Grow what is suited to your environment and season them you won’t have to do much while providing way more than you can use. Grow something not ideal them yeah it’ll be a perpetual uphill battle.
Big grocery propaganda lol
5 Roma tomato plants and you got salsa for the year
The smell of fresh tomatoes is one of the best things though
You gain more than saving money when you take the time and learn to grow your own food.
Meh, I like tomatoes to taste like tomatoes.
I’m allergic. But it’s such a good fruit to grow and eat. Specially the tiny grape tomatoes.
I simply do not trust people who think the appeal or value of gardening is saving money or that local tomatoes are no different than mass shipped grocery store tomatoes.
Money is not the reason why I plant tomatoes.
If I could I would buy them, but you can’t buy the flavor when they ship it green over the half the continent.
Buying locally could work, but the business doesn’t work because it would be expensive and most people would not pay more for local food.
I picked my first peach from our first peach tree and the aroma was glorious. The taste of it was between giving up everything I own for a second one and meeting my wife for the first time.
Nothing beats growing your own food. Plus the little tomatoes, although I’m allergic, taste like berries.
I suppose that depends on the amount of tomatoes you’re growing.
Growing your own veggies, at least in most western countries, is seldom about saving money or food security.
Herbs are a massive saving if you cook.
To make one pot of some dishes you’re looking at $3-$6 of herbs from a grocery store (if they have them at all), when growing my own we’re talking pennies.
Just as important to me is flavor and convenience. My own stuff tastes like the real thing, and I know it’ll be there every day.
When I trim the herb monsters back, I give those trimmings to my neighbors since I can’t use all I grow.
Oh and I grow everything inside, in the old “TV space” (since it’s useless anymore) using self-contained little hydroponic setup (Aerogarden knockoff).
I didn’t do it to save money. In fact growing my own tomatoes and chili’s cost more that it saved.
I grew chili’s inside a greenhouse with growlights and outside to test the difference. Inside the greenhouse was over 30C every day and they had 10h of light per day while outside was much more variable and lower on average.
The ones from the greenhouse were so spicy that I could barely eat them.
It was a fun project and I’ll definitely do it again.
Checkout Aerogarden and their knockoffs. So idiot proof and self-contained.
I have a brown thumb and these things make me look like an expert.
$2.17 pfft.
Pack of 50 good tomato seeds: $3.50. Bag of manure: $10. String for tying up the plants: $2. Sticks to tie them up to: found in the yard. Water: no idea. Plant 30 seeds, get 20 plants big enough to transplant. Grow a pithy 5lbs of tomatoes from each plant in your first year because you don’t know what you’re doing. 100lbs tomatoes, would be $5/lb at the store (and don’t taste as good), $500 - $15.50 = $485 savings, less water costs.
Same set up in the next year, less seed costs (you kept yours right?), $50 in steel pipe to trellis the tomatoes to, few hours of YouTube University, and look at that, twice the yield. Now you have to buy some ball jars and a pressure canner ($100). $1000 - $162 = Still $838 ahead. And you now have fresh jarred tomatoes for the whole year.
Why pressure can tomatoes?
Yeah, this person has obviously never grown tomatoes. Most people end up with so many they give them to anyone who will take them.
It’s also super easy to rig up an auto watering system. I’m about to implement one on our lemon tree that keeps almost dying (I don’t neglect it; I’m the one who saves it), using a soil moisture probe and a solenoid valve. It’s like $40 in parts, including tubing.
What soil moisture probe are you using? Most are kinda useless I figured out, as they don’t measure the water volume in the soil.
Do yoy have a tutorial for the watering system?
The Millennial Gardener has a good tutorial for drip irrigation (can be automated or manual turn on/off) on YouTube. If you can’t find it let me know
You’ve never bought a tomato in a grocery store half as flavorful as the Cherokee purples I grow.
This is it for me. When the tomato gets ripe right there in front of you, the taste ruins all other tomatoes forever.
Same with strawberries. Why even bother buying some little red water crunches in December? Buy the real ones from farmers market that taste like real strawberries. Embrace seasonality. Don’t live in some Boomer fantasy where the shape of the water crunchies available in January means we beat the Soviets.
It’s the journey more than the destination. But stick with the journey long enough and you’ll find yourself at some exceedingly tasty waystations.
This is one of those where the act is more than the physical result.
Gardening keeps you outside, active, and in our day and age away from your screens.
Indeed in the US environment it also means you know the providence of your food and my guess is that your tomatoes don’t grow up near a feedlot ending up with salmonella spillover and more.
And beyond that it allows you to stretch those inflating dollars and get more nutritious food than the ultra processed grocery cheap food provides.
