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As someone who has a garden and has successfully grown garlic from cut ends of store bulbs...
It's not worth the labor.
I garden, yes, but the economy of scales of buying at the grocery store is much lower than growing your own vegetables. You garden because you want to enjoy vegetables that are either heirloom or you want the freshness.
Between the labor, watering, fertilizing, maintaining, etc. it's simply cheaper to buy at the store.
Just don't plant cheap stuff.
I will probably never grow onions, potatoes, corn, celery and other vegetables that are always cheap.
I will plant things that are easy and or pricey. Tomatoes for sure, if I bought the tomatoes at the store I would probably have spent $500 just on tomatoes a season. Chives are also easy to manage and expensive in store. Aspargus is stupid expensive and is almost hard to get rid of once established. Some berry type fruits are also worth growing if you have spare land for them since they come back each year.
spare land
Look at Mr. Moneybags over here
Guerilla gardening - who said it was my land?
we plant onions because that way we never have to think "hey, do we have onions?"
I have a similar philosophy with basil. It's cheap enough in our stores, but it's way more convenient to always know its outside.
I have a similar view. Plant things that are fun. It is a hobby and it needs to be that. Why bother planting potatoes when they take up a good amount of space and they're cheap?
I plant chives as well, rocket because I love it, weird varieties of chillies, and I'm thinking of adding also other herbs that I can't get easily or that are a faff to get. Coriander is a good example, as I have to get a bag whenever I have to use a tiny bit and the rest goes to waste.
Hobby farming is fun and a great way to get you (and the family) to eat more veggies. Subsistence farming is just painful.
Yeah that's my attitude as well. I grow the things that are significantly better straight out of the garden. The best tomatoes are too fragile to go through the sorting machinery, so growing your own enables much higher quality produce. Berries are way better picked ripe. Green beans are also super easy to grow and are better fresh.
Then there's varieties that just aren't popular enough for many stores to stock and specialty stores are far and expensive: patty pan squash, molokhia, ground cherries, shallots, celery leaves (I don't like the stalk), a variety of herbs, peppers that aren't bell or jalapeno, etc.
Haha, yeah, asparagus is hard to get rid of. It forms these mats of roots like 8 inches down that hollow out during the fall/winter and then new roots shoot back out through the tubes. That said.. I've never had store bought asparagus that was JUICY. I usually pluck them as as snack to eat while I'm weeding or whatever, they're perfectly tasty raw.
That's why tiktok and youtube shorts are just braindead. I read this other thing where "kids" bought all the cucumbers in stores because there is this crazy new thing called cucumber salad. A week or so later a friend visits me and for some reason it came up and she was like: yeah, i had to try this cucumber thing, because it was everywhere on tiktok, and it turns out it's:s just a salad.
This woman is 36 years old.
I worked at a grocery store during lockdown and Celtic Sea salt trended on tick tock. We couldn't keep that shit on the shelf. One or two dudes would clean us out as soon as we restocked and flip it online for a huge markup.
It's just fucking salt. You'd have to eat a pound of it to get any sort of benefit from the trace minerals.
This woman is 36 years old.
...and they vote...
It's not worth the labor.
This is my perspective. I hate weeding, more than almost anything. I hate crouching and bending over, and shuffling slowly from patch to patch. I hate gardening. I hate getting sweaty and the kind of dirty you get in the garden: gritty, and it finds its way into your shoes and gloves. Gardening sucks.
If I was really invested, I might do hydroponics. Elevated, minimum to no weeds, no crawling around in the dirt. I don't know whether, in the end, I'd actually save any money, though.
I have a terrible back but love gardening so I invested in 3 foot high bins. They are a life saver for not only my back but keeps rabbits from eating the vegetables. If you get the right soil mixture you don't have to worry about the weeds.
The dirt....you can't do much about that except hydroponics like you said but that has its drawbacks too. At the end, you do what helps you and keeps you happy.
My biggest issue at this point is mosquitoes so I've started wearing long pants and a light jacket. That seems to have helped things.
Itβs not worth the labor.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Itβs not worth the labor if you don't know what you are doing.
Gardening is like printing free money, and it is an enjoyable hobby that provides some stress relieving exercise, IF you know what you are doing.
Using cheap-ass store bought garlic is a big mistake.
I don't plow, till and hardly weed yet have a fantastic garden that provides way more high quality produce than we can use. My fresh tasty heirloom produce is not sprayed with any toxic chemicals. I get free rotten hay bales from farmers for mulch and fertilizer from our chickens. I save seeds from varieties that do well in our area.
Yeah feeling that after looking at my garlic harvest this year. It was fun to grow it in some pots but unless I had way more space it isn't worth growing. Ill keep to perennial herbs instead.
Also looking at reducing how many pots I have as they use up way more water than stuff planted in the ground. Probably just mint and chives in pots going forward. Helps a lot that I have my own small garden now so I can plant things in the ground, its so much better than pots.
That's nice, now I only need 200k so I can buy a house with a backyard so I can make my own groceries.
Where do you live that 200k gets you enough land to grow your own food? Mine was Β£230k and all I can realistically grow a years supply of in a year is a few types of herbs.
Easy enough. Every country has an area where nobody wants to live. On the side of a mountain, hours away from the next city, maybe on an old garbage tip or an old industrial chemical spill. In Eastern Europe you might even find a cheap piece of land in a mine field. Should be possible.
I really don't recommend to grow your food on an old garbage pit or an old industrial chemical spill or zone, just in case someone was going to take this seriously.
There isn't really any unowned land left in England. Some patches that are abandoned perhaps but its not exactly publicised as someone would probably take it if it was well known that there was free land somewhere.
There are still cheap places to live all over England and Scotland - I bought a 1 bedroom flat with small garden for Β£90k in Peterborough (a smaller city about an hour north of London) 3 years ago, and the garden has enough space for a few raised beds with vegetables in them
LOL. I started out with a little wooded land, cut trees, cleared it, bought a $1,200 well used mobile home and now have a nice home with three gardens. Buy small and grow.
Have you tried giving up avocado toast?
Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.
Hunter-gatherers had most of that, too.
Not really. An exception are hunter-gatherers benefitting from the rich marine resources and salmon of Pacific North America, but for most hunter-gatherers:
overpopulation: well, populations tend to hit the carrying capacity, whatever it may be, but I think here it refers to living conditions like with poop being in the street and stuff like that
hierarchy: hardly any to speak of, it's mostly family-based, with special respect for great hunters or people who solve conflicts
authoritarian forms of government: no
malnutrition: of course hunger and famine exists for hunter-gatherers as well, but they generally had much better nutrition than early agriculturalists
slavery: no, they don't have the social organization to manage this
war: meeting strangers was always a dangerous event, and war can exist in specific times and places, more often being small-scale ritualized warfare in places of high productivity, but food production really brought that to another level
Garlic will grow like a weed too. Growing up we had an entire bed along the outside north wall that went from mixed plants to oops all garlic and chives alarmingly quickly.
Chives make a nice border plant, they crowd out weeds, they are great for cooking and they have nice flowers in the spring.
just discovered agriculture?
Hey, you want to make a big of money? Do what I did, get into farming
By this logic, why not buy 200,000 tomato plants with the million dollars?
$50 in a few decades will be worth very little compared to now because of inflation. Take the lump sum and invest more on the early side. That's how smart people successfully implement compounding.
Edit:
Also, that $6,250 times 52 weeks in a year is not $46M; it's $325k. Not to mention that the $6,250 takes a year from initial investment, so it takes 2 years to hit that $325k. And that's revenue, not profit. And it assumes dependable harvest. It's a joke shit post that I'm taking way too seriously, right?
100%
Also, you'd need to live for over 380 years for those $50 weekly payouts to add up to a million dollars.
This was spectacularly bad advice in every aspect.
With this SIMPLE LIFEHACK and TWENTY SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS anyone can be a MULTI MILLIONAIRE in just ONE YEAR!!!!!
On what fuckin land?
Broseph, I could just build a factory. Just take $20 a week making sourdough starter and wait 6 weeks and build a factory making bread. Just ignore every other cost and the cost of owning land and taxes and real life.
This is how I see all of the "I'm going to move to the country and grow my own food" crowd.
They're essentially glorifying subsistence farming, a lifestyle that humans have collectively been trying to escape since we invented agriculture.
I've lived in a subsistence farming community. You know who doesn't glorify and romanticize it? Farmers.
Don't get me wrong, hobby farming often is the best of both worlds, and smallholder farming and gardening fucking make life 20,000 times better. But making the jump to letting your whole life depend on rainfall just to eat is madness.
We as a species have 50 centuries of receipts to tell us that subsistence farmers eventually lose the game in a long enough time line. It only takes 1 season for that to ruin lives and communities.
once a week i hunt for a shop and gather some groceries.
Just like my forebears
Garlic factory owners hate this one simple trick.
Eliminate car repair bills with a bunch of tools and this weird trick!
Wait until they stop adopting children after finding out about impregnation
12000 years and weβre back
The garlic at my local store is 69Β’ a bulb. Nice!
This sounds like a wall-e type sci-fi concept. Except our actual future.
My parent's garden has literally thousands of garlic plants that show up unplanned every year. When clearing part of the garden to plant something else, pulling up like 30 garlic stalks is normal. Come harvest time, they give away as much garlic as they can and they still have so much that they have to throw a bunch of it out because it all goes bad before they can use it.
Make aioli.
EDIT: also, eat Lebanese while you have fresh garlic.
This is tiktok after all, so yes, they fully believe theyβre the very first to discover agriculture, and no, no one else has yet. Itβs so cool to be them, according to them.