As someone who has a garden and has successfully grown garlic from cut ends of store bulbs…
It’s not worth the labor.
I garden, yes, but the economy of scales of buying at the grocery store is much lower than growing your own vegetables. You garden because you want to enjoy vegetables that are either heirloom or you want the freshness.
Between the labor, watering, fertilizing, maintaining, etc. it’s simply cheaper to buy at the store.
It happens often because I take my vegetable trimmings and peels to the garden and use it as mulch. I try to remove the seeds and stuff that can grow (like potato peels), but there’s often root of garlic that end up mixed with the peel. Which is no big deal. Often, they only start growing in the spring or summer, so I only harvest immature forms. Which is fine. It’s not like I was invested in that garlic.
I wholeheartedly agree.
It’s not worth the labor if you don’t know what you are doing.
Gardening is like printing free money, and it is an enjoyable hobby that provides some stress relieving exercise, IF you know what you are doing.
Using cheap-ass store bought garlic is a big mistake.
I don’t plow, till and hardly weed yet have a fantastic garden that provides way more high quality produce than we can use. My fresh tasty heirloom produce is not sprayed with any toxic chemicals. I get free rotten hay bales from farmers for mulch and fertilizer from our chickens. I save seeds from varieties that do well in our area.
My parents grow their own vegetables and they even have some beehives and make and sell their own honey.
I once calculated their hourly wages for beekeeping, and I only counted the time they spent harvesting and processing the honey, nothing else. Not even the cost of materials, bees, food, medicine, nothing. Not the time spent doing anything but harvesting.
Yeah feeling that after looking at my garlic harvest this year. It was fun to grow it in some pots but unless I had way more space it isn’t worth growing. Ill keep to perennial herbs instead.
Also looking at reducing how many pots I have as they use up way more water than stuff planted in the ground. Probably just mint and chives in pots going forward. Helps a lot that I have my own small garden now so I can plant things in the ground, its so much better than pots.
That’s why tiktok and youtube shorts are just braindead. I read this other thing where “kids” bought all the cucumbers in stores because there is this crazy new thing called cucumber salad.
A week or so later a friend visits me and for some reason it came up and she was like: yeah, i had to try this cucumber thing, because it was everywhere on tiktok, and it turns out it’s:s just a salad.
I worked at a grocery store during lockdown and Celtic Sea salt trended on tick tock. We couldn’t keep that shit on the shelf. One or two dudes would clean us out as soon as we restocked and flip it online for a huge markup.
It’s just fucking salt. You’d have to eat a pound of it to get any sort of benefit from the trace minerals.
This is my perspective. I hate weeding, more than almost anything. I hate crouching and bending over, and shuffling slowly from patch to patch. I hate gardening. I hate getting sweaty and the kind of dirty you get in the garden: gritty, and it finds its way into your shoes and gloves. Gardening sucks.
If I was really invested, I might do hydroponics. Elevated, minimum to no weeds, no crawling around in the dirt. I don’t know whether, in the end, I’d actually save any money, though.
I have a terrible back but love gardening so I invested in 3 foot high bins. They are a life saver for not only my back but keeps rabbits from eating the vegetables. If you get the right soil mixture you don’t have to worry about the weeds.
The dirt…you can’t do much about that except hydroponics like you said but that has its drawbacks too. At the end, you do what helps you and keeps you happy.
My biggest issue at this point is mosquitoes so I’ve started wearing long pants and a light jacket. That seems to have helped things.
Mosquito’s suck too, but I didn’t want to get into a fight with someone about repellent, or citronella, or bundling up in winter clothes thick enough to resist the hummingbird-sized mosquitoes we get in Minnesota, while trying to garden in 105° heat.
What makes me happy is buying vegetables from the farmer’s market, so that’s what I do.
Were you trying to grow softneck or hardneck? Most grocery store garlic where I live is softneck garlic from china which doesn’t grow well in colder climates. Hardneck garlic, on the other hand, requires a long cold winter in order to flower in the spring. We bought a clove of hardneck from the farmers market, threw two of the biggest cloves in the garden about 6 inches down, and then did absolutely nothing to them for 9 months. The bulb wasn’t as large as the original one but I plan to replant 6 or 7 of the second harvest and see what happens. I usually buy garlic just because of how fucking loooooooooong it takes. I’m tryin to make some pasta not a baby!
I will probably never grow onions, potatoes, corn, celery and other vegetables that are always cheap.
I will plant things that are easy and or pricey. Tomatoes for sure, if I bought the tomatoes at the store I would probably have spent $500 just on tomatoes a season. Chives are also easy to manage and expensive in store. Aspargus is stupid expensive and is almost hard to get rid of once established. Some berry type fruits are also worth growing if you have spare land for them since they come back each year.
Tomatoes have been bad for us for the last couple of years. Last year, we got a good yield of cherry tomatoes but large tomatoes only started to ripen before the cold killed them. This year, we only planted cherry tomatoes and are just now getting the first few. My coworkers have confirmed that their tomatoes are also super late this year.
You are right about chives, asparagus, and berry bushes. Once those get established, you will have to work to keep them under control.
Haha, yeah, asparagus is hard to get rid of. It forms these mats of roots like 8 inches down that hollow out during the fall/winter and then new roots shoot back out through the tubes. That said… I’ve never had store bought asparagus that was JUICY. I usually pluck them as as snack to eat while I’m weeding or whatever, they’re perfectly tasty raw.
I have a similar view. Plant things that are fun. It is a hobby and it needs to be that. Why bother planting potatoes when they take up a good amount of space and they’re cheap?
I plant chives as well, rocket because I love it, weird varieties of chillies, and I’m thinking of adding also other herbs that I can’t get easily or that are a faff to get. Coriander is a good example, as I have to get a bag whenever I have to use a tiny bit and the rest goes to waste.
Hobby farming is fun and a great way to get you (and the family) to eat more veggies. Subsistence farming is just painful.
i have so much goddamn basil, lemon balm, rosemary, lavender and laurel because of this philosophy. every few weeks i pick some and fill a jar for each room of the house. it smells fantastic in here.
Yeah that’s my attitude as well. I grow the things that are significantly better straight out of the garden. The best tomatoes are too fragile to go through the sorting machinery, so growing your own enables much higher quality produce. Berries are way better picked ripe. Green beans are also super easy to grow and are better fresh.
Then there’s varieties that just aren’t popular enough for many stores to stock and specialty stores are far and expensive: patty pan squash, molokhia, ground cherries, shallots, celery leaves (I don’t like the stalk), a variety of herbs, peppers that aren’t bell or jalapeno, etc.
I’m going to grow canning pickles next year because find those specific types in the store is a nightmare, and that’s even with someone who works there and can special order them, it’s just easier and cheaper to grow my own!
I’d never grow garlic. Store has huge cheap bins of it.
San marzano tomatoes though? Growing. Strawberries? Absolutely growing, the store ones are okay but fresh is amazing.
Been growing plants inside and out for over 30-years, never had success with garlic. I feel so dumb because it seems the easiest thing in the world to grow. Going to plant this October and see what happens.
My experience with using grocery store bought garlic is mixed. When it did work, it grew a lot of leaves but not the bulb. When I researched this, it’s because garlic requires specific soil conditions to grow its bulbs.
But bulb aside, garlic is a good natural critter repellent. It’s good to grow around lettuce and kale. Though I haven’t found a good cover plant to keep white butterflies away. Right now I’m using netting which they can sometimes find a way into.
As someone who has a garden and has successfully grown garlic from cut ends of store bulbs…
It’s not worth the labor.
I garden, yes, but the economy of scales of buying at the grocery store is much lower than growing your own vegetables. You garden because you want to enjoy vegetables that are either heirloom or you want the freshness.
Between the labor, watering, fertilizing, maintaining, etc. it’s simply cheaper to buy at the store.
I let it grow when it happens accidentally.
It happens often because I take my vegetable trimmings and peels to the garden and use it as mulch. I try to remove the seeds and stuff that can grow (like potato peels), but there’s often root of garlic that end up mixed with the peel. Which is no big deal. Often, they only start growing in the spring or summer, so I only harvest immature forms. Which is fine. It’s not like I was invested in that garlic.
I wholeheartedly agree.
It’s not worth the labor if you don’t know what you are doing. Gardening is like printing free money, and it is an enjoyable hobby that provides some stress relieving exercise, IF you know what you are doing.
Using cheap-ass store bought garlic is a big mistake.
I don’t plow, till and hardly weed yet have a fantastic garden that provides way more high quality produce than we can use. My fresh tasty heirloom produce is not sprayed with any toxic chemicals. I get free rotten hay bales from farmers for mulch and fertilizer from our chickens. I save seeds from varieties that do well in our area.
My parents grow their own vegetables and they even have some beehives and make and sell their own honey.
I once calculated their hourly wages for beekeeping, and I only counted the time they spent harvesting and processing the honey, nothing else. Not even the cost of materials, bees, food, medicine, nothing. Not the time spent doing anything but harvesting.
It came out to ~€5/h.
Yeah feeling that after looking at my garlic harvest this year. It was fun to grow it in some pots but unless I had way more space it isn’t worth growing. Ill keep to perennial herbs instead.
Also looking at reducing how many pots I have as they use up way more water than stuff planted in the ground. Probably just mint and chives in pots going forward. Helps a lot that I have my own small garden now so I can plant things in the ground, its so much better than pots.
That’s why tiktok and youtube shorts are just braindead. I read this other thing where “kids” bought all the cucumbers in stores because there is this crazy new thing called cucumber salad. A week or so later a friend visits me and for some reason it came up and she was like: yeah, i had to try this cucumber thing, because it was everywhere on tiktok, and it turns out it’s:s just a salad.
This woman is 36 years old.
I worked at a grocery store during lockdown and Celtic Sea salt trended on tick tock. We couldn’t keep that shit on the shelf. One or two dudes would clean us out as soon as we restocked and flip it online for a huge markup.
It’s just fucking salt. You’d have to eat a pound of it to get any sort of benefit from the trace minerals.
…and they vote…
This is my perspective. I hate weeding, more than almost anything. I hate crouching and bending over, and shuffling slowly from patch to patch. I hate gardening. I hate getting sweaty and the kind of dirty you get in the garden: gritty, and it finds its way into your shoes and gloves. Gardening sucks.
If I was really invested, I might do hydroponics. Elevated, minimum to no weeds, no crawling around in the dirt. I don’t know whether, in the end, I’d actually save any money, though.
I have a terrible back but love gardening so I invested in 3 foot high bins. They are a life saver for not only my back but keeps rabbits from eating the vegetables. If you get the right soil mixture you don’t have to worry about the weeds.
The dirt…you can’t do much about that except hydroponics like you said but that has its drawbacks too. At the end, you do what helps you and keeps you happy.
My biggest issue at this point is mosquitoes so I’ve started wearing long pants and a light jacket. That seems to have helped things.
Mosquito’s suck too, but I didn’t want to get into a fight with someone about repellent, or citronella, or bundling up in winter clothes thick enough to resist the hummingbird-sized mosquitoes we get in Minnesota, while trying to garden in 105° heat.
What makes me happy is buying vegetables from the farmer’s market, so that’s what I do.
Were you trying to grow softneck or hardneck? Most grocery store garlic where I live is softneck garlic from china which doesn’t grow well in colder climates. Hardneck garlic, on the other hand, requires a long cold winter in order to flower in the spring. We bought a clove of hardneck from the farmers market, threw two of the biggest cloves in the garden about 6 inches down, and then did absolutely nothing to them for 9 months. The bulb wasn’t as large as the original one but I plan to replant 6 or 7 of the second harvest and see what happens. I usually buy garlic just because of how fucking loooooooooong it takes. I’m tryin to make some pasta not a baby!
Just don’t plant cheap stuff.
I will probably never grow onions, potatoes, corn, celery and other vegetables that are always cheap.
I will plant things that are easy and or pricey. Tomatoes for sure, if I bought the tomatoes at the store I would probably have spent $500 just on tomatoes a season. Chives are also easy to manage and expensive in store. Aspargus is stupid expensive and is almost hard to get rid of once established. Some berry type fruits are also worth growing if you have spare land for them since they come back each year.
Tomatoes have been bad for us for the last couple of years. Last year, we got a good yield of cherry tomatoes but large tomatoes only started to ripen before the cold killed them. This year, we only planted cherry tomatoes and are just now getting the first few. My coworkers have confirmed that their tomatoes are also super late this year.
You are right about chives, asparagus, and berry bushes. Once those get established, you will have to work to keep them under control.
Haha, yeah, asparagus is hard to get rid of. It forms these mats of roots like 8 inches down that hollow out during the fall/winter and then new roots shoot back out through the tubes. That said… I’ve never had store bought asparagus that was JUICY. I usually pluck them as as snack to eat while I’m weeding or whatever, they’re perfectly tasty raw.
I have a similar view. Plant things that are fun. It is a hobby and it needs to be that. Why bother planting potatoes when they take up a good amount of space and they’re cheap?
I plant chives as well, rocket because I love it, weird varieties of chillies, and I’m thinking of adding also other herbs that I can’t get easily or that are a faff to get. Coriander is a good example, as I have to get a bag whenever I have to use a tiny bit and the rest goes to waste.
Hobby farming is fun and a great way to get you (and the family) to eat more veggies. Subsistence farming is just painful.
Look at Mr. Moneybags over here
Guerilla gardening - who said it was my land?
we plant onions because that way we never have to think “hey, do we have onions?”
I have a similar philosophy with basil. It’s cheap enough in our stores, but it’s way more convenient to always know its outside.
i have so much goddamn basil, lemon balm, rosemary, lavender and laurel because of this philosophy. every few weeks i pick some and fill a jar for each room of the house. it smells fantastic in here.
I like the flowers.
Yeah that’s my attitude as well. I grow the things that are significantly better straight out of the garden. The best tomatoes are too fragile to go through the sorting machinery, so growing your own enables much higher quality produce. Berries are way better picked ripe. Green beans are also super easy to grow and are better fresh.
Then there’s varieties that just aren’t popular enough for many stores to stock and specialty stores are far and expensive: patty pan squash, molokhia, ground cherries, shallots, celery leaves (I don’t like the stalk), a variety of herbs, peppers that aren’t bell or jalapeno, etc.
I’m going to grow canning pickles next year because find those specific types in the store is a nightmare, and that’s even with someone who works there and can special order them, it’s just easier and cheaper to grow my own!
I’d never grow garlic. Store has huge cheap bins of it.
San marzano tomatoes though? Growing. Strawberries? Absolutely growing, the store ones are okay but fresh is amazing.
Been growing plants inside and out for over 30-years, never had success with garlic. I feel so dumb because it seems the easiest thing in the world to grow. Going to plant this October and see what happens.
My experience with using grocery store bought garlic is mixed. When it did work, it grew a lot of leaves but not the bulb. When I researched this, it’s because garlic requires specific soil conditions to grow its bulbs.
But bulb aside, garlic is a good natural critter repellent. It’s good to grow around lettuce and kale. Though I haven’t found a good cover plant to keep white butterflies away. Right now I’m using netting which they can sometimes find a way into.