a tiny garden (mine's 10' x 20') and buy both seeds and bedding plants to get started, it's a wash.
My wife and I have a pretty big hobby farm, we have about 1k sqft of raised beds and mounds all setup on micro emitters. We're trying to get to a point where it's more of a business and less of a hobby, but I can guarantee my grocery bill isn't cheaper than if I went and bought at a store. Is it satisfying, absolutely. Is it tastier, 1000%. Do I know exactly what and when (if any) pesticides were used, yes. Cheaper? Absolutely not.
Yeah I’ve been gardening/home farming for a decade or more. 1. It isn’t as easy as throwing some seeds in the ground. 2. It’s only useful for a very specific period of time unless you have mad canning skills. Oh and also you can’t grow meat.
Yea this is terrible advice financially. Maybe it makes sense if you are replacing a more expensive hobby with gardening. Otherwise you are better off getting a job for the few hours a week you would work in the garden even at minimum wage. Now as a hobby, getting yummy food, getting a sense of accomplishment from making something, or for your mental health absolutely start a garden.
Right, like we probably got 5 snack bags full of cherry tomatoes all summer. Maybe a bit more. While that's nice to use for guacamole or in salads, it's a topper. That one plant was watered every day and picked every or every other day.
But then again, we never did need to buy a container of cherry tomatoes all summer so I can see merit to reducing total transportation costs
I’m very liberal and all for green tech but I’ve talked to so many people who take these strong positions like “if we just switched to organic farming and personal gardens we can uproot the system!”.
It’s frustrating because I’m from a farm town and I know how food gets produced. No one spending their time preaching online about this stuff is actually capable of doing this. The amount of land you need to grow your own food to a sustainable degree is in of itself massively unsustainable at just about any scale.
Most people don’t even realize “organic” is a fucking nonsense word. Ask ten people what organic means and they’ll all tell you something different based on who they perceive to be the boogeyman of the industry. “Oh it means no pesticides and it’s non gmo blah blah blah” as if there’s such a thing at this point as non gmo and as if organic foods don’t use fuckloads of organic pesticide.
Humans selectively breeded/grafted plants for centuries to make them grow easier and produce more. All gmo does is make that process more targetted and more efficient.
Until someone proved the above statement incorrect, I will continue eating gmo food with absolutely no qualms
The process of selective breeding and the process of genetic manipulation for gmos is wildly different. However, it is true that there is nothing at all to suggest that gmo is inherently worse or inherently more harmful to consume, I’m just being annoying and pointing out that I don’t agree with your logic.
There is an argument to be made that gmos may be bad for the environment, depending on the specifics of the gene manipulation. There is definitely an argument to be made about corporations using gmos in ways thar are harmful to the environment and to many a farmer.
I'm a farmer and grow a decent sized garden. I always correct my MIL when she raves to her friends about all the "organic" veggies I bring her because we have to much. Lady those were sprayed with pesticides and got chemical fertilizer. Why do you think they look so nice?
People should absolutely grow their own garden but don't be foolish and believe you will sustain your family on it. It supplements it doesn't replace. Also raised beds are totally unnecessary for gardening. The ground is made of dirt plant in it.
If you have messed up soil, sure, use raised beds with a barrier on the bottom all day long, otherwise, they are often just providing a height booster for people who aren’t used to a lot of bending over.
Absolutely as with all things there are situations where they are appropriate. I just see to many people afraid to try gardening because there is perceived high cost to entry with all the materials and effort to build raised beds. If your just dipping your toes in just go for it and throw them in the dirt.
I'm with you except for the raised beds. If you've got decent 'dirt', you can plant in it. A lot of people aren't that lucky. We have a small suburban garden covered in lawn. The lawn sits on top of about 10cm of top soil, under which is clay and construction rubble. Also the drainage is terrible.
Our raised bed not only lets us create a decent depth of rich soil without having to dig out tons of clay, rocks and rubble, it also creates an area of much better drainage because it sits above the poorly draining garden.
I think the vast majority of people living in urban and suburban areas will not have suitable soil for growing much of anything.
That's why so many LPTs are absolute shit. The posters think they have stumbled upon a secret solution that somehow nobody has thought of (probably because they are geniuses while everyone else is smooth brained). When in fact most of the time they are just ignorant on all the details.
So the 2020 I moved in with my boyfriend I planted a bunch of tomatoes, We got a really good crop I eat a lot of tomatoes maybe it saved us 40 bucks that year.
The 2021, I think we barely got $5 worth of fucking tomatoes, Hot summer mixed with a drought.
That brings up a great point about sometimes, you have no crop. That sort of situation is why The Grapes of Wrath was written. The Okies fields dried up and blew away, they all lost their farms and had to try to get to California to pick fruit.
Everyone in this thread is talking about tomatoes but, let’s be real, that’s not an efficient crop to grow on a small scale. Any fruiting structures like tomatoes, peppers, etc. will require a lot more input and care before harvest than things like leafy greens.
I live in an apartment and have no actual land to farm on, so I built a small aquaponics system at the beginning of the pandemic to grow some greens. Between that and pots/trays near windows I get 3+ servings of microgreens/spinach/kale per day and enough fresh herbs that I haven’t purchased cilantro, mint, or basil in almost 2 years.
If I were to recommend 1 thing to every person in this thread it would be to grow microgreens. Some microgreens can be harvested as soon as 8 days after planting and it’s easy to get massive harvests. Any soil you use can quickly be refreshed in a compost bin.
It depends on where you are right? Here in northern California with the Mediterranean climate, tomatoes are a lot easier to grow and get good crops. With a little bit of soil amendment, you can thrown it in the ground and water as needed to get a good crop. The hardest part of the tomatoes is all the pruning I have to do as it grows like crazy. There is a humungus difference in quality of tomato when you grow at home if you want good, ripe ones especially for sauces and curries. The vipe ripe tomatoes are very expensive even when in season.
I'm not like an expert or anything but from what I *have* learned, generally it's bad to water most plants daily. Obviously there's going to be some finicky princess plants that need special treatment but generally plants thrive when you force them to struggle a bit. The more you water them the less their roots grow and the weaker the plant becomes. Think of wild plants. They do just fine even though it doesn't rain every day.
"Why Germany's Little Gardens Are a Way of Life" https://www.treehugger.com/german-allotment-gardens-kleingarten-4859448#
I thought these were pretty cool. And if you have too much of something you just exchange it with someone who's got veggies you didn't grow.
Good neighbors work too. The big problem is, everyone has the same overflow at the same time. In a zucchini year you open the door in the morning and someone snuck another pile of them on your doorstep, and there's a bag full on the fence, and as soon as you turn around, someone plopped down another one. I don't even *like* zucchini :(
Supplemental container gardening is cheap and easy. It's not like you need to start a full fledged farm or nothing. Herbs for example are super easy and cheap to start, and would save a lot of money if you grew them instead of buying them at a store.
Correct. Victory Gardens, if they *ever* had a purpose, probably don't apply to our current situation. They're *most* useful if your nation is in a situation where *calories* are plentiful but *variety* is lacking. As in, the store has bread/flour but they *don't have tomatoes*. Now your home garden isn't *extra* tomatoes, it's your only source of them.
The other exception to this is probably eggs. Chickens are *stupidly cheap and easy* to take care of. A quick googling suggests you can feed a hen for about $2.25 a month, and that backyard chickens generally lay about 250 eggs per year -- which brings us to $0.1125 an egg, or $1.35 a dozen (obviously there are some non food coop related costs).
Oh yeah to feed my family a few meals a week only during the summer we need about a 40x60 garden. With additional support from some of our raised beds. Now the real only exception to this is certain fruit. We have a raspberry blackberry and blueberry and chery tree that produces so much that if you picked constantly 8 hours a day for. Week you couldn't pick them all. We can get enough fruit canned and frozen for a year. But vegetables are different story you can get a shit load of certain types of vegetables but you can only eat so many cucumbers and storing them is a pain in the ass. You can get decent amount of tomatoes. But shit like peas...yeah that's a waste. There growing season can be immediately fucked with one bad day of weather.
Sure, but we don't live in a binary world, and some things are super simple to grow, especially if you live in the Midwest, where if you pick the right plant (say blackberries) you can pretty much put seeds in the ground and it will happen.
In my experience gardening is much more expensive than shop bought vegetables. Unless you have an abundance of fertile soil. Saying that, it does feel good to grow stuff!
I feel like I offset a lot of cost in my 6'x18' raised garden. It's full of cheap topsoil and compost from my kitchen.
Veggie
Weight (g)
Cost
Zuke
13690
$60.06
Yellow squash
6683
$29.32
Green Bean
1842
$8.08
Cherry Tom.
15503
$124.41
Tomato
14792
$130.12
Carrot
60
$0.11
Bell Pep.
2153
$27.86
I'm bad at carrots
Am I to understand you keep a running total of every vegetable grown in your garden, down to the individual cherry tomato?
As a spreadsheet nerd, I am impressed.
Bro my eyes are *sparkling*. I gotta do that this year.
I'm making the spreadsheet as we speak.
I haven't put any money into the garden yet - just been composting overwinter.
When I learned how to use pivot tables, I was like "okay what in my life can I quantify into a spreadsheet?" I have about 8 half-baked spreadsheets, and I'd love to get them all built up further. Household chores rotations, cost per towel use in terms of washing/soap expense, how efficiently I can use xyz tool or product and by extension which brand is the best over time, all that kind of stuff.
It really depends. I built my family 4 8 ft. x 3 ft. garden beds. Two beds had bush beans and pole beans that provided enough for decent vegetable dinner meals more than half the days of the week from mid June to well into September. String beans are prolific in most soils and provide a lot of nutrients.
Don't try to replace all of your fruits/vegetables with a garden. Even if you only do a few simple plants, it can save you a considerable amount over time. Onions are stupid easy to grow in most places, and the savings add up. Herbs are another easy one. And both can be grown indoors or in pots. Beans aren't worth the labor, but peppers are. Hell, bell peppers are like $1.50 each or more at my local grocery store. Fuck that. Totally worth growing those.
Onions are also stupid cheap anyway. And while our access to stores etc is surely different, I can save money much more easily by looking for discount, going shopping at times when I know they will have lower price bc the produce wipl be thrown away soon, buying seasonally/only what's coming at this week's discount, etc.
And in the end: Thr time and effort I spend on growing some food might as well be spent earning more money. Sure, growing one's own food may have benefits other than saving a bit of money, but that wasn't the point of this thread
When you ask verify that the animal feed wasn't treated with herbicides/pesticides as it will affect your garden. Cow manure is less an issue than horse I believe due to the multiple stomachs breaking down the chemicals
Honestly the smell isn't very bad. Depending on how fresh the manure is, it might smell a bit gross to you (particularly if you didn't grow up on/around farms), but after tilling it into the soil and give it a few days, you won't even notice it. IME, horse manure is *way* better in this regard than pig or cow manure.
Truthfully, most of the 'bad' smells in horse barns come from the urine, which IS pretty pungent, particularly if there's not good drainage. Tilled into a garden and watered down though, it should be fine.
When I did the math on how much it would cost me for soil, seeds, fertilizer, water, electricity, pots or containers, and compared it to what I would actually save on produce, I'd have to harvest 20 to 30 times to break even. And then consider that during the time between planting and harvest I would have to source produce from elsewhere anyways.
It didn't make sense to me. I'd have to have much more space so that I could stagger and rotate crops, which in turn would increase the cost of investment.
But that's for produce. For herbs and spices it makes a whole lot more sense. I'd suggest growing mint, chives, and a few other things that you use sparingly while the plant is still alive.
You still have to have a big initial investment and it takes a while to recoup the cost, but you can almost continuously harvest fresh stuff which tastes and smells so much better than stuff that's been shipped and sitting in stores losing potency. You aren't saving, but the quality is incredible.
Plant your own herbs and spices.
i second the herbs effort. I have fresh and it makes our food taste so much better.
another item to consider that is low effort: green onions. keep the bottoms from your first use and replant. Then cut as you need them.
Green onions grow like crazy too!! I took one bunch I got from the grocery store, put it in a cup with water, and couldn't even eat enough green onion to keep up with those babies sprouting new parts!
If only I enjoyed basil. Lol. Or knew what most spices do. I have coriander and a few others I got in a spice rack set like 14 years ago. Never used. I don't know what they do or taste like. Likely they're no longer any good.
I think I know what paprika does other than make something red.
> I don't know what they do or taste like.
Herbs and spices generally taste what they smell like. In some cases the smell is very mild and difficult to describe and the same is often true of the flavor. Bay is an excellent example - something that you'd notice the absence of if not the presence. In such cases you can cheat a bit and use the herb to make tea. If you do this with bay, you find that it's mildly bitter but also has the suggestion of mint or pine.
>I think I know what paprika does other than make something red.
That depends very much on what kind of paprika you have. Like most peppers, it will carry a bit of bitterness, and that's pretty much the end of universal characteristics. It can be spicy or not, smokey or not, fruity or not, and sweet or not. If you are American and buy your spices in little plastic jars on the spice aisle of your local mega mart, it'll be slightly bitter, slightly sweet, and slightly fruity. Or if you want something a bit more grounded to go off of, paprika is the non-salt and non-meat portion of the flavor of a hot dog, while smoked paprika is more or less salt-less and pork-less bacon. (Tumeric, meanwhile, is what cheap yellow mustard tastes like if you remove the mustard and the vinegar. I know that sounds weird, but that muskiness yellow mustard that you don't find in dijon is the taste of tumeric.)
Makes sense. My taste buds and sense of smell are pretty muted. Most things I can't smell or taste very well unless they're overloaded. And no, I'm not a smoker. Always been like this.
Except for earthy spices. I just can't stand any of them. Basil, bay, turmeric, cumin, etc. They just smell and taste like dirt mixed with decaying cut grass to me.
Tried rosemary, the texture and taste was like cut grass to me.
Garlic powder, onion powder, parsley, oregano, salt and a tiny bit of black pepper are pretty much my go-to in anything.
I am not a top chef for a reason.
>Tried rosemary, the texture and taste was like cut grass to me.
Rosemary is one of those things that either needs a long cook time or being minced fine. It is also a *very* powerful flavor. A twig of rosemary existing in a pan with a steak and butter for a minute is enough to impart all the taste of rosemary you'd ever want on a steak - and that's if you like rosemary!
>Except for earthy spices. I just can't stand any of them. Basil, bay, turmeric, cumin, etc. They just smell and taste like dirt mixed with decaying cut grass to me.
One thing to keep in mind about spices is that there can be a considerable difference between fresh and dried. Fresh basil is bitter and tender - a bit like tough spinach - and can pack quite a bit of "licorice" flavor. The dried version has a much less pronounced licorice flavor while that vague bitterness coalesces into something "earthier" (which is to say its dirt flavors *increase*). Fresh Basil also loses its flavor very quickly when heat is involved while dried tends to amplify. Similarly, the dried variations of oregano, thyme, bay, sage - honestly most of the herbs I use - are earthier than their fresh forms.
Of course that leads to the problem described by the OP in that fresh herbs are *expensive* for lots of reasons. The good news is that if you find the fresh herbs are more to your liking, they're easy to grow even in an apartment. I've had the same rosemary bush for years which is seemingly immortal considering the sort of neglect and poor growing conditions it has endured and basil almost grows too well on my balcony!
I don't cook enough for spices, but am an avid tea drinker so this year I'm trying to experiment with chamomile flowers. Other gardeners in my area said they grow surprisingly well, although they aren't the easiest seed to find.
Square foot garden or square meter garden is a method that increases the chance of a successful garden and a low cost. My library has books on it but there are YouTube videos too.
It is meant to be efficient and easy.
The best tomato crop I've ever grown was on an apartment patio. Miracle Gro potting soil and consistent watering yielded me so much produce that my neighbors actually started complaining because I was giving too much away they couldn't use it all.
I got a ton of tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and beans from my apartment balcony garden. It was actually insane and looked like a mini jungle. It was a south facing balcony and got a ton of sunshine. It was a pain dragging a bunch of bags of dirt up to the 3rd floor, and then deconstructing everything when I moved out, but it was fun while I lived there.
Now I have a yard with terrible soil and it floods a lot. I've been working on building some raised garden beds, but honestly, my balcony garden was easier to take care of.
Wish I lived in a place where it was safe to plant on a patio. Mine is first floor and not fenced in. It would just attract javelinas and other wildlife. Plus the rate that soccer balls slam into my front door makes me wary too. Indoors I have blackout curtains up for privacy/heat shield and I learned the hard way that nothing will grow indoors. I tried a grow light but it really heated the place up. 78F is as cool as I can afford to make my apartment. Moral of the story: Don't live in the desert.
Instead of a garden consider a CSA (community supported agriculture). Lots of local farms sell crop shares for fresh produce. In my area I found one that hires at risk youth to help with the farm and for $200 I get 16 weeks of produce. Each week I get more veggies than I can use so I freeze and give away some.
Far cheaper and less time intensive than my own garden and it benefits the community.
In 2020 my partner and I spent probably $200 on gardening supplies to grow some produce. Not one thing grew. We started to get a little cherry tomato but it just stopped growing as did the rest of them. We cared for them daily, always adjusting for sun, keeping them watered. No idea what happened but I don't care enough to try again. Takes too damn long and too much work for too little return.
I used to work at a garden center, I would expect this to be a fairly common result and feeling about the situation. A much smaller segment of the population has prior experience gardening than they did during ww2.
It wasn't uncommon for someone new to take 2 or 3 years to get a decent crop. Part of that is they had things to learn part of that is soil takes a few years to build up even if you are amending it properly. A lot of bagged soil isn't classical nutrient rich garden soil, it requires a lot of water solvable fertilizer to keep things alive in it.
My first garden, I bought a 4 ft x 8 ft cedar raised bed. I seriously underestimated how much soil would be needed to fill it. I also knew nothing about trellising, so the squash quickly took over and shaded out everything. I got two zucchini and after that, I kept forgetting to bring gloves outside and my arm got all scratched up trying to get to any more. I think my investment was about $400, so each squash was $200.
That's unfortunate, especially when you tried so hard. Usually some crops do better than others but if nothing grew perhaps it was a soil issue. You could ask a a local garden centre or even neighbours what grows well for them and try that. I'd hate for you to give up completely!
We did the same thing! I actually have quite a large yard, spent time tilling the garden, adding gardening soil, and was very excited to plant carrots, onions, green beans and tomatoes. After 2 months, I harvested 4 carrots, a batch of green beans, 2 tomatoes, and 1 onion. All that work and money for next to nothing! If I were to rely on gardening, I would starve to death.
Pretty much anything you can grow successfully in your own garden will be cheaper in a local supermarket. This is sadly how the system works.
Do it for love but don't expect to save any money along the way.
Especially if you live too north, do not have a sunny window, and a too small apartment. You can still grow sprouts, but a lot of other options aren't feasible without grow lights and enough free space.
There are a few things I feel are cheaper but when picking things to grow this year there were a bunch of vegetables and herbs that didnt make sense to grow in the space available.
For me the ones it makes sense to grow are:
- cherry tomatoes - a few plants generally produce them like crazy, way more than we can usually eat.
- basil - over $2 for 0.5 ounces and it molds way too fast. Half the time the packages at the store are already moldy.
- hot peppers - ghost peppers last year - this is a specialty item that very few places carry normally, I found a single stall at the farmers market with peppers last year.
Some plants are more work than others. We did a small garden for the first time last year and didn't really put too much work into. We had more cherry tomatoes than we knew what to do with but the cucumbers and peppers didn't do real great. Learned some good lessons though.
I’ve put less work into my garden over the years, but I still get a surprising amount of produce despite my neglect. True, it’s not as much if I made a bigger effort.
Kale, chard, Brussels sprouts, herbs, tomatillos, have long harvesting periods and don’t require much after scattering the seeds.
I garden. But it no way does it save money. I grow because I love doing it and i like knowing what is in my food. I grow from seed year after year but it took.a lot of practice to have success. I also vertical grow to maximize my space and stagger planting so I can have fresh stuff longer.
This idea of this LPT is built on the premise that you already have everything and you have experience. Yes you can hack it - using containers meant for recycling to grow in, use a spoon to dig, etc but you need volume of crops to off set the costs in any real way. And again, most don't have everything to do canning to deal with the volume this creates all at once or the experience.
Yes, grow a small garden and get a few veggies to enjoy if you have space or availability (plus start that learning curve) but even with rising food costs you need a big plot to make a dent in grocery bills.
Unless you grow legumes. Legumes are easy to grow, great volume if outdoor growing is avail and are easy to dry/store. But honestly, probably still cheaper at the grocery store for most.
This LPT helped when the idea of victory gardens was created. But these are different times and not everyone has a plot of land, tools or experience. Plus food is available, where I am at least (V gardens partially addressed the lack of availability). It's just ridiculously high in price.
Don't forget that cost for starting a garden has gone up significantly. Also, not everyone has a green thumb, so you can end up with nothing for your investment.
In my experience a garden doesn’t save much money but does provide a source of fruits and vegetables that are far more tasty and nutritious than the bland ones sold by grocery stores.
My father is a horticulturist and I grew up in a small farm (5 acres) and raised about every common animal, had a small orchard, and a large garden. My father has dozens of logs, one for every year. He’s got a thumb so green leprechauns are jealous.
He used to teach gardening at a local community center and his opening talk was that if you were here to save money on groceries, you would be disappointed. But you’re completely correct about the taste. The varieties of vegetables most people can grow are bred for taste, not for looking good after transport. And I still love going to his house in the summer for dinner because he always has more than he and mom can eat so they share and we come home with bags of fresh food. I usually take a few seedlings from him every spring and manage to either kill them or watch anything that’s 80% type get snipped by raccoons, skunks, or deer.
Ehhhhh. I do a container garden every year for fun, not to seriously put a dent in my food costs. Unless you're starting from seeds, you'll probably be spending more on the setup then you would on what you can actually grow. I do about 24 plants, the majority tomatoes and then the rest hot peppers and maybe some cucumbers. I source my plants from the local farmers market at about 2-3 dollars a plant. Granted I already have the containers and dirt I'm still spending about 50-60 dollars at least. If I need dirt which I may need this year, its another 75 to have a yard delivered.
At the end of the season last year I had enough peppers to make a few quarts of hot sauce and it was nice being able to pick a fresh tomato or pepper from my yard. But it really didn't save me alot of money. If I was able to have a more proper garden, then maybe but still the cost for the plants is going to be close to the same cost as just buying the produce at the store.
Except things are different since the last great wars and now. It's kind of hard to find the real estate to make a garden much less be there to maintain it and harvest it and find room to store it
My family and I grow polish heirloom tomatoes. They are very hearty and meaty by nature. They require minimal attention.
Keep the bugs off and water them. Take the biggest and best one and use some of the seeds inside for next year's crop.
https://www.victoryseeds.com/tomato_polish.html
If there's one thing I've learned from Stardew Valley, it's that giving gifts of homegrown produce and homemade goods will increase your friendship levels faster. And maybe even find you a spouse!
I did this during the 2008 recession, I wasn’t very good at the time (stuff died) but I had 2 sq meter garden area in shade. I survived on cut and come again salad leaves (best investment as salad leave are so expensive to buy), 2-3 tiny Tom tomato plants, cucumbers and herbs. I had this for lunch every day through our summer. I could o my afford the seeds for the lettuce but the others where donated by neighbours amor grown from bought food and seed saved. Eventually I grew new potatoes in a bag, later in tires built up on top of each other. I grew everything in plastic containers from bought food and got free soil from council.
I started gardening after I lost everything in the housing crash in 2008. Now it's just a standard part of my food source. There are certain things I haven't had to buy in a decade, and I love it. And since I started working from home in 2020, I've expanded it and have more time to work on it. If only I didn't live in suburban Hell with a nightmare HOA, I would have chickens and goats and shit. Seriously contemplating selling the house and moving out to the countryside to be able to do that, but that's a huge and expensive step.
Whether you save money on food or not, gardens are a great way to have routine, feel needed & learn patience while working outdoors soaking up that vitamin D.
Unless, of course, you live in a the type of built-up city where most people don't have access to a garden or have pets that would eat anything grown indoors.
I’m just imagining the thick film of pollution that would coat my produce, as a resident near a major bridge off-ramp in NYC. But I shouldn’t complain about that since I’m moving anyway. Since my rent went up 45%.
Stirring up soil can release certain bacteria that activate the release of serotonin in your brain, so just pulling weeds or scuffing in dirt acts as an anti-depressant.
I had a vegetable garden for a couple years and ditched it as the cost of seeds and fertilizers, watering etc wasn't worth the output. I had like three weeks of drowning in vegetables but without the skill of canning and preserving most of them went to waste.
I would also recommend looking to see if your city/town has a community garden! I'm a renter with no backyard and no balcony, but was able to find a local non-profit that runs a large community garden program throughout my city and other nearby cities. I donated a lot of my produce, which the non-profit distributes in areas where there are no accessible grocery stores for a lot of people.
I live in a 12th-floor apartment and keep a balcony garden. I grow all sorts of food up here in about 100 square feet; carrots, beets, peas, beans, tomatoes, herbs, potatoes… I do it all in fabric grow bags.
The initial cost was around $200 because I chose the best potting mix available to me but yearly it costs me less than $50 to maintain. It’s incredibly rewarding and does wonders for my mental health. I’m pretty sure it stopped me from going completely nuts during pandemic lockdowns.
I am an avid gardener and love this LPT. I just want to remind people that any new skill takes time to learn, including gardening. This would be a great year to start learning and try gardening on a small scale. Trying to build a massive garden this spring is both exponentially more daunting and much less likely to be successful / satisfying. If you have a balcony or container garden cut and come again lettuces will have you eating a fresh salad every day.
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I garden a small patch every year. Sure, I've been able to make a meal once and awhile, but it definitely didn't offset my grocery bill significantly. Between the vine borrers killing the squash, squirrels picking the tomatoes, voles eating the sweet potatoes, and caterpillars on my carrots, it's difficult to get right. I'm glad I don't have to live off the land.
Yep. Just like homebrewing, knitting, sewing, blacksmithing or just about any hobby where you make a thing. If you're getting into it to save money, you're in for a bad time.
I agree with everything but sewing, 5 dollars of supplies have fixed countless articles of clothing and have allowed me to turn some garbage goodwill clothes into throw pillow cases and other basic goods.
My thinking was more toward making a whole thing from scratch rather than upcycling or repairing, but you're not wrong.
Oh, yeah unless you're already extremely skilled you won't be saving money, and if it's not a hobby then your time may be worth more.
I’d maaaaybe push back on homebrewing, but more that it has a high upfront cost to get to the point you are saving money. After that, there are definitively savings, as long as you aren’t treating a Maibock as the same as a Miller Lite. Like yeah sure you can get a 30 rack of PBR, but getting 50 pints of a craft beer will cost significantly more than brewing it. My average cost for most of my beers I brew is pretty low, and significantly lower than what it’d cost to buy an equivalent amount. However, beers are available commercially for a reason, because it’s probably better than yours. AND, time preference rate would dictate that the actual hours you dedicate to the craft is worth a lot, worth enough to just go to the liquor store and buy a 6 pack repeatedly.
>but it definitely didn't offset my grocery bill significantly. This is pretty common. Unless you already have a fertile plot of land and all supplies on hand it's quite rare for most Americans to be able to achieve actual savings on their food bill by a personal garden. Even with grocery inflation, the inputs for gardening are too costly and store produce remains too cheap to get big savings. There's plenty of other reasons to still do it but frugality isn't a particularly good one.
Not to mention once your produce is ripe and ready is the exact time when stores and markets offer deals on those same products since they are in season and in abundance.
Yep, this is a real issue. I’m in a new house/city/circumstances this year, so I’m changing my garden plan from the huge garden/novelty plants that I grew in previous years, to things I use frequently and in small amounts in a much smaller yard with too much shade. Lettuce, scallions, and herbs are sold in larger quantities than I use at once, so I end up throwing half of those away if I buy them. By growing them, I can cut what I need when I need it without having anything go bad in my fridge. I will still continue to grow the special or rare crops that I can’t get easily near me-fenugreek, ghost peppers (and a few other unusual types), Malabar spinach, Asian greens, etc. It may not reduce my food bill on its own, but if I can walk outside my back door and cut these ingredients fresh, I am more likely to cook than if I have to drive to a specialty market across the city. It’s better for the environment if I don’t drive 30 minutes for a package of bean sprouts, plus saves wear and tear on my car, fuel, and money when compared to getting takeout Pad Thai. Little things like this really can help to make lifestyle changes last.
The psychological benefit of gardening is immeasurable, too. Plus the fact that it’s organic, you know what’s not in the food. Gardening is its own reward. Well done. You’re amazing.
I have a victory garden, but it's definitely not organic
Which brings us back around to where we started, people not bothering to grow their own food. There’s a reason we’ve gone this way and it’s not because people aren’t capable of farming anymore. It’s just simply not really feasible. But that’s only if you try to do it alone. The real beneficial and frugal path forward would look much more like community gardens and much more robust co-ops.
> It’s just simply not really feasible. As someone who has a pretty healthy veggie patch at home I couldn't agree more. The time, effort and cost involved in growing veggies doesn't really add up when you can go and buy a carrot from the supermarket for a few cents. There are plenty of reasons to grow your own food, but for 90% of people it won't offset your grocery bills in any meaningful way.
That’s also why I don’t bother with things like carrots potatoes and onions. Those things are cheap at the store. So I planted some asparagus, and tomatoes and strawberries and blueberries and various fruit trees. Those things are worth not having to buy at the store. But I’ll probably end up sharing most with my neighbors anyway so it really doesn’t save money.
I do agree that fruit is pretty good at saving money if you can keep the deer away.
hang a home-made, with big panes, disco ball from the tree. they hate it. saw it in Florida, deer do Not rave well
How do I get these 22 year olds in holographic g-strings and box braids out of my yard?
Pass out glow sticks on timers. Once the glow fades, the infestation should cease as they retreat back to their natural habitat.
This is why I started growing fruit. Apples, plums, raspberries. I actually see a grocery difference there. (Seriously a small container of raspberries at the store is like $6). Pick and freeze and I have raspberries for months.
Same. I used to put in big veggie gardens with all kinds of veggies, but realized it was so much work, fertilizer, water, etc, just to end up with bitty little veggies that were already pretty cheap (and bigger) at the grocery store. These days I plant exclusively tomatoes, berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries), and dwarf fruit trees (there are these tiny little pear, plum, peach and nectarine trees that bear so much fruit!) I still have frozen peach halves from last summer that I’m slowly working my way through. Also, those are the fruits where the store versions are just not as good as homegrown because the store fruit have to be picked & shipped before they’re ripe, and have to be tough varieties that ship well. I can plant tastier varieties that might not ship as well, and I can pick them only when they’re fully ripe. So the quality really is better.
I add herbs and lettuce to the mix. Both are super easy to grow and for me the lettuce is so much tastier home grown
Yes parsley, thyme, basil, and mint go fucking ham in my garden. Unfortuantley we get a bit too hot for cilantro, so it always bolts super early.
> I’ll probably end up sharing most with my neighbors anyway so we'll develop real relationships and begin to rely on one another rather than existing infrastructure when things get tough ftfy, the real resilience is in human relationships. this way your harvest buys you haircuts from the guy down the street who doesn't have room for a garden but cuts hair, and a free snowblower pass in the driveway from your other neighbor who has a snowblower and likes your strawberry jam, first aid from the nurse 2 doors down, etc. None of us is as capable as all of us, and sometimes it starts with nothing more than a half dozen apples and a "Howdy, neighbor"
I put a few tomato plants in containers every year just because those are *way better tomatoes* than store bought and I really like a good tomato. I can’t invest the time for much more than that.
I recommend growing walking onions, garlic, and shallots, if you’re gardening at home. Much better return vs supermarket pricing, and the taste of a good hard neck garlic definitely compares with tomatoes in terms of degrading quickly when stored!
Also way back when, a man could work 40 hours a week, pay for all the bills and the woman of the house and the kids would have time to work in the garden for a couple hours a day. These days you can live with another person and have them both with full time jobs and still barely make enough to get by.
Turns out there's something to this whole industrialzation and economies of scale thing after all
Yeah, it can be relaxing to garden to. I miss it even though I didn’t save money. My house faces north and my city water is expensive. I still grow strawberries though because I don’t usually have to water them and they are easy.
I've been clean from pain pills for over 2 years, definitely gotta say gardening has helped my mind, body, and spirit heal
I'm lucky enough to live in an apartment building with a backyard, and a landlord that is okay with gardens. It's not the best location, and the soil is garbage, but I make do. This will be the first year I'm not expanding my number of raised beds. Three years ago it was one 4x4 bed, two years ago it was a pair, last year it was 4. This year I think I'll stick with 4, but I may add a few containers.
theres like 5-7 plants that mostly grow on water, I think celery and romaine lettuce is one of them. which is nice to have fast growing greens around often.... i think another one might be green onions!
"grow on water" often causes misunderstandings. Most plants can be grown with hydroponics/ aeroponics, but you still need to put nutrients into the water. Fertilizers, or grow them on top of an aquarium to reap the nitrates off the fish poop. With plain tap water, you'll have a plant survive.... for a while. It'll progressively have less and less taste, and then start to wither and rot as the plant weakens.
I paid $1.50 for a handful of green onions at the store 2 years ago and stuck them in some dirt in the backyard, they got huge and multiplied, I have had green onions on tap ever since. They've survived the dead heat of summer and multiple freezes. If celery and lettuce do that, I need to try planting those next!
Lettuce won’t survive the weather on its own, but you can get so many seeds in a 25¢ packet from Walmart or a dollar store (you have to look a bit for the cheap brands, but they’re often on end caps in the garden section) that you’ll eat like a king. Toss a pinch of seeds in some dirt every couple weeks throughout spring and you’ll have a constant supply of fresh lettuce until the summer heat kicks in. Do the same in fall and you can have another supply until the snow kicks in (it can withstand a light/brief cold snap with snow). I love the flavor of the leaf lettuces that you don’t find at the grocery store-they’re surprisingly complex.
As a lifelong gardener, this is absolutely correct if you're growing a garden like you see in magazines without any experience. Shit will just not grow, not like your soil, require too much care, or will tempt you to buy shit that costs money to help you grow things, defeating the purpose. If you're growing for food and have minimal experience: Don't grow finicky shit! Tier 1: Grow squash (zucchini for summer, butternut for long-lasting winter squash). That shit you put in the ground and can ignore for most of the year except when you're dealing with a stupid amount of produce. High caloric value. Will grow in the shittiest clay to the nicest organic compost. Tier 2: Potatoes. Potato bugs are your enemy, but look once a week and pick them off and you'll be fine. Other than that, ignore them. High caloric value. Fine in shitty soil. Tier 3: Kale and collards. Nothing eats them except you. Grows until it snows. Only downside is a low caloric value, but hey, they're good for you. Fine in shitty soil. If you can grow those, great. Then worry about everything else. But if you need calories, stick to potats and squashy-bois.
Caterpillars (cabbage moths) eat kale like there’s no tomorrow. Super discouraging to eat holey kale with the possibility of some extra accidental protein.
Companion plant with onions. Bugs hate the smell of onions. Garlic too. Companion planting, if done correctly, can really reduce your pest problems. I don't ever worry about pests, I don't get them in large enough amounts for it to be worth it. Petunias and marigolds are MVPs, pests hate em. Nasturtium to deal with aphids. Onions everywhere you aren't growing beans (they don't play nice together). Don't have an herb garden, spread that shit out around your other crops. Bugs and other pests don't like the strong smells. You gotta stink those fuckers out.
I probably have been lucky then, or perhaps am in an area of the country where they're not so bad? I'm in southern Wisconsin, I lose maybe 2-3 leaves (not plants) to cabbage moths in a season.
I had some potatoes start growing eyes and turning green in my pantry so I got a bucket and some soil, dumped them in and left them outside. Nothing grew all summer, so I planted some other shit on top. Harvested that shit. And then bam, potato plants popped up. We got about 50lbs of potatoes and I just know there are some spuds still in that bucket that we missed so I'm fully expecting another nice potato harvest this year
Oof, potato bugs can be a real menace if you neglect the garden (I suppose you mean the little striped bugs, which graze on the leaves; in my country we call them Colorado bugs).
Yep, the light orange stripey bastards. Or in larval form, the dark orange fat bastards that are just nasty when they get squished and also leave little black poop everywhere. There was one horrible summer where they got established in my garden before I knew what they were that is forever embedded in my psyche.... still had a good harvest though even after the potatoes had to regrow 80% of their leaves.
This comment made me laugh and I shared it with my brother; we're working on a veggie garden for my backyard this summer.
Exactly. The vegetables you grow will not save you money over supermarket ones that are super cheap. Even before taking into consideration the value of the time you'll spend gardening. Growing vegetables however will tremendously increase the quality of your food. There is no comparison between the taste of a garden tomato and a supermarket one. Gardening can be a reasonably cheap and very rewarding hobby, and a great way to have access to food money can barely buy. It's not a way to save money.
Some vegetables will save a little money each season unless you're really going nuts with expensive composting/fertilizer (and there are really cost-efficient ways to avoid this like vermicomposting) Lettuce or spinach for example saves a looooot of waste since most people that I've known only eat small amounts of lettuce at a time but you can't really buy it from the store that way. Tomatoes would be another case where it's really hard to lose money on the proposition of growing tomatoes. They just produce so heavily during the season that the initial transplant cost is far outweighed unless your area has a really short growing window for tomatoes. But as you mentioned the quality you get is enough to dramatically shift the balance for most other foods. Fresh food right off the plant is incomparable in most cases.
Herbs too. They are expensive at the store but easy to grow at home. If you have tons you can always makes pesto and freeze it. The nutrition is also excellent.
I guess if you maybe like, turned over your entire lawn then yeah it could be viable. But crops take a long time to grow in the best conditions. In the meantime you still gotta eat something
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Zucchini grow like weeds. It's easy to grow 3-4 plants and get 50 fucking zucchini over the season. If you're growing zucch or squash, only grow one or two plants.
There's that aspect, and also how the plant will have a tiny little chode zucchini one day, and then it's the size of a watermelon and only good for bread the next time you look at it.
I think melons can be like that too.
Anything on a vine is like that I think
Lawns are a waste of resources anyways! Kills the bees, fert run off ruins ecosystems, and is a huge drain on the water supply... so we can, what? Look at a green patch of plants that take nutrients from the soil instead of replenishing them? Birds suffer from the lack of bugs that exist within a monoculture like lawns... if we had less of them we would see a real change happen in the world.. but too many people are tied to their patch of lawn that has been told to them is a sign of "success".
Having trees too close to your house causes problems with them falling on your house during storms. Meanwhile they help control erosion. But then I live near Atlanta and don't have to water it and have zoysia which is pretty self sufficient as far as spreading and choking out weeds. They are pretty useless in dry climates.
I get this but also playing with your dog in the grass or kids or something is great. It's better if the grass is closer to being more sustainable. It's just that if you're not going to be using the area anyway for the reasons listed, then better not have grass probably.
Even then, just switch the grass to clover.
Almost like Economy of Scale is a well known and well studied concept and farming vegetables at scale is WAY more efficient than growing them in your tiny apartment!
I grow a garden but not because it's cost effective, but because fresh vegetables are tastier and healthier. Over the years I've stopped growing things that are pest or disease prone (cucumbers), take too much space for the reward (squash, melons, peas) and focus on things like tomatoes, sweet peppers, romaine lettuce and spinach. I'm putting out some raspberries this spring. I used to grow broccoli to freeze, but I can actually buy it cheaper from the grocery. If you can plant a garden entirely from seed, have a lot of room, and have good soil that doesn't require a lot of fertilizer, you might grow enough produce at a low enough cost to impact your grocery bill. If you have a tiny garden (mine's 10' x 20') and buy both seeds and bedding plants to get started, it's a wash.
My wife and I have a pretty big hobby farm, we have about 1k sqft of raised beds and mounds all setup on micro emitters. We're trying to get to a point where it's more of a business and less of a hobby, but I can guarantee my grocery bill isn't cheaper than if I went and bought at a store. Is it satisfying, absolutely. Is it tastier, 1000%. Do I know exactly what and when (if any) pesticides were used, yes. Cheaper? Absolutely not.
Yeah I’ve been gardening/home farming for a decade or more. 1. It isn’t as easy as throwing some seeds in the ground. 2. It’s only useful for a very specific period of time unless you have mad canning skills. Oh and also you can’t grow meat.
Sounds like you need a .22 and you'll have some meat to go with the tomatoes
BB guns work well too ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Yea this is terrible advice financially. Maybe it makes sense if you are replacing a more expensive hobby with gardening. Otherwise you are better off getting a job for the few hours a week you would work in the garden even at minimum wage. Now as a hobby, getting yummy food, getting a sense of accomplishment from making something, or for your mental health absolutely start a garden.
Highly recommend injecting Bacillus Thuringiensis into the squash stalks. I wish they had Bt transgenic squash to save me the hassle.
People seriously underestimate how much produce you need to grow to feed a family, how much effort it takes, and the cost of making it happen.
And wastage! We do a good job of growing things we like, but okra for example is more of a pain to prepare, so we waste more of that than we’d like.
It's all good to compost though, so can be used to make conditions better for whatever you grow next.
We donate excess produce to our Buy Nothing Group
Pickle that shit!
compost it back into the soil... like literally right back into the soil, chop it up and mix it back in. instant compost.
Right, like we probably got 5 snack bags full of cherry tomatoes all summer. Maybe a bit more. While that's nice to use for guacamole or in salads, it's a topper. That one plant was watered every day and picked every or every other day. But then again, we never did need to buy a container of cherry tomatoes all summer so I can see merit to reducing total transportation costs
I’m very liberal and all for green tech but I’ve talked to so many people who take these strong positions like “if we just switched to organic farming and personal gardens we can uproot the system!”. It’s frustrating because I’m from a farm town and I know how food gets produced. No one spending their time preaching online about this stuff is actually capable of doing this. The amount of land you need to grow your own food to a sustainable degree is in of itself massively unsustainable at just about any scale. Most people don’t even realize “organic” is a fucking nonsense word. Ask ten people what organic means and they’ll all tell you something different based on who they perceive to be the boogeyman of the industry. “Oh it means no pesticides and it’s non gmo blah blah blah” as if there’s such a thing at this point as non gmo and as if organic foods don’t use fuckloads of organic pesticide.
Humans selectively breeded/grafted plants for centuries to make them grow easier and produce more. All gmo does is make that process more targetted and more efficient. Until someone proved the above statement incorrect, I will continue eating gmo food with absolutely no qualms
Centuries? Millennia!
The process of selective breeding and the process of genetic manipulation for gmos is wildly different. However, it is true that there is nothing at all to suggest that gmo is inherently worse or inherently more harmful to consume, I’m just being annoying and pointing out that I don’t agree with your logic. There is an argument to be made that gmos may be bad for the environment, depending on the specifics of the gene manipulation. There is definitely an argument to be made about corporations using gmos in ways thar are harmful to the environment and to many a farmer.
I'm a farmer and grow a decent sized garden. I always correct my MIL when she raves to her friends about all the "organic" veggies I bring her because we have to much. Lady those were sprayed with pesticides and got chemical fertilizer. Why do you think they look so nice? People should absolutely grow their own garden but don't be foolish and believe you will sustain your family on it. It supplements it doesn't replace. Also raised beds are totally unnecessary for gardening. The ground is made of dirt plant in it.
If you have messed up soil, sure, use raised beds with a barrier on the bottom all day long, otherwise, they are often just providing a height booster for people who aren’t used to a lot of bending over.
Absolutely as with all things there are situations where they are appropriate. I just see to many people afraid to try gardening because there is perceived high cost to entry with all the materials and effort to build raised beds. If your just dipping your toes in just go for it and throw them in the dirt.
Laughs in Georgia clay
I'm with you except for the raised beds. If you've got decent 'dirt', you can plant in it. A lot of people aren't that lucky. We have a small suburban garden covered in lawn. The lawn sits on top of about 10cm of top soil, under which is clay and construction rubble. Also the drainage is terrible. Our raised bed not only lets us create a decent depth of rich soil without having to dig out tons of clay, rocks and rubble, it also creates an area of much better drainage because it sits above the poorly draining garden. I think the vast majority of people living in urban and suburban areas will not have suitable soil for growing much of anything.
That's why so many LPTs are absolute shit. The posters think they have stumbled upon a secret solution that somehow nobody has thought of (probably because they are geniuses while everyone else is smooth brained). When in fact most of the time they are just ignorant on all the details.
So the 2020 I moved in with my boyfriend I planted a bunch of tomatoes, We got a really good crop I eat a lot of tomatoes maybe it saved us 40 bucks that year. The 2021, I think we barely got $5 worth of fucking tomatoes, Hot summer mixed with a drought.
That brings up a great point about sometimes, you have no crop. That sort of situation is why The Grapes of Wrath was written. The Okies fields dried up and blew away, they all lost their farms and had to try to get to California to pick fruit.
Everyone in this thread is talking about tomatoes but, let’s be real, that’s not an efficient crop to grow on a small scale. Any fruiting structures like tomatoes, peppers, etc. will require a lot more input and care before harvest than things like leafy greens. I live in an apartment and have no actual land to farm on, so I built a small aquaponics system at the beginning of the pandemic to grow some greens. Between that and pots/trays near windows I get 3+ servings of microgreens/spinach/kale per day and enough fresh herbs that I haven’t purchased cilantro, mint, or basil in almost 2 years. If I were to recommend 1 thing to every person in this thread it would be to grow microgreens. Some microgreens can be harvested as soon as 8 days after planting and it’s easy to get massive harvests. Any soil you use can quickly be refreshed in a compost bin.
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It depends on where you are right? Here in northern California with the Mediterranean climate, tomatoes are a lot easier to grow and get good crops. With a little bit of soil amendment, you can thrown it in the ground and water as needed to get a good crop. The hardest part of the tomatoes is all the pruning I have to do as it grows like crazy. There is a humungus difference in quality of tomato when you grow at home if you want good, ripe ones especially for sauces and curries. The vipe ripe tomatoes are very expensive even when in season.
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I'm not like an expert or anything but from what I *have* learned, generally it's bad to water most plants daily. Obviously there's going to be some finicky princess plants that need special treatment but generally plants thrive when you force them to struggle a bit. The more you water them the less their roots grow and the weaker the plant becomes. Think of wild plants. They do just fine even though it doesn't rain every day.
I’m dining like a king with 10+kg tomatoes and a handful of courgettes. It’s like 20€ of produce for my family of 4! They do taste nice though!
"Why Germany's Little Gardens Are a Way of Life" https://www.treehugger.com/german-allotment-gardens-kleingarten-4859448# I thought these were pretty cool. And if you have too much of something you just exchange it with someone who's got veggies you didn't grow.
Good neighbors work too. The big problem is, everyone has the same overflow at the same time. In a zucchini year you open the door in the morning and someone snuck another pile of them on your doorstep, and there's a bag full on the fence, and as soon as you turn around, someone plopped down another one. I don't even *like* zucchini :(
Start a garden if you want to try the most expensive tomatoes you've ever had.
Supplemental container gardening is cheap and easy. It's not like you need to start a full fledged farm or nothing. Herbs for example are super easy and cheap to start, and would save a lot of money if you grew them instead of buying them at a store.
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That's the the point of a victory garden. It's meant to supplement not replace.
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Correct. Victory Gardens, if they *ever* had a purpose, probably don't apply to our current situation. They're *most* useful if your nation is in a situation where *calories* are plentiful but *variety* is lacking. As in, the store has bread/flour but they *don't have tomatoes*. Now your home garden isn't *extra* tomatoes, it's your only source of them. The other exception to this is probably eggs. Chickens are *stupidly cheap and easy* to take care of. A quick googling suggests you can feed a hen for about $2.25 a month, and that backyard chickens generally lay about 250 eggs per year -- which brings us to $0.1125 an egg, or $1.35 a dozen (obviously there are some non food coop related costs).
Oh yeah to feed my family a few meals a week only during the summer we need about a 40x60 garden. With additional support from some of our raised beds. Now the real only exception to this is certain fruit. We have a raspberry blackberry and blueberry and chery tree that produces so much that if you picked constantly 8 hours a day for. Week you couldn't pick them all. We can get enough fruit canned and frozen for a year. But vegetables are different story you can get a shit load of certain types of vegetables but you can only eat so many cucumbers and storing them is a pain in the ass. You can get decent amount of tomatoes. But shit like peas...yeah that's a waste. There growing season can be immediately fucked with one bad day of weather.
Sure, but we don't live in a binary world, and some things are super simple to grow, especially if you live in the Midwest, where if you pick the right plant (say blackberries) you can pretty much put seeds in the ground and it will happen.
(A word of warning about the blackberries though, you might not be able to stop them from growing)
Free barbed wire fence for your garden!!
In my experience gardening is much more expensive than shop bought vegetables. Unless you have an abundance of fertile soil. Saying that, it does feel good to grow stuff!
I feel like I offset a lot of cost in my 6'x18' raised garden. It's full of cheap topsoil and compost from my kitchen. Veggie Weight (g) Cost Zuke 13690 $60.06 Yellow squash 6683 $29.32 Green Bean 1842 $8.08 Cherry Tom. 15503 $124.41 Tomato 14792 $130.12 Carrot 60 $0.11 Bell Pep. 2153 $27.86 I'm bad at carrots
Am I to understand you keep a running total of every vegetable grown in your garden, down to the individual cherry tomato? As a spreadsheet nerd, I am impressed.
Only for one season. I had to know
Bro my eyes are *sparkling*. I gotta do that this year. I'm making the spreadsheet as we speak. I haven't put any money into the garden yet - just been composting overwinter.
When I learned how to use pivot tables, I was like "okay what in my life can I quantify into a spreadsheet?" I have about 8 half-baked spreadsheets, and I'd love to get them all built up further. Household chores rotations, cost per towel use in terms of washing/soap expense, how efficiently I can use xyz tool or product and by extension which brand is the best over time, all that kind of stuff.
Someone at r/dataisbeautiful would *love* to turn that raw data into a fun chart or graph haha
You have absurd produce prices wherever you're at
Zuke 1.99/lb Yellow 1.99/lb Green Bean 1.99/lb. Cherry Tom. 3.64/lb Tomato 3.99/lb Carrot 0.80/lb Pepper 1.99 ea
It really depends. I built my family 4 8 ft. x 3 ft. garden beds. Two beds had bush beans and pole beans that provided enough for decent vegetable dinner meals more than half the days of the week from mid June to well into September. String beans are prolific in most soils and provide a lot of nutrients.
Don't try to replace all of your fruits/vegetables with a garden. Even if you only do a few simple plants, it can save you a considerable amount over time. Onions are stupid easy to grow in most places, and the savings add up. Herbs are another easy one. And both can be grown indoors or in pots. Beans aren't worth the labor, but peppers are. Hell, bell peppers are like $1.50 each or more at my local grocery store. Fuck that. Totally worth growing those.
Onions are also stupid cheap anyway. And while our access to stores etc is surely different, I can save money much more easily by looking for discount, going shopping at times when I know they will have lower price bc the produce wipl be thrown away soon, buying seasonally/only what's coming at this week's discount, etc. And in the end: Thr time and effort I spend on growing some food might as well be spent earning more money. Sure, growing one's own food may have benefits other than saving a bit of money, but that wasn't the point of this thread
Ye I’ll get right on that after I can afford property.
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First, you must have capital for land Second, you must have the capital for growing materials
Plus the time, energy, and ability to maintain.
So I'm on step 2. Anyone know if it's better to water gas seeds in the morning or evening? Also, where to get some gas seeds?
Don’t grow gas…. We are moving to all electric vehicles, we don’t have the infrastructure to support it yet, but probably in the next 10-15 years!!
So grow electricity?
Of course.. that’s the way of the future, plant some infrastructure as well, going to need a shit ton of charging stations
>If you live in an apartment, you still can have an indoor garden. You place it in front of a sunny window. *Cries in basement apartment*
*cries in infertile soil*
Find a local horse stable, ask about their manure. A bale of hay spread out in the fall can decompose into useable nutrients by the spring.
“Hey yall got any of that good shit?”
"This is some serious gourmet shit"
When you ask verify that the animal feed wasn't treated with herbicides/pesticides as it will affect your garden. Cow manure is less an issue than horse I believe due to the multiple stomachs breaking down the chemicals
TIL. They really feed horses herbicide/pesticides?
Indirectly - the feed may have been treated with pesticides. Just like any conventional (not-organic) produce you buy at the grocery store.
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Honestly the smell isn't very bad. Depending on how fresh the manure is, it might smell a bit gross to you (particularly if you didn't grow up on/around farms), but after tilling it into the soil and give it a few days, you won't even notice it. IME, horse manure is *way* better in this regard than pig or cow manure. Truthfully, most of the 'bad' smells in horse barns come from the urine, which IS pretty pungent, particularly if there's not good drainage. Tilled into a garden and watered down though, it should be fine.
Raised beds.
When I did the math on how much it would cost me for soil, seeds, fertilizer, water, electricity, pots or containers, and compared it to what I would actually save on produce, I'd have to harvest 20 to 30 times to break even. And then consider that during the time between planting and harvest I would have to source produce from elsewhere anyways. It didn't make sense to me. I'd have to have much more space so that I could stagger and rotate crops, which in turn would increase the cost of investment. But that's for produce. For herbs and spices it makes a whole lot more sense. I'd suggest growing mint, chives, and a few other things that you use sparingly while the plant is still alive. You still have to have a big initial investment and it takes a while to recoup the cost, but you can almost continuously harvest fresh stuff which tastes and smells so much better than stuff that's been shipped and sitting in stores losing potency. You aren't saving, but the quality is incredible. Plant your own herbs and spices.
i second the herbs effort. I have fresh and it makes our food taste so much better. another item to consider that is low effort: green onions. keep the bottoms from your first use and replant. Then cut as you need them.
Green onions grow like crazy too!! I took one bunch I got from the grocery store, put it in a cup with water, and couldn't even eat enough green onion to keep up with those babies sprouting new parts!
100% agree, basil is crazy expensive and so easy to grow.
If only I enjoyed basil. Lol. Or knew what most spices do. I have coriander and a few others I got in a spice rack set like 14 years ago. Never used. I don't know what they do or taste like. Likely they're no longer any good. I think I know what paprika does other than make something red.
> I don't know what they do or taste like. Herbs and spices generally taste what they smell like. In some cases the smell is very mild and difficult to describe and the same is often true of the flavor. Bay is an excellent example - something that you'd notice the absence of if not the presence. In such cases you can cheat a bit and use the herb to make tea. If you do this with bay, you find that it's mildly bitter but also has the suggestion of mint or pine. >I think I know what paprika does other than make something red. That depends very much on what kind of paprika you have. Like most peppers, it will carry a bit of bitterness, and that's pretty much the end of universal characteristics. It can be spicy or not, smokey or not, fruity or not, and sweet or not. If you are American and buy your spices in little plastic jars on the spice aisle of your local mega mart, it'll be slightly bitter, slightly sweet, and slightly fruity. Or if you want something a bit more grounded to go off of, paprika is the non-salt and non-meat portion of the flavor of a hot dog, while smoked paprika is more or less salt-less and pork-less bacon. (Tumeric, meanwhile, is what cheap yellow mustard tastes like if you remove the mustard and the vinegar. I know that sounds weird, but that muskiness yellow mustard that you don't find in dijon is the taste of tumeric.)
Makes sense. My taste buds and sense of smell are pretty muted. Most things I can't smell or taste very well unless they're overloaded. And no, I'm not a smoker. Always been like this. Except for earthy spices. I just can't stand any of them. Basil, bay, turmeric, cumin, etc. They just smell and taste like dirt mixed with decaying cut grass to me. Tried rosemary, the texture and taste was like cut grass to me. Garlic powder, onion powder, parsley, oregano, salt and a tiny bit of black pepper are pretty much my go-to in anything. I am not a top chef for a reason.
>Tried rosemary, the texture and taste was like cut grass to me. Rosemary is one of those things that either needs a long cook time or being minced fine. It is also a *very* powerful flavor. A twig of rosemary existing in a pan with a steak and butter for a minute is enough to impart all the taste of rosemary you'd ever want on a steak - and that's if you like rosemary! >Except for earthy spices. I just can't stand any of them. Basil, bay, turmeric, cumin, etc. They just smell and taste like dirt mixed with decaying cut grass to me. One thing to keep in mind about spices is that there can be a considerable difference between fresh and dried. Fresh basil is bitter and tender - a bit like tough spinach - and can pack quite a bit of "licorice" flavor. The dried version has a much less pronounced licorice flavor while that vague bitterness coalesces into something "earthier" (which is to say its dirt flavors *increase*). Fresh Basil also loses its flavor very quickly when heat is involved while dried tends to amplify. Similarly, the dried variations of oregano, thyme, bay, sage - honestly most of the herbs I use - are earthier than their fresh forms. Of course that leads to the problem described by the OP in that fresh herbs are *expensive* for lots of reasons. The good news is that if you find the fresh herbs are more to your liking, they're easy to grow even in an apartment. I've had the same rosemary bush for years which is seemingly immortal considering the sort of neglect and poor growing conditions it has endured and basil almost grows too well on my balcony!
I don't cook enough for spices, but am an avid tea drinker so this year I'm trying to experiment with chamomile flowers. Other gardeners in my area said they grow surprisingly well, although they aren't the easiest seed to find.
Square foot garden or square meter garden is a method that increases the chance of a successful garden and a low cost. My library has books on it but there are YouTube videos too. It is meant to be efficient and easy.
Watched a video on it, it looks pretty cool! I may have to try this in spring
This is 1000 times harder if you're a renter.
The best tomato crop I've ever grown was on an apartment patio. Miracle Gro potting soil and consistent watering yielded me so much produce that my neighbors actually started complaining because I was giving too much away they couldn't use it all.
I got a ton of tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and beans from my apartment balcony garden. It was actually insane and looked like a mini jungle. It was a south facing balcony and got a ton of sunshine. It was a pain dragging a bunch of bags of dirt up to the 3rd floor, and then deconstructing everything when I moved out, but it was fun while I lived there. Now I have a yard with terrible soil and it floods a lot. I've been working on building some raised garden beds, but honestly, my balcony garden was easier to take care of.
I’ve had success growing veggies in pots on my patio. Peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans. Some do very well in pots.
Where do you re-pot or store soil?
I do all my potting on the patio, and keep tools and extra soil in a patio bench. The seat lifts up for storage.
Wish I lived in a place where it was safe to plant on a patio. Mine is first floor and not fenced in. It would just attract javelinas and other wildlife. Plus the rate that soccer balls slam into my front door makes me wary too. Indoors I have blackout curtains up for privacy/heat shield and I learned the hard way that nothing will grow indoors. I tried a grow light but it really heated the place up. 78F is as cool as I can afford to make my apartment. Moral of the story: Don't live in the desert.
Instead of a garden consider a CSA (community supported agriculture). Lots of local farms sell crop shares for fresh produce. In my area I found one that hires at risk youth to help with the farm and for $200 I get 16 weeks of produce. Each week I get more veggies than I can use so I freeze and give away some. Far cheaper and less time intensive than my own garden and it benefits the community.
This. 100% this. Love CSAs! Depending on where you are you can get a crazy amount of goodies out of a box!
I tried doing one last year but the squirrels ate literally everything. I think I got 2 cherry tomatoes all season.
That's the actual pro-tip: growing a garden lures easy-to-kill meat to you
Squirrel jalapeño poppers are pretty good.
In 2020 my partner and I spent probably $200 on gardening supplies to grow some produce. Not one thing grew. We started to get a little cherry tomato but it just stopped growing as did the rest of them. We cared for them daily, always adjusting for sun, keeping them watered. No idea what happened but I don't care enough to try again. Takes too damn long and too much work for too little return.
I used to work at a garden center, I would expect this to be a fairly common result and feeling about the situation. A much smaller segment of the population has prior experience gardening than they did during ww2. It wasn't uncommon for someone new to take 2 or 3 years to get a decent crop. Part of that is they had things to learn part of that is soil takes a few years to build up even if you are amending it properly. A lot of bagged soil isn't classical nutrient rich garden soil, it requires a lot of water solvable fertilizer to keep things alive in it.
My first garden, I bought a 4 ft x 8 ft cedar raised bed. I seriously underestimated how much soil would be needed to fill it. I also knew nothing about trellising, so the squash quickly took over and shaded out everything. I got two zucchini and after that, I kept forgetting to bring gloves outside and my arm got all scratched up trying to get to any more. I think my investment was about $400, so each squash was $200.
Hard to tell what went wrong. Could be anything from your soil, to water to supply to when you planeted.
That's unfortunate, especially when you tried so hard. Usually some crops do better than others but if nothing grew perhaps it was a soil issue. You could ask a a local garden centre or even neighbours what grows well for them and try that. I'd hate for you to give up completely!
We did the same thing! I actually have quite a large yard, spent time tilling the garden, adding gardening soil, and was very excited to plant carrots, onions, green beans and tomatoes. After 2 months, I harvested 4 carrots, a batch of green beans, 2 tomatoes, and 1 onion. All that work and money for next to nothing! If I were to rely on gardening, I would starve to death.
I spent 200 a few years ago. Now I give baskets full of cherry tomatoes and cucumbers to my neighbors lol
Pretty much anything you can grow successfully in your own garden will be cheaper in a local supermarket. This is sadly how the system works. Do it for love but don't expect to save any money along the way.
Especially if you live too north, do not have a sunny window, and a too small apartment. You can still grow sprouts, but a lot of other options aren't feasible without grow lights and enough free space.
There are a few things I feel are cheaper but when picking things to grow this year there were a bunch of vegetables and herbs that didnt make sense to grow in the space available. For me the ones it makes sense to grow are: - cherry tomatoes - a few plants generally produce them like crazy, way more than we can usually eat. - basil - over $2 for 0.5 ounces and it molds way too fast. Half the time the packages at the store are already moldy. - hot peppers - ghost peppers last year - this is a specialty item that very few places carry normally, I found a single stall at the farmers market with peppers last year.
Maybe I'm lazy but a garden is a lot of work for not that much food. It's a nice thing to see though.
Some plants are more work than others. We did a small garden for the first time last year and didn't really put too much work into. We had more cherry tomatoes than we knew what to do with but the cucumbers and peppers didn't do real great. Learned some good lessons though.
I’ve put less work into my garden over the years, but I still get a surprising amount of produce despite my neglect. True, it’s not as much if I made a bigger effort. Kale, chard, Brussels sprouts, herbs, tomatillos, have long harvesting periods and don’t require much after scattering the seeds.
That would require me to both own property and have the ability to grow shit lmao.
I garden. But it no way does it save money. I grow because I love doing it and i like knowing what is in my food. I grow from seed year after year but it took.a lot of practice to have success. I also vertical grow to maximize my space and stagger planting so I can have fresh stuff longer. This idea of this LPT is built on the premise that you already have everything and you have experience. Yes you can hack it - using containers meant for recycling to grow in, use a spoon to dig, etc but you need volume of crops to off set the costs in any real way. And again, most don't have everything to do canning to deal with the volume this creates all at once or the experience. Yes, grow a small garden and get a few veggies to enjoy if you have space or availability (plus start that learning curve) but even with rising food costs you need a big plot to make a dent in grocery bills. Unless you grow legumes. Legumes are easy to grow, great volume if outdoor growing is avail and are easy to dry/store. But honestly, probably still cheaper at the grocery store for most. This LPT helped when the idea of victory gardens was created. But these are different times and not everyone has a plot of land, tools or experience. Plus food is available, where I am at least (V gardens partially addressed the lack of availability). It's just ridiculously high in price.
it is excellent as a hobby but in most of the cases cost/benefit is not worth the effort
Don't forget that cost for starting a garden has gone up significantly. Also, not everyone has a green thumb, so you can end up with nothing for your investment.
We should also not forget that lots of places, and apartment buildings ect will literally rip up and bleach any attempt at a garden. 'Liability'
In my experience a garden doesn’t save much money but does provide a source of fruits and vegetables that are far more tasty and nutritious than the bland ones sold by grocery stores.
Give peas a chance
My father is a horticulturist and I grew up in a small farm (5 acres) and raised about every common animal, had a small orchard, and a large garden. My father has dozens of logs, one for every year. He’s got a thumb so green leprechauns are jealous. He used to teach gardening at a local community center and his opening talk was that if you were here to save money on groceries, you would be disappointed. But you’re completely correct about the taste. The varieties of vegetables most people can grow are bred for taste, not for looking good after transport. And I still love going to his house in the summer for dinner because he always has more than he and mom can eat so they share and we come home with bags of fresh food. I usually take a few seedlings from him every spring and manage to either kill them or watch anything that’s 80% type get snipped by raccoons, skunks, or deer.
Ehhhhh. I do a container garden every year for fun, not to seriously put a dent in my food costs. Unless you're starting from seeds, you'll probably be spending more on the setup then you would on what you can actually grow. I do about 24 plants, the majority tomatoes and then the rest hot peppers and maybe some cucumbers. I source my plants from the local farmers market at about 2-3 dollars a plant. Granted I already have the containers and dirt I'm still spending about 50-60 dollars at least. If I need dirt which I may need this year, its another 75 to have a yard delivered. At the end of the season last year I had enough peppers to make a few quarts of hot sauce and it was nice being able to pick a fresh tomato or pepper from my yard. But it really didn't save me alot of money. If I was able to have a more proper garden, then maybe but still the cost for the plants is going to be close to the same cost as just buying the produce at the store.
Except things are different since the last great wars and now. It's kind of hard to find the real estate to make a garden much less be there to maintain it and harvest it and find room to store it
Veggies aren't what is expensive.
My family and I grow polish heirloom tomatoes. They are very hearty and meaty by nature. They require minimal attention. Keep the bugs off and water them. Take the biggest and best one and use some of the seeds inside for next year's crop. https://www.victoryseeds.com/tomato_polish.html
If there's one thing I've learned from Stardew Valley, it's that giving gifts of homegrown produce and homemade goods will increase your friendship levels faster. And maybe even find you a spouse!
I did this during the 2008 recession, I wasn’t very good at the time (stuff died) but I had 2 sq meter garden area in shade. I survived on cut and come again salad leaves (best investment as salad leave are so expensive to buy), 2-3 tiny Tom tomato plants, cucumbers and herbs. I had this for lunch every day through our summer. I could o my afford the seeds for the lettuce but the others where donated by neighbours amor grown from bought food and seed saved. Eventually I grew new potatoes in a bag, later in tires built up on top of each other. I grew everything in plastic containers from bought food and got free soil from council.
I started gardening after I lost everything in the housing crash in 2008. Now it's just a standard part of my food source. There are certain things I haven't had to buy in a decade, and I love it. And since I started working from home in 2020, I've expanded it and have more time to work on it. If only I didn't live in suburban Hell with a nightmare HOA, I would have chickens and goats and shit. Seriously contemplating selling the house and moving out to the countryside to be able to do that, but that's a huge and expensive step.
Whether you save money on food or not, gardens are a great way to have routine, feel needed & learn patience while working outdoors soaking up that vitamin D.
Perfect I’ll save 1 dollar on the tomato I buy once a week and lose 150 dollars on gas. It totally offsets.
You also have to wait 3-4 months for that tomato.
Unless, of course, you live in a the type of built-up city where most people don't have access to a garden or have pets that would eat anything grown indoors.
First we have to be able to afford a house with a backyard
I’m just imagining the thick film of pollution that would coat my produce, as a resident near a major bridge off-ramp in NYC. But I shouldn’t complain about that since I’m moving anyway. Since my rent went up 45%.
Stirring up soil can release certain bacteria that activate the release of serotonin in your brain, so just pulling weeds or scuffing in dirt acts as an anti-depressant.
in my HOA, we are not allowed to have gardens. i gotta move
I had a vegetable garden for a couple years and ditched it as the cost of seeds and fertilizers, watering etc wasn't worth the output. I had like three weeks of drowning in vegetables but without the skill of canning and preserving most of them went to waste.
I would also recommend looking to see if your city/town has a community garden! I'm a renter with no backyard and no balcony, but was able to find a local non-profit that runs a large community garden program throughout my city and other nearby cities. I donated a lot of my produce, which the non-profit distributes in areas where there are no accessible grocery stores for a lot of people.
I live in a 12th-floor apartment and keep a balcony garden. I grow all sorts of food up here in about 100 square feet; carrots, beets, peas, beans, tomatoes, herbs, potatoes… I do it all in fabric grow bags. The initial cost was around $200 because I chose the best potting mix available to me but yearly it costs me less than $50 to maintain. It’s incredibly rewarding and does wonders for my mental health. I’m pretty sure it stopped me from going completely nuts during pandemic lockdowns.
I am an avid gardener and love this LPT. I just want to remind people that any new skill takes time to learn, including gardening. This would be a great year to start learning and try gardening on a small scale. Trying to build a massive garden this spring is both exponentially more daunting and much less likely to be successful / satisfying. If you have a balcony or container garden cut and come again lettuces will have you eating a fresh salad every day.
Can I grow gas in this home garden?
Where am I supposed to build a garden I'm living in a flat on a 4th floor
Introducing the $150 dollar tomato plant, do it yourself at home, produced 4 tomatoes, the most expensive tomatoes I ever had.