5 ms·
Cheap is not the biggest advantage. Home grown vegetables taste better, especially haricots verts and tomatoes. Some fruits are ridiculously expensive though l
by jules 16y ago
Cheap is not the biggest advantage. Home grown vegetables taste better, especially haricots verts and tomatoes.
Some fruits are ridiculously expensive though like raspberries and blackberries. They also require less weeding than most vegetables and they survive the winter. From one blackberry plant you can get 20kg of blackberries. This can cost like €300 in the supermarket.
- Semiapies 16y agoFor blackberries, do what the hipsters call "foraging" or what folks when I was a kid called "picking them" from wild bushes. Cheap. (Make sure you're not close to a road, garbage dump, etc. And they may not grow in your area. Void where prohibited.) After going to the trouble of doing so, you might just prefer to spend the money for a little tub of them. Still, it's an option.
- robobenjie 16y agoOh, but the flavor of wild, ripe blackberries is so much better then even the ones I can get at the farmers market. Along with tomatoes, they have the biggest difference in flavor home-grown vs bought. Also blackberries myst be the easiest thing in the world to grow (here in the bay area anyway). Getting rid of them when you are done might be another story...
- jules 16y agoYep, that's another option. Where I live they are very rare and the ones that are there are small and not many berries per plant. Gathering then from your own garden is very quick. Certainly quicker than the extra time you spend in the shop for them. And the ones in the shop are usually not ripe enough for my tastes. I like them sweet not sour. Also buying 3 kg for making jam costs you a fortune. You can buy a jar of blackberry jam for less than €1, but buying that amount of fresh blackberries easily costs €10.
- joeyh 16y agoGet good at picking blackberries, with a hanging picker so you use both hands, and find or cultivate a bush with good, large berries, and you can pick that little $5 supermarket tub in about 5 minutes. Every day. :) I enjoy picking blackberries like I enjoy tetris. Same neurons at work.
- barrkel 16y agoBlackberries are weeds. I spent much time in my youth fighting them back - they grow about an inch a day, if not more.
- jules 16y agoIt's highly dependent on where you live. They are quite uncommon in the wild here. We bought 1 plant 10 years ago and it's still 1 plant. You could literally kill it in 2 minutes by cutting it from the ground.
- MC27 16y agoYeah, especially tomatoes. So many vintage varieties with usual colours/tastes, and you can let them ripen naturally. Tomatoes are difficult though, I've seen lots of newbies have trouble - it's one of those plants that people need to read up about and follow the growing instructions carefully.
- jules 16y agoOne problem I have is that they get a kind of disease (don't know the English name) that makes the leafs dry up and the tomatoes rot before they turn red. The solution is to buy seeds of plants that can't get this disease. So when you plan on growing tomatoes ask for this, it's very common. And buy multiple different seeds so you don't put all eggs in one basket.
- billswift 16y agoTomatoes are vulnerable to a lot of diseases, it is particularly important that you rotate them; don't grow tomatoes in the same spot more than two years in a row, and wait at least two years before growing them there again. If growing them in pots sterilize the soil over the winter (there are several ways you can do this).
- billswift 16y ago"Green zebra" and "Green Grape" tomatoes have particularly different and interesting flavors. They have a faint touch of the taste of a wild relative of theirs called "Cape Gooseberry".