You’ve never bought a tomato in a grocery store half as flavorful as the Cherokee purples I grow.

I don't grow tomatoes, but am related to people who do.

It ain't about saving money, they just taste way better.

$2.17 pfft.

Pack of 50 good tomato seeds: $3.50. Bag of manure: $10. String for tying up the plants: $2. Sticks to tie them up to: found in the yard. Water: no idea. Plant 30 seeds, get 20 plants big enough to transplant. Grow a pithy 5lbs of tomatoes from each plant in your first year because you don't know what you're doing. 100lbs tomatoes, would be $5/lb at the store (and don't taste as good), $500 - $15.50 = $485 savings, less water costs.

Same set up in the next year, less seed costs (you kept yours right?), $50 in steel pipe to trellis the tomatoes to, few hours of YouTube University, and look at that, twice the yield. Now you have to buy some ball jars and a pressure canner ($100). $1000 - $162 = Still $838 ahead. And you now have fresh jarred tomatoes for the whole year.

I simply do not trust people who think the appeal or value of gardening is saving money or that local tomatoes are no different than mass shipped grocery store tomatoes.

Meh, I like tomatoes to taste like tomatoes.

I grow enough tomatoes for our family of five for the year. Tomatoes,sauce, salsa, tomato paste...we do it all.

Only in the first year. Be patient and stubborn and after a few years you will have learned enough about the needs of your plants to grow veggies more reliably and consistently.

I still buy the 'cheap crops' - potatoes, carrots and onions because I'm still not growing enough of these. Everything else, including fresh aromatic herbs every day, comes out of my garden - at the moment it's plenty of tomato and aubergine, cucumbers, courgette and green beans.

I didn't do it to save money. In fact growing my own tomatoes and chili's cost more that it saved.

I grew chili's inside a greenhouse with growlights and outside to test the difference. Inside the greenhouse was over 30C every day and they had 10h of light per day while outside was much more variable and lower on average.

The ones from the greenhouse were so spicy that I could barely eat them.

It was a fun project and I'll definitely do it again.

Yeah, the point isn't to save money lol

It's also how you avoid explosive diarrhea from Trump's dysfunctional FDA testing.

It's the journey more than the destination. But stick with the journey long enough and you'll find yourself at some exceedingly tasty waystations.

I think part of the trick is more just growing what already grows well in your area. I have a cherry tomato plant that I didn’t buy seeds for—I just tossed a few old tomatoes in the garden and it popped up subsisting off excess water from the lawn sprinklers. These last couple of months I’ve been able to step out every morning and pick a few to go with my breakfast. I haven’t had to spray for bugs because the local lizards keep them clear. I think more passive gardens like that might be the way to go.

This is one of those where the act is more than the physical result.

Gardening keeps you outside, active, and in our day and age away from your screens.

Indeed in the US environment it also means you know the providence of your food and my guess is that your tomatoes don't grow up near a feedlot ending up with salmonella spillover and more.

And beyond that it allows you to stretch those inflating dollars and get more nutritious food than the ultra processed grocery cheap food provides.

Big grocery propaganda lol

5 Roma tomato plants and you got salsa for the year

Grow what is suited to your environment and season then you won't have to do much while providing way more than you can use. Grow something not ideal then yeah it'll be a perpetual uphill battle.

Rhubarb is over £10/kg. In a single year rhubarb plant should be able to produce a few kg of rhubarb.

At least that is what the internet tells me, I only got it a few months ago so the yield so far is zero. Oh and it keeps growing year after year and I plan to multiply it to grow even more. Tough I might buy a few more rather than go with just 1 so its a bit faster to get a decent sized patch of then. I also plan to make rhubarb wine and mead. Which is worth even more.

Herbs are worth quite a bit too, grow them to make my own herb salt mix for roast potatoes.

But the ones in my garden taste better and landscaping is for idiots.

Have you seen how much tomatoes cost these days? On a good year I can get hundreds of dollars worth from 6 or 7 plants. Most of that gets turned into hundreds of dollars worth of frozen sauce.

Growing your own food is like printing money but you need to know a little bit about gardening. It's a journey, adventure and philosophy. If you are working hard at it you are doing it wrong. Read Ruth Stout's and Masanobu Fukuoka's books. They make it a lot easier.
I wouldn't hardly eat vegetables or fruit if I had to eat store produce. Tomatoes and peaches from the store are atrocious.
I don't plow, till or weed much. My garden produces way more than we can use so I try to give friends, family and needy people the excess - don't get me started on the excess cucumbers and zucchinis.

The smell of fresh tomatoes is one of the best things though

There's a good reason we've all outsourced farming

For today sure. What it mainly means is that next time the world does a thing you can definitely still have tomatoes.

Remember when covid started and suddenly the shelves were empty and people who didn't understand the importance of masks were fighting eachother over the last tin of beans?

That wont be you. You'll be chilling in your vegetable patch.

I'm allergic. But it's such a good fruit to grow and eat. Specially the tiny grape tomatoes.

Sure, if you buy tomato plants at steep prices, plant them in golden pots and install drip systems for each one separately...

Don't believe the advertisement hypes. Tomatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow!
You can grow them in containers if you don't have a garden. I've even seen them grow wildly in an abandoned closed off shop sprouting from cracks in the floor.

If you grow tomatoes once they'll probably show up year after year from fallen tomatoes. They'll become your new garden weeds that give even mint some firm competition.
Throw some tomatoes in your garden today and you'll be eating nothing but tomatoes next year.