5 foods it's cheaper to grow
articles.moneycentral.msn.com
articles.moneycentral.msn.com
Even with the work it takes, I would strongly recommend it. Remember, the true cost of the time and effort you put in is the opportunity cost of what you could be doing instead with your time. For a large chunk of the population, that's TV or facebook (farmville, ha ha). Plus, there are intangible benefits beyond the retail value of the food itself. Personally, I find it immensely rewarding to eat food that I made myself from seed to plate. It tends to taste better too--foods in the grocery store are bred for fast harvest, lower soil requirements, long shelf life and durability during transportation. It should come as no surprise that they converge in most discernible attributes towards wax and cardboard. Meanwhile, the tomato seed varieties you can pick up at your local nursery are bred to optimize salad, pasta sauce, gazpacho and lasagna.
[1] Unless you live in Hawai`i. Seriously, you can throw a stick at any bare patch of ground on that island and come back to a tree in a few years. Lava is nutritious.
I've got a higher than average risk for Parkinson's Disease, so it's important that I avoid pesticides religiously. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090421091705.ht...) Buying organic veggies helps, but growing is the best way to be sure.
Not necessarily - thats the point of the article Even in just cost of seeds and fertilizer you can't grow wheat more cheaply than iowa or saskatchewan.
There are 50+ types of specialty grains, each with distinct flavor and color contributions to the beer. In a more malt forward style like a scotch ale the grains certainly do provide a lot of the flavor profile, and there are at least 100+ strains of yeast for that matter.
Actually hop prices have dropped to half or less of their highs during last years shortage. Disclaimer, I work part time at my local home brew shop to support my brewing hobby with the employee discount.
We grow (among other things) our own wheat and spuds, which take a lot of hard work and can be bought for cheap. However, even the best "organic" (a term the USDA has diluted to the point of being almost a joke) versions from the best food stores in the area simply aren't in the same class as the stuff we grow.
The taste, texture, and flavor of organic home grown food can be so much better than the industrial food we're all mostly familiar with. You don't even have to be a "foodie" to notice. I can only eat about 1/2 of our home grown spuds when compared to store-bought ones, even if they're the same variety. Ours are so much more satiating than store spuds, that we eat far less per meal. I assume this is due to higher nutrition per unit weight/volume.
It's not really fair to compare home grown stuff with commercial agriculture, as they are two totally distinctly different products.
Sure, just money.
I've also had very good experiences with asparagus that just kept coming up every spring with no care beyond being mowed as part of the lawn in summer to keep the weeds down -- but I didn't start those plants.
Also. the article is wrong about homegrown carrots tasting like store-bought. The taste is much more concentrated and intense, and many more varieties are available to grow. But they can be a pain to grow.
You also don't need to be living in a rural or suburban area to grow herbs. I live in Brooklyn and have herbs growing on my fire escape, as do many of my neighbors. If you're lucky enough to have outdoor space, a good trick is to take tires and fill them with dirt to grow crops. Friends of mine have been successful with tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers.
I'm an advocate of urban farming and I'd love to hear from other people growing food in an urban area. I'm dying to try Window Farms (http://windowfarms.org), which looks like a great project and has built a robust community around urban farming.
One more thing: cat people, grow catnip! It's ~$1 for a bag of seeds and keeps on coming back. Much cheaper than anything store bought.
EDIT: Currently growing basil, rosemary, cilantro (barely), chives, mint, catnip, parsley. Would love to hear what has been successful or any advice since I'm kind of new to growing.
Drying the plant before you brew the tea, give a better taste.
We make our own simple syrup out of dextrose and the mint, which we can mix into liquor or tea as needed. Sometimes I'll throw some mint leaves (torn in a few pieces each) in with my tea when brewing.
- Peppermint can be used to make tea, mojito, as flavour for ice cream, or you can just chew on the leaves as a snack.
- Aloe vera juice can be used to relieve itching from sunburn or insect bites.
- Need more plants? Just break off a bit of your old aloe vera or peppermint and shove it in some wet soil.
- And of course, both plants are decorative. :)
Regarding mint, it's super robust and will expand if allowed to. You can also surround other plants with mint, because most pests don't like the flavor (that's probably why it evolved that way) it will act as a barrier. Ants, mosquitos, cockroaches all don't like it. I grow Pineapple Mint because it looks cool. :)
Another unkillable plant I like is horseradish. It's deliciously spicy fresh from the garden and it simply won't die. Be careful if you plant it in a garden: it spreads like mad and it's really hard to stop because it grows underground.
This all reminds me I need to go tour the back of my property and see if the wild raspberries and grapes are fruiting yet!
I haven't tried other vegetables yet.
With all similar herbs, including basil, you get much more foliage if you pinch back the buds before they flower.
I planted oregano outside (in LA) about 5 years ago and the same plant is still growing. It's about 4 feet in diameter.
Maintenance consists of pruning in the fall, culling fruit early in the season, fertilizing occasionally, and periodic spraying. For pruning, decide how much you think you ought to cut back, and then cut twice that amount. Do not skip the spraying. People who want their food grown all naturally really just wind up feeding the bugs and other pests.
A given type of fruit tends to come ripe all at once. I'll be harvesting my peaches, say, over 1.5 - 2 weeks. For soft fruits like peaches or plums, you can't keep them very long. You've got to preserve them or give them away. So plan your crops accordingly.
If you want to do this, now is the time to start planning. Even more than tomatoes, you need to time it right. Trees need to be planted either in very early spring, or in the fall.
[1] 2 peaches, 2 apples, 2 pears, 1 plum, 1 pluot
>People who want their food grown all naturally really just wind up feeding the bugs and other pests.
I think that's part of the point. Wiping out bugs with pesticides has far reaching effects and not just on the bugs directly.
Some fruits are ridiculously expensive though like raspberries and blackberries. They also require less weeding than most vegetables and they survive the winter. From one blackberry plant you can get 20kg of blackberries. This can cost like €300 in the supermarket.
(Make sure you're not close to a road, garbage dump, etc. And they may not grow in your area. Void where prohibited.)
After going to the trouble of doing so, you might just prefer to spend the money for a little tub of them. Still, it's an option.
Also buying 3 kg for making jam costs you a fortune. You can buy a jar of blackberry jam for less than €1, but buying that amount of fresh blackberries easily costs €10.
I enjoy picking blackberries like I enjoy tetris. Same neurons at work.
So when you plan on growing tomatoes ask for this, it's very common. And buy multiple different seeds so you don't put all eggs in one basket.
1. Better taste. A tomato out of the garden is almost a different fruit (vegetable?) than one from the store.
2. Personal satisfaction. There is just something rewarding about tending to a plant and enjoying the fruit after the work.
3. Aesthetics. I have a lemon and a grapefruit tree I keep indoors. They look and smell nice. The fruit is just an added bonus.
It's dead easy (I think I could manage, but luckily my fiancee got bitten by some kind of sprouting-bug lately), doesn't require much space (the window sill is perfect) and very cheap.
Around here, a mini tub of store-bought sprouts can run around €1.5 (say, $2). That buys probably around 500 g of dried mung beans, which will give a volume of sprouts that easily beats the store-bought pack by a factor of, oh, 50 is probably very conservative. It's almost scary, at first.
We cheat and use a sprouter (a small plastic container with two levels of strainer shelves, a bottom, and a transparent lid) that was around €10-15, so it'll take a while to get our investment back.
For the impatient, sprouting is of course also very fast, you'll be harvesting in a manner of days.
B) Carrots are my favorite fresh. I can't believe they said there wasn't much of a difference between store bought and garden bought. Although I have noticed that I have gotten a few exceptional carrots at time. It may be that their such a durable vegetable buyers can be negligent and leave them sitting around for ages.
C) Asparagus plants take a while to establish but are easier than growing a fruit tree! Key is to plant them correctly and to lime the hell out of them every fall / spring. They thrive under the right soil conditions.
And on the foraging front, Mushroom Foraging is actually pretty simple for a few location dependent varieties. Chicken of the woods or Sulfur Shelf is blooming all over the place this time of year in New England. Hen of The Woods is also bloomer, although not as easy to spot.
My favorite grow-your own was Giant Shiitake's from Fungi Perfect. Buy spores online (30$), find a suitable tree(30$ or free) and a days of work to get started. Water in droughts and you will get tons of mushrooms twice a year for 2-3 years. I had 3 fruiting logs and I would get 6" deep in a grocery bag of portabello sized mushrooms! This was one of my more satisfying hobbies, although the logs died in a drought last summer =(
I would estimate it's mostly been a money pit - the yields have been nowhere near enough to justify the time or money. For me it's a chance to do something real (I work from home) and a great learning opportunity for the kids.
The other thing not to forget is growing flowers. They're much easier and you can have fresh flowers inside the house for a very small outlay, or just keep them in the garden and enjoy.
For anyone with a small amount of garden space, look into the book One Magic Square (I think that's what it's called). Local author/gardener, suggests square-metre plantings that are complementary or that will give you crops suiting certain meals (salads, soups, etc). The other big advantage is that you add a square-metre and get used to it before you take it further.
IME, one risk otherwise is diving in too deep and finding you've bitten off more than you can chew (well, manage by weeding, watering, etc). Instead, start incrementally.
My yard project this fall is digging out a row of clay soil and making a raised amended bed for 8-9 blueberry highbushes. Blueberry plants are finicky about soil PH and drainage, so I am prepping the bed with sulfur, coarse sand, peat, and ground pine bark chips and getting it right for planting by spring 2012. I expect they will produce ~100 pounds per year in 5 years.
Currently in backyard in CA:
-Plums, lemons, oranges, pomegranate (my personal favorite), avocado and fig tree.
-Eggplant, jalapeños, bellpepper, corn
-Mint is the only herb we're growing
Beyond watering every evening (I actually find this therapeutic in a way), the twice a year fertilizer (the fresh stuff we get from Dad's friend) and once a year pruning, our backyard garden provides us food year round.
It costs around $100-$200 upfront investment, and then about $50 to make 5 gallons. The time cost isn't that bad either, 3 hours on the first day, then 15 minutes, once a week for three weeks.
In my experience, those heads of lettuce are delicious, rewarding, and cost 10-100x what you pay in the store.
Way way way cheaper than the store - I am not detracting from my work or life in any way when I stand outside and water my (large) garden for thirty minutes while drinking coffee. Actually, it's one of the best ways I can think of to wake up.
I've heard/seen various lamp-based systems that have timers and things. I was curious if there are any particular plants that would grow in the relative dark of an apartment if I could get myself a barrel with some soil.
I'm assuming your apartment has windows (or do you live in the dark?) so invest in some window boxes. You can grow herbs easily in those.
I was hoping there was some secret vegetables/herbs that could deal with low-light. I guess that means things that would be possible to grow in the woods, like underbrush.
I did make a great discovery this year: chocolate mint (mentha piperita). The leaves taste like minty chocolate (you really have to try this -- you won't believe it until you do).
Also, I've heard conflicting reports about growing mint indoors over the winter; some sources say that mint needs to die down in the winter and won't survive year-round growing, but others don't mention it. Should I just plant two pots, one indoors and one out?
I sometimes wonder if we've gone too far with these genetic modifications.
See "seed piracy".
Newer patented varieties are legally protected against being non-sexually propagated also, like taking cuttings from herbs or roses, to start new plants.
Expensive, but worth it.