A lot of foods with seeds are generally engineered to not grow from those seeds.
Yes, garden, then you can spend $5 on a pepper once you’ve factored in cost of all the supplies
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? -_-
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.
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
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.
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!
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
Just make sure your seeds aren’t copyrighted or greedy corporations like Monstanto will sue you.
Luckily that only applies if you signed an agreement with them. If you use seeds from an item you bought, they wouldn’t be able to stop you.
If you’re just growing in your backyard for your own use then there really isn’t much risk.
Is this person angry that green peppers cost money because… Theres a bunch of seeds???
Not angry, just saying more people should grow their own food instead of relying on supermarket food for eveything
Eh, gardening is usually very time consuming, the times it isn’t is when it’s already super cheap produce (onion and potato. There are some instances it’s actually very useful though. Growing some herbs and spices can be pretty easy and it’s nice because rather than buying a ton of fresh herbs that go bad you merely clip what you need from the plant and it stays fresh. Scallions are another one that are easy to grow and can be kind of expensive to buy depending where you live. You can literally drop a scallion stem in some water in front of a sunny windoe and it’ll grow.
Other than those examples however the small economies of scale make it too time consuming to garden for financial reasons. It’s better to work overtime and buy produce than to garden it.
On another note though you can try community gardening too and that may be a large enough scale to be useful however.
Id slightly disagree with the economic judgement.
We know that working a particular job has a declining productivity rate as hours increase, and past a certain threshold it is detrimental to your health.
While gardening does take time, it is also a hobby, is good for the psyche and helps to offset stress from your normal job.
So the utility of gardening is often much higher than the nominal value of the price difference.
Do you have rights to use and distribute product based on those patented seeds, though?
Intellectual property is a scam!
