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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
price of soil = compost + dirt = free….
or a few bucks for pre made soil….
price of water?
what tools?
use an old milk jug with holes poked in the top for a watering….
a hand trowel is like 50 cent at a thrift shop… and could be substituted with a good stick….
a pot to hold the plant is free… or you could make a gardening box with a couple planks of wood….
…
i’ve grabbed live but sick tomatoes plants from the trash at a gardening store, came with soil and a pot… i just added water and had the best tomatoes of my life….
2/ 8 plants died quickly and i planted herbs in those pots…. made pizza….
cost about $1.00 in tap water total… (tap water should sit in an open container a while before using to neutralize the chlorine).
spent a few minutes watering it every once in a while….
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.
