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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.
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.
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.
Every time I’ve tried gardening all I’ve accomplished is feeding the local squirrels.
I can’t afford to get a garden
Is this person angry that green peppers cost money because… Theres a bunch of seeds???
Not angry, just saying more people should grow their own food instead of relying on supermarket food for eveything
Eh, gardening is usually very time consuming, the times it isn’t is when it’s already super cheap produce (onion and potato. There are some instances it’s actually very useful though. Growing some herbs and spices can be pretty easy and it’s nice because rather than buying a ton of fresh herbs that go bad you merely clip what you need from the plant and it stays fresh. Scallions are another one that are easy to grow and can be kind of expensive to buy depending where you live. You can literally drop a scallion stem in some water in front of a sunny windoe and it’ll grow.
Other than those examples however the small economies of scale make it too time consuming to garden for financial reasons. It’s better to work overtime and buy produce than to garden it.
On another note though you can try community gardening too and that may be a large enough scale to be useful however.
Id slightly disagree with the economic judgement.
We know that working a particular job has a declining productivity rate as hours increase, and past a certain threshold it is detrimental to your health.
While gardening does take time, it is also a hobby, is good for the psyche and helps to offset stress from your normal job.
So the utility of gardening is often much higher than the nominal value of the price difference.
Unfortunately, many communities (my own included) aren’t interested. Glad I learned about seed bombs.
I haven’t tried with scallions, but with lettuce if you use water without dirt the taste gets lost a bit every time you regrow it
