A dollar saved is a dollar earned

Seriously. They barely taste like the same 'fruit'.

Also one of the easier garden vegetables (yes, vegetable, fight me) to plant. Great for beginners.

And they stay fresh pretty much as long as you want them to.

Honestly, with my raised beds, between compost, seeds and fertilizer I probably lose money compared to buying tomatoes from the store. Home grown garden tomatoes are 10x better quality than grocery store tomatoes.

Bro I been growing edamame. Holy fucking shit. You'll fucking cum.

And if ever there is a day you can’t buy tomatoes for whatever reason, you will have them.

Not to mention the cost of watering.

Sure, but if you keep the same plot, over time that cost will average out.

Store bought tomatoes seem to taste more fucking bland every year. Like I have to spend $6 per small bag to get "gourmet" tomatoes to even taste like a tomato. It's actually infuriating. I grow tomatoes now literally not to save money but just because grocery store tomatoes (at least in my area) are trash.

A tomato straight from the vine is basically candy 🍅🤤

You can beat a tomato off in many ways 😏

Depends on where you live. If you live in Italy, you can just throw random shit around your house and a couple of months later you will crap loads of free food!

We had 1/2 acre and planted a bunch of things, ate for free. Water was from a well so not even a water bill. Best tasting veg ever. Potatoes though, those are hard labour.

tell this to everyone giving advice to people in poverty

And you know what's even better? Those fresh peas.

Is it the same for all vegetables, or just tomatos?

Also you can leave them on the plant a lot longer than they last in the fridge.

So you save a lot more, since you aren't buying tomatoes every week. You just pick them as you need them.

I think the issue is they taste of nothing, and the flesh is all this mealy mush texture. People have a surprisingly low standard of what the accept as a tomato

Try making a pizza sauce from homegrown tomato and you find out why a Marguerita pizza exists

Or you can be like me thinking I hated tomatoes, until I tried home grown ones finally and realized it isn't tomatoes I hate it's shitty mealy store bought tomatoes that I hate. And it turns out everyone actually hates those because they are shitty.

Yeah, I started gardening several years ago and I've now got about 5 different varieties of tomatoes, they all taste unique and they all taste fucking amazing. But I will say, if someone isn't into the idea of gardening, then I would agree its a waste of time.

I totally agree on strawberries. They're really easy to grow (once they're in place, they survive through winters and you actually have to stop them from spreading), and the berries are so good.

We got our very first raspberries this year and Oh. My. God! They are so much better!

It was only the other day I learned that the reason for this is mostly due to how they ripen, which I'm sure you already know.

For those that don't, when you pick a tomato from your garden, you've picked it at your desired color and freshness. When you buy a tomato from the supermarket (most if not all), you're buying a tomato that wasn't fully ripened on th vine, but instead is blasted with some ethylene, a naturally occurring gas that normally is produced by tomatoes actively ripening, causing the tomato to continue to mature but not develop some of the complexity of taste you get from proper vine ripening. They're often picked a little green when in super-farms because they're firmer and less prone to damaging that way, and then ripened during packaging. That, and the tomato you eat from supermarkets and fast food are all super homogenous and bred specifically for mass yield.

Seriously. Someone post the King of the Hill clip. You know the one.

And you can grow more than 4 fucking tomatoes in two months

Yes, this meme works for almost all vegetables but definitely not tomatoes. Homegrown vs store bought is night and day.

Just buy them from your local farmers market.

This. I made pasta sauce with 100% produce I grew on my garden and it was by far the best I had ever tasted. Made about 2 jars and preserved the second one and was still amazing a couple of months later.

"What message?"

"Oh it says 'fuck farmers' but it's only visible from the air."

absolutely this. I see so many people who look at the very real possibility of economic instability, even in the temporary case, and are sure that the three most important things to get through it are guns, guns and guns. Some of them, maybe, know a little first aid. So I've made it a thing for me to be the guy in the apocalypse that can do a little bit of everything else. Canning, winemaking, cheesemaking, all the other various ways that people have figured out how to preserve food, and basic gardening and herb lore. I'm networking with people who know how and what to forage, nurses who know what basic supplies would be needed to treat minor injuries and diseases and how they can be improvised with what's to hand, and other like-minded people. Everyone is sure that in order to survive they're gonna need to be self-sufficient rugged individualists and that it's mostly gonna involve raiding and repelling raiders but if you look at times of uncertainty the people who actually survive know how to generate food and medicine from nothing and have small, tightly knit communities where they know and take care of one another. If your plan for economic uncertainty is just guns you're gonna end up dead of a bacterial infection next to a pile of guns. If, however, you know how to make soap from fat and ash, and have a sensible number of guns with which to acquire animal fat, and can generate food from the dirt, you're a lot more likely to actually do well. Economic uncertainty isn't going to be an action film.

God damn. That would be like buying a new pet like a kitten or something and then a year later finding out you can’t eat it.

Healthier too since the plant actually did its proper growing cycle and converted nitrogens into protiens

You sound like a weird tomato version of Gaston.

I think they're meming that 4 that was their total yield from all the plants they were able over the 2 months.

if you were to grow your own you'd probably be limited by something - space , light, and soil quality, and weather (maybe)

that's probably why you say "if"

Where the fuck do you think people buy tomatos?

Also the cost of your time. People always forget labour costs.

Also, tomatoes require pretty much the same Ph, moisture, and light levels that Marijuana does. Once you're good at growing tomatoes, you can switch to a more profitable crop

My MO is much cheaper. I just throw produce waste into a corner of my back yard and see what starts growing. Right now I've got about 10 pumpkin plants taking off like crazy. A jalapeño plant too!

I do think that numbers here are much more complex than people give them credit for, firstly no gardener I know only grows six tomatoes and secondly there are added benefits which come from it being an active hobby plus various health benefits.

I think there are bonuses that are very hard to get elsewhere, making friends by sharing excess harvest for example - if you brought tomatoes and give a bag full to someone you barely know they'll think you're odd but give them a bag of ones you've grown and next time you see them they'll tell you how nice whatever they cooked with it was and at some point they'll probably give you a couple of courgettes or invite you to pick from their strawberies while they're away.

It gives a real connection to reality and passing time too, watching your plants struggle from the soil, potting them up and helping them through the various stages of life until they're fruiting and ready for harvest. Watching the weather, keeping track of how much it's rained and when to plant different things or what to water and feed - it's very grounding, especially learning to accept whatever comes because you can only do so much and the rest is out of your control.

I could go on but just one more thing, having excess fruit opens up so many possibilities that you'd never bother with otherwise, making pies and jams just to make use of them feels so good and it's such a great way to discover new things - my dad made a recipe he found for courgette cake partly as a joke in a year they had a bumper harvest and now it's everyone's favourite cake.

Actually one more thing, I was away from home recently and had to buy things I'm used to picking, herbs are insane prices! And awfull quality. A widow box full of herbs saves about twenty dollars a month and that's without even taking into account having a tub of coriander (cilantro) for mojitos.

Besides weed, is there anything profitable to grow at home?

Honestly, might not be a popular opinion but I live in a big city and the amount of gardening-related local Facebook groups is insane. And since it's Facebook, it's all old people who have decades of experience with this shit. AND it's region specific so they are constantly throwing down relevant advice for the zone you live in. 10/10 it's literally the reason why I keep Facebook haha.

Start them off inside, plant 3x as many as you want, choose the best and discard the rest when it comes to planting out.

Tomatoes grow well in containers or large pots, these can be moved to catch the sun or to avoid a storm and can also be moved away from some pests.

Cherry tomatoes grow well in hanging baskets...

Try cherry and grape tomatoes. I've grown cherry tomatoes for the past two years along with starting grape tomatoes this year and I've had much more success with them than larger varieties. I think they tend to be more disease resistant, more vigorous, more productive, and fruit matures more quickly.

Also try growing them in bags or raised beds where it's kept away from the ground where pests can get at them easier. Another thing you can do is cover the soil around them with straw mulch in order to reduce soil splash onto the plant when it's being watered--this can transmit diseases to the plant. Pick off all the bottom half foot of leaves or so on the plant when it's big enough too to reduce soil splash hitting leaves.

You could look into: companion planting (some plants help or hinder others. Eg, basil and tomato are good friends); no-dig gardening (alongside having a good soil microbiome); green manure; sacrificial crops to lure pests away from your main crops; aspect and soil type.

Higher potassium and phosphates increase flower and fruit growth. Higher nitrogen increases leafy growth.

Don't grow the same type of plant in the same patch every year.

It's so hard to know any specific advice but I'd say when you're getting into gardening plant more than you need and try different things - ideally write on labels what you're doing with that one, like try some in bigger pots, different soil, more light or shade, different pruning styles or planting times. It's fun and a great way to get a feel for your plants, instead of thinking 'oh this plant is rubbish' try to come at it more like 'oh that's what happens to a tomato without enough light'

Also YouTube is full of great gardening videos, the lesson type ones get boring once you know what they're going to say but watching people show you their garden and talk you though everything and how it's been growing, what they've done too it and etc can be endlessly fascinating

I don't know what your neck of the woods is like but here in "High altitude misery land, were subsoil is the only soil in your yard and it'll freeze in June because fuck you" it's a struggle to get anything out of the garden.

This year, something went wrong with the peppers and tomatoes I started indoors (I suspect the potting soil) and they never grew over 1.5 inches tall, even after they were hardened off and planted outdoors in proper soil. As such, I bought a pepper and a tomato from a retail store. The pepper is still only about a foot tall, but the tomato was actually bushing out fairly well, about 4' tall... and then something ate it down to maybe 3'-2.5'-ish. The squash I started indoors did much better and survived hardening off well. After I put them into the garden the earwigs actually waited a whole week to eat them down to stumps. And I absolutely need to water... it takes about two days for the plants to start wilting.

My garden makes me appreciate the supermarket every year.

Hydroponics and the accessibility to it makes things even easier. On demand veggie snacks, right in my room? Yes please.

This comment is brought to you by someone living in a temperate area, with land that they have access to, that also doesn't scorch everything that tries to grow.

A lot of people think growing shit takes a lot of effort because it does for them.

That being said, hydroponics is a very nice option that works for me.

so basically you would prefer to live alone in a forest

Or the fucking squirrels

It's not too surprising. Tomatoes are usually eaten uncooked, so the seeds are almost always viable when they hit the sewer system. Add to that tomatoes are tropical, so when a seed hits the soil it's gonna start growing.

Dude, I grow tomatoes in a 4' x 6' plot of dirt by the sidewalk in Montreal with zero tending and I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with every year. What are you doing so wrong?

I have like six different tomato plants growing out of jars (started as seeds) hydroponically. They take almost no effort. It's actually super easy to grow them if you eliminate nature from the process lol.

The tight temperature range is something I very much agree with you on. I think climate conducive to their growth play a big factor in disease immunity as well. I've seen them thrive like weeds in sub tropical regions. But for some reason, even in controlled conditions, they fail to do that well here in my area.

I grew these morning glories and by jove Im gonna eat these morning glories!