This assumes that gardening is free. Which it is not. Still better to grow your own though.
It is also labour intensive and not that easy. This year, I must have put dozens of hours of labour to get 8 tomatoes, 5 cucumbers and some chives. We got too much rain.
Let me encourage you to attempt deep water hydroponic growing of those tomatoes. Easiest fucking thing I’ve ever done, I only have to check them once a week to refill the water other than that I don’t do shit and I get nice large cherry tomato harvests.
You basically just need a large barrel or bucket, an air pump, and a little air Stone from like a fish tank or something. Plant goes into the water air bubbler goes down so that the roots don’t drown mix in some hydroponic nutrients and you’re done sit back and ignore it
Yes, garden, then you can spend $5 on a pepper once you’ve factored in cost of all the supplies
During covid lockdown, I discovered I really only have to go to the grocery store once every 1-2 months for all products except fresh produce, which require weekly trips. Once I started my own garden I got a lot of time savings back by cutting out >75% of my grocery trips, and I found myself using fresh herbs much more often as they are always available just outside my kitchen for last-minute additions to recipes (vs having to plan ahead and buy those expensive little packets at the store). I also started eating a lot more leafy greens; I’d stopped buying them because I was tired of constantly throwing them away after they went bad in the fridge after a few days, whereas they stay fresh on the plant for weeks or months.
So actually, I grow a garden because of the time savings. Well that and because it’s fun to play in the dirt, not to mention it’s a great non-sedentary hobby that gets me outside more often. Plus practicing food self-sufficiency is a useful skill to have. And since I garden in my front yard it’s an excellent ice breaker for getting to know neighbors and other folks in the neighborhood. Basically there are a bunch of reasons to garden beyond the food you harvest!
That’s only if you dislike gardening. If you like it, you gain happiness from it (the opposite of a job). Once you have everything set up it’s not that much time and money. It’s like anything else, you get used to it and can eventually spend maybe 10 minutes per day watering (less if it rains).
Also, the food you get will taste much better because it’s picked when it’s ripe. Most vegetables in a grocery store are picked too early.
It’s certainly not free (not that that is the point) but if you’re spending $5 on a pepper you either are a bad gardener or don’t know how to amortize the cost of reusable supplies over many peppers. Or both.
that’s what I always say, you gotta amortize the cost of reusable supplies, buddy.
in the club, on the beach, sometimes I yell it as I pass by in a fast moving car
Well I use the chilly seeds and plant them on the terrace, and voila, infinite chillies and chilly flakes. My investment is time, used jars and dirt I bought once. I water them with fertilized aquarium water and I don’t know what to do with them.
If you got fish and an aquarium, might want to look into aquaponics.
It’s better for herbs and spices since without soil other produce doesn’t taste as good.
As a bonus, aquaponic grow beds work really well for propagating plants from cuttings. I have been able to make a lot of fruit tree saplings with it.
We had good luck getting things started on an aquaponics aquarium, but very little luck keeping them alive long term there. Basil did okay, but not most other things. And my wife was following all the advice from reputable places. Not sure what the issue was, but we gave up.
price of soil = compost + dirt = free….
or a few bucks for pre made soil….
price of water?
what tools?
use an old milk jug with holes poked in the top for a watering….
a hand trowel is like 50 cent at a thrift shop… and could be substituted with a good stick….
a pot to hold the plant is free… or you could make a gardening box with a couple planks of wood….
…
i’ve grabbed live but sick tomatoes plants from the trash at a gardening store, came with soil and a pot… i just added water and had the best tomatoes of my life….
2/ 8 plants died quickly and i planted herbs in those pots…. made pizza….
cost about $1.00 in tap water total… (tap water should sit in an open container a while before using to neutralize the chlorine).
spent a few minutes watering it every once in a while….
check your math, bruh
The cost of dirt is “land”. It’s not actually free. And considering I have to work for a living, my free time is a resource I like to spend carefully, so digging, clearing rocks and weeds and spreading fresh topsoil is usually not my choice activity.
There’s a reason farmers get paid, and it takes economy of scale and subsidization to bring the cost of produce down to as cheap as it is.
Gardening can be fun and rewarding, but let’s not pretend that it just free food that appears by magic.
Funny. I’m growing oregano, tomatoes, squash in pots, inside on cold days. Your limited free time probably costs more work hours than a bag of dirt and a few seeds but excuse yourself any way you want.
Right… The reason peppers cost 75 ¢ is those horrible, horrible, no-good, greedy farmers. All they did was use dirt and water! Sooooo expensive.
I grew up in a family of farmers and lived in farm country most of my life. I didn’t say that, and you shouldn’t put your words in my mouth. That’s very disingenuous. You could dig up a documentary on corporate farming and investment bankers, but how dare anyone expect you to do anything so basic? -_-
Green peppers are unripe and so the seeds generally don’t grow into anything
also the second generation of plants are mostly way worse than the first (which produced the fruit that you buy)
I don’t get this statement. Like is there some ancient pepper plant that all seeds come from?
From PSU:
It is important to know that not all vegetable varieties are suitable for seed saving. If the variety you want to save is a hybrid, seeds from that plant will not produce genetically true fruits. Most likely, the plant will produce a fruit that resembles one of the plants used to create that hybrid. To avoid this, choose heirloom varieties, ones that have been around since grandma’s time or earlier. […] Heirlooms will produce offspring that are identical to the parent.
Cloning plants is a thing people have been doing for a long time, and is one popular way to get good produce.
You also take a set of carefully selected plants and carefully breed them to get a plant that has the desired profile. It’s the deliberate nature that results in a better food, not “not being a replant”.
Pollinators don’t care which plants they combine, so the natural way often produces a fruit that isn’t as good as a food crop.
It’s the real reason most farmers aren’t actually super into reusing seed. It typically results in a lower quality yield.
Me, who has no space to plant anything:
“Thanks bud”
Cool, so all I gotta do is own a house?
I’ll just leave this here.
The last three apartments I’ve lived in I’ve been able to have a garden. Not a large one mind you, and I’ve had to learn how to utilize grow bags rather than growing directly in the soil, however home ownership isn’t a requirement to being able to grow your own food.
