Would love to be in a neighborhood with a community garden or other shared space for planting and growing. But when real estate is hyper-inflated, its tricky to have more than a postage stamp of yard space anywhere near downtown.
You can grow tomatoes in a pot very successfully, but space is definitely required for a meaningful offset.
Good luck surviving on tomatoes.
it would be a lot of tomato soup
I spent a summer canning tomatoes to realize I don’t really use that many cans of tomatoes. I’ll use fresh tomatoes, but we literally had to change our diet because we had canned enough tomatoes that we had to re-arrange the kitchen. We had tomatoes in cans for literally years after that summer.
#1 tip for starting gardeners: take a week or two and actually write down what the hell you actually eat that is a vegetable, and grow that. I’m not saying don’t branch out and try new things, but focus on serving yourself and growing things you actually eat. If you don’t eat like… 20+ tomatoes a week, you probably don’t need more than 1 or 2 tomato plants, if even that.
You’ll be way more successful/ happy/ satisfied/ likely to continue or advance as a gardener if it doesn’t feel like a chore and its serving you.
Definitely depends on the store and the tomato. There’s lots of varieties in grocery stores now. When I was a kid, all you could get were pale, mealy tomatoes.
Tomato’s for sale in stores are hardier varieties that can handle the roughness of transport, they are also picked unripe and ripen while transported.
They aren’t even close to the same.
Oh, I’m certain that tomatoes you grow at home are super good, often better than store bought. What I’m saying is that store bought tomatoes are much better than they used to be, and are usually plenty good enough.
I agree. Some stores here sell heirloom tomatoes (the ones there are often funny-shaped and not just red) and they’re much better than the perfectly round mealy, red ones. They’re also much more expensive (often comparable to farmers markets here) but they’re available. True, they’re not as good as farmers market or homegrown, but they’re leagues better than the “regular tomatoes”
Home grown have also grown tastier in the same time frame. That’s a totally irrelevant point, but I guess justify shitty tomatoes however you want.
They’re still always picked unripe, and ripening on the plant is how they get tastier. That’s not gonna change from a variety change.
Oh, we’ve been getting some lovely heirloom tomatoes in a few stores my town since a couple of years ago.
Or how about this with cherry tomatoes:
- Cut in half a couple dozen, place them in a tray with high walls.
- Sprinkle with olive oil, salt (I use Lawry’s Seasoned) and crack some pepper on top.
- Heat them in a toaster oven until they start to caramelize.
- Put a couple of large handfuls of baby spinach with sliced red onion, pour more olive oil, toss and put back into toaster oven.
- Toss with pincers every couple of minutes until the spinach becomes dehydrated and concentrated.
- Stuff into a sandwich like a grilled cheese, or a quesadilla.
I do not think my tomatoes will help me survive. I know for a fact they’ll taste better though, I’ve had fresh grown from the vine tomatoes and they’re amaaaazing
My home canned tomato product is a key component of my survivalist strategy, idk what the rest of the people in this thread are doing…
“And I’ve got enough disappointment in my life already, son.”
