Yeah, the point isn’t to save money lol
I don’t grow tomatoes, but am related to people who do.
It ain’t about saving money, they just taste way better.
It’s also how you avoid explosive diarrhea from Trump’s dysfunctional FDA testing.
$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.
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.
Do yoy have a tutorial for the watering system?
You’re assuming a lot by asserting the average backyard gardener has the space and time to grow 20 plants, and averages 5 lbs yield from each one…
Why pressure can tomatoes?
Botulism.
And I don’t have enough space in my freezer for as many jars of sauce I make every year. I need them to be shelf stable, and that requires canning, and pressure canning is faster and more consistent than deep water bath canning.
Okay, thanks. I’m not trying to tell you what to do of course, I was just curious about the choice to pressure over water bath.
The hold time is faster at pressure for sure, but I wish pressure canning was faster than water bath over all! I think my limitation is my glass top stove. The canner I have specifies it can be used on glass top but it takes forever to get to pressure. Water bath canning gets done outdoors with a large propane burner and that gets rolling fast lol.
Could also be canning above 1000 ft (305m) in elevation. I have to pressure can everything where I’m at since water boils around 195F/90C.
Excellent point, I forgot some people live in the clouds.
Outdoor propane burner ftw! That was my go to before I had to get a new stovetop. My newer induction top gets the pressure canner up to temp pretty quick, so it’s the best option for me now.
Most low acid stuff should be pressure canned anyways due to botulism. Tomatoes are almost acidic enough.
It’s still recommended to acidify tomato products! I use citric acid.
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.
I grow cayenne peppers to save money. One plant yields so many peppers that it’s legitimately profitable.
I do save money growing mint over buying it at the store, because mint is eternal. I’ve been making juleps and jelly out of the same mint plant for about 6 years now. But mostly I keep mint around because I like it.
Tomatoes? It’s not really about the money, it’s that grocery store tomatoes are designed for durability rather than flavor.
Mint is also a glorified scp attempting to breach containment and will take over the world if given a chance.
I’ve grown cayenne for the first time this year. I’ve got so many! It’s only in a 15l pot.
I dry and chip them. Three plants can keep me in red pepper flake for a year.
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.
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.
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.
Do you mean specific to your location? I just paid $1.70 /lb for 60lbs of tomatoes from a local organic farmer whereas the grocery story will sell them for closer to $0.60, and there is a wait list for the farmer! I’m not that picky about organic but these tomatoes are amazing.
I do grow some at home but we preserve all the tomato sauce we need for the year ourselves and we haven’t been able to grow that much…yet.
I think in Germany the tomato business is not able to compete with the Netherlands, so I don’t know of any local farmers growing tomatoes.
In the supermarket you can’t buy them, and if they don’t taste differently.
Also in Germany or the EU the tomato varieties are limited that you can sell for eating. While there are so much more tomato varieties that you could eat but not allowed to sell.
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.
@CombatWombat I grew up on an organic farm and my dad grew something like 18 different varieties. I assure you if there was such a thing as a good tomato I would have eaten it by now. I actuality all tomatoes are disgusting.
That just means you don’t like tomatoes.
It’s okay, I kinda don’t either. But on occasion, certain varieties in small amounts, paired with the right stuff, yeah I can enjoy.
It’s usually heirloom varieties though, not the ones from the grocery store that are genetically engineered to produce large, heavy, tasteless fruits that are mostly water and have low nutritional density.
Woah wait hold up you’re on a friendica instance? That whips! I don’t think I’ve seen a friendica user in the threadiverse before.
I grow enough tomatoes for our family of five for the year. Tomatoes,sauce, salsa, tomato paste…we do it all.
Meh, I like tomatoes to taste like tomatoes.
Growing your own food is like printing money but you need to know a little bit about gardening. It’s a journey, adventure and philosophy. If you are working hard at it you are doing it wrong. Read Ruth Stout’s and Masanobu Fukuoka’s books. They make it a lot easier.
I wouldn’t hardly eat vegetables or fruit if I had to eat store produce. Tomatoes and peaches from the store are atrocious.
I don’t plow, till or weed much. My garden produces way more than we can use so I try to give friends, family and needy people the excess - don’t get me started on the excess cucumbers and zucchinis.Rhubarb is over £10/kg. In a single year rhubarb plant should be able to produce a few kg of rhubarb.
At least that is what the internet tells me, I only got it a few months ago so the yield so far is zero. Oh and it keeps growing year after year and I plan to multiply it to grow even more. Tough I might buy a few more rather than go with just 1 so its a bit faster to get a decent sized patch of then. I also plan to make rhubarb wine and mead. Which is worth even more.
Herbs are worth quite a bit too, grow them to make my own herb salt mix for roast potatoes.
I’ve got rhubarbs in the garden, been there as long as I can remember, in the same spot even. Still consistently getting rhubarbs every year, more than I can eat.
Rhubarb based alcoholic beverages tend to be a bit too dry for me personally, but you do you. I know a bunch of people like them.
You can add some sugar back to it before drinking
Big grocery propaganda lol
5 Roma tomato plants and you got salsa for the year
Have you seen how much tomatoes cost these days? On a good year I can get hundreds of dollars worth from 6 or 7 plants. Most of that gets turned into hundreds of dollars worth of frozen sauce.
Yeah, decent tomatoes here are like £3 for 250g. Last year I grew 55kg. This year not going so well but also I planted a lot less.
Only in the first year. Be patient and stubborn and after a few years you will have learned enough about the needs of your plants to grow veggies more reliably and consistently.
I still buy the ‘cheap crops’ - potatoes, carrots and onions because I’m still not growing enough of these. Everything else, including fresh aromatic herbs every day, comes out of my garden - at the moment it’s plenty of tomato and aubergine, cucumbers, courgette and green beans.
Grow what is suited to your environment and season then you won’t have to do much while providing way more than you can use. Grow something not ideal then yeah it’ll be a perpetual uphill battle.
Sure, if you buy tomato plants at steep prices, plant them in golden pots and install drip systems for each one separately…
Don’t believe the advertisement hypes. Tomatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow!
You can grow them in containers if you don’t have a garden. I’ve even seen them grow wildly in an abandoned closed off shop sprouting from cracks in the floor.If you grow tomatoes once they’ll probably show up year after year from fallen tomatoes. They’ll become your new garden weeds that give even mint some firm competition.
Throw some tomatoes in your garden today and you’ll be eating nothing but tomatoes next year.