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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
Are they flavorful?
yes very, and the plant grows like fucking crazy. Tomatoes in particular have always been a high water plant so putting them in a literal bucket of it they are quite happy
Good to know. No special lights needed?
Eta: Please pardon my manners. I meant to thank you.
If you do it outside good old sunlight is just fine if you want to grow indoors any LED grow light should be sufficient although tomatoes do like a lot of light so you may need a few of them if you decide to go with indoor growing.
You also want to make sure that as little light as possible gets down into the bucket of water to avoid stuff like algae growth. But that’s a simple as wrapping your bucket in some nice cheap tin foil keeps the light out, helps keep the water temperature stable, and even reflect some light back up to your plant so that it can get more
Hmm. I have two sets of tall, double-windows in one room, and thinking I could probably find an at m aerator/pump/tubing by yard sale or thrifting. I may not be able to pull it all together in time this winter, because I’m rural without my own transportation atm, but I bet I’m be able to find it before next winter. That’s really a good idea with the foil and enough detailed instructions to get it done! Thanks so much for taking the time to type all that out for me, friend. Wishing you abundance in your endeavors, and thank you again.
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Yes, garden, then you can spend $5 on a pepper once you’ve factored in cost of all the supplies
Don’t forget to price out your time and labor.
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!
I was with you until this line:
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.
Getting to know and be forced to socialize with my neighbors doesn’t sound like a plus for me
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
Oh that’s what the gypsy woman meant
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.
I’ve had issues with draining out the grow beds enough. If they aren’t drained well enough then the roots might rot or the plants might die from too much water.
If you have a single grow bed, it’s a lot easier. Then you mostly just have to worry about the siphon initiating and stopping at the right times. Which is something you can see and fix in less than an hour before there is plants.
Not sure what your situation was, but it’s best to start small and try to account for every variable.
I’m on year 3 of my setup, and I just added another 2 grow beds and a sand root zone in the sump.
I’m not seeing the one we had online anymore. It was small, maybe 6 gallons of so. Clear plexiglass on front and right side, gravel bottom. Little slots at the bottom left, under the gravel, let water go into a smaller area on the left side. There was a section above that, and another along the back, with plant baskets,. Water was pumped from lower left into upper left, which followed through the bottle of the plant baskets and made a little waterfall into the main tank at the back right. We just had a few guppies in it.
Share with neighbors! Sell some?
Already did, now they’re swimming in chillies. :D
Oh cool all I need now is an aquarium, how expensive could that be?
If you use the plants to filter the water, it is a lot less expensive than a typical aquarium.
But if you love fish (or just like eating them) then this is a solid way to go.
Haha, buy a man a fish, he’ll be happy for a day, buy a man an aquarium, he’ll be poor until he dies.
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Dirt. Water, a bit of time. Sooooo expensive.
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.
“excuse myself”? I don’t need an excuse for what I enjoy doing in my free time.
What you’re missing is that I don’t enjoy gardening, and I don’t pretend that I’m saving significant sums of money by doing it. I do enjoy what I do in my free time, so I chose to enjoy myself, rather than spend my time doing what feels like work.
I’m not talking actual monetary costs, I’m talking the actual expenditure of time.
You enjoy gardening, and that’s good for you. The time you spend growing your tomatoes isn’t time taken away from an activity you enjoy.
Not everyone is in a place where spending time doing an activity they don’t enjoy is worth avoiding paying for produce.“Gardening can be fun and rewarding, but let’s not pretend that it just free food that appears by magic.”
Guess the italicized part threw me.
If you don’t enjoy it, you don’t, and that’s fine. My apologies for taking you so literally.
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.
The second generation (F2) is worse only in the case they are hybrid seeds (F1)
They’re probably cloned.
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”
I’m growing in flower pots.
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.
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Unless you want to plant stuff in your living room I’d suggest you get a garden as well
That pepper at the grocers is an F1 hybrid. It’s offspring won’t be very prolific and may actually have a different shape and flavor.
Yeah I’ve done this before and got a weird cross breed of a bell pepper and hot pepper.
Was it yummy?
Some plants can become toxic enough to kill you if it cross pollinates with similar other plants. I think watermelon and zucchini do this. Be careful, do your research, and always share some of your crop with neighbors you don’t like to see what happens first.
https://www.thedailymeal.com/heidelberg-germany-zucchini-toxin-poison/82315/
Something like that…
Yeah, cucurbits in general are kinda jerks that way.
How is this a meme?
At this point complaining about how any shared image on the internet is considered a meme now is a meme itself.
We garden and mostly what we get are 78943749832 zucchinis and 1 spinach leaf. I think maybe I’m not cut out for it.
Prolific gardener here; I have never once successfully grown spinach, despite many attempts. There are tons of different greens species out there; once your garden is filled with endive, chicory, lambs lettuce, mizuna, beet greens, turnip greens, and a million different varieties of mustard, lettuce, and kale, you won’t even remember that spinach exists.
We have had ok success with kale. We’re just operating in really limited space, so we mostly stick with the things we know will grow (aka the stupid zucchinis and lots of tiny onions, plus a few tomatillos). I’m hoping we can add more beds in a couple of years to add more greens.
huh, spinach didn’t give a single shit about be neglecting it on the balcony in tiny pots, grew great
I have many spinach leaves in my garden.
They’re about the same size as a grain of corn and have been for a month :(
Do you have rights to use and distribute product based on those patented seeds, though?
Intellectual property is a scam!
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.
Didnt you read your green pepper EULA when you purchased it? The QR code it right there on the sticker…
If you’re just growing in your backyard for your own use then there really isn’t much risk.
What plants are we talking about here?
Copyrighted crop seeds
I reckon most peppers in the store don’t have viable seeds.
They do, but chances are they’re f1 hybrids, meaning they don’t grow true to seed. You’ll get a random mutant, but it’ll be an edible pepper .
Even if they’re marketed as heirlooms, if they’re designated for produce, they might be planted next to other varieties and while the fruit is True, the seeds are going to be Hybrids.
Also, Green Bell Peppers are unripe Red/Orange/Yellow/etc Bell Peppers. The seeds aren’t viable anyway.
As long as you can afford a garden
I grew twenty jalapeno peppers in pots in my first year of apartment living, all descended from a pepper I had in my window in college. Any container can be a plant pot as long as you can add drainage holes - I used a lot of milk jugs and soda bottles cut in half, with old takeout trays to catch the drainage water. Soil is cheap (or free if you’re not picky about what’s in it) and I just watered them with tap water. Ten years later I have fewer peppers but I still have one from that lineage, and my spouse has over two hundred plants in pots scattered through our apartment. We use water from the fish tank as fertilizer, and our main expense is a spritzer of insecticidal soap bought every year or two, and thrift store teacups I drill drainage holes in for some of the succulents. Time and the energy to care for plants are probably the biggest hurdles when you’re broke, but money isn’t necessarily a huge barrier. I hope that helps.
i mean tons of people live in houses with massive yards, for them it’s effectively free.
Unless their HOA mandates what’s grown on it, usually a water-hungry fescue.
well HOAs consist of their members, challenge the current leadership.
Substinence farming fucking sucks, you’re going to be on the field all day long in the summer in order to have enough food to get you through the winter. Hobbyist gardening gives you best of both worlds - you have a nice patch of land to play in, and at the end you get a handful of produce to show off to friends and family.
Subsistence farming sucks for grains and similiar things that can be efficiently machinized.
For many fruits and vegetables farming still relies on a lot of manual labor, often done by immigrants and vulnerable people under terrible working conditions.
My parents grow most of their fruits and veggies for half a year on about 40 m2 which is a tenth of an acre.
So with very little land it is possible to replace a lot of your grocery bag with self grown produce.
Since I see a lot about second generation peppers not being as good as first, does that go for tomatoes too? There are those really tasty grocery store cherry tomatoes that come in different varieties in one box. They cost like 4x the others but I get them when they’re discounted before they throw them away. Can I save the seeds and grow them in my containers?
We grew some cherries in containers this year before they got invaded by stinkbugs. But those that survived were the tastiest tomatoes I’ve had in my life.
Homegrown tomatoes reveal that the stuff we’re served at grocery stores and cheap restaurants aren’t really tomatoes at all. I’ve never tried to grow from seeds out of grocery store produce because you can get packets of seeds for a couple of bucks, and I’ve heard that the produce from grocery store seeds will be sub-par.
Produce is sold by weight, not taste or nutrition. Grocery store varieties have been selected for weight so they maximize value. That weight is mostly just water, and their taste is crap compared to older heirloom varieties.
The issue is whether the produce you’re procuring seed from is a hybrid or not. If it’s not, you should be good to go with seed saving. If it is a hybrid, the results will be unpredictable, although not necessarily bad. This is an interesting read on the topic: https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/save-hybrid-seeds-zbcz1602/
I think I know what tomato product you’re referring to, and I think you’d really like a lot of the heirloom cherry tomato varieties out there, which are even tastier. They’re very common in almost any seed catalogue nowadays (so many varieties it’s overwhelming!), but if you want to sample them first, I’d recommend stopping by a farmers market next summer. Be sure to chat with the seller to find out if they’re hybrids or not; larger farms will probably have hired help selling the products so you may not get a good answer, but if the seller is the farmer themself, they’ll absolutely know whether the tomatoes they’re selling are hybrids or not. I also would recommend either the seed catalogue or farmers market routes because that way you’ll be able to match the tomato variety to your growing conditions; a tomato variety bred for hydroponic growing for instance may not do well in soil. Also there are two types of tomatoes, determinate and indeterminate, which have slightly different care and harvest requirements. In short, you’re better off knowing what variety of tomato you’re growing so you can research care and growing conditions, vs growing seeds from an unknown tomato variety where you have to wing it and hope for the best.
Oh wow that’s a lot of useful info. Thanks so much! The cherries we grew this year were actually from a granny farmer from the farmer’s market. Her veggies are always the tastiest there and she seems to know her stuff, bless her. Thanks a lot for the link! 🍅
Tomatoes only grow true to seed if they haven’t been cross-pollinated. You can try, but there is no guarantee. Dry the seeds on a paper towel next to a radiator for a day before you plant them, it reduces the chance of mold foiling your plan.
Bell peppers need warm temps, full sun, good soil, and take a long time to grow. A lot of backyard gardens aren’t the best conditions for them. Wouldn’t be surprised that the second generation would taste as good without the growing conditions the first gen had.
