653
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
653 points (98.7% liked)
News
23267 readers
2998 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
!gardening !balconygardening
While I like gardening, unironically advising people to grow their own food to cut costs is just bonkers.
It takes months to grow anything, and given the limited space, you can't grow much anyway. You'll be lucky to grow 20€ worth of food on your balcony while spending hours doing the gardening. That's not cost effective.
And that doesn't even count the cost of materials to get started.
Definitely not against gardening, me and my partners are in the process of getting our garden going in our new place, but dirt alone could easily eat up the cost savings if you have to build out your planters.
Yeah I've had gardens all the way up until covid when prices went bananas because it wasn't feasible anymore. I can buy from a farmers market for less than the materials/time/water. I need to build a gray water capture system.
Now I just grow herbs and tomatoes.
As I wrote in another comment: you can create your own soil with earthworms. You can get a small batch of worms in fishing supply stores for like 5€ (or collect them yourself), these guys turn almost any plant material into pure fertilizer.
If your balcony could support the load you could grow quite densely with hydroponic towers, but you won't ever recoup the costs. That method is also very little work beyond the initial compared to soil.
Yeah, sorry, no. Even if I had the space, when I get home from work at 1900 the last thing I want to do is more work. It's not like you can just plop some seeds into soil and do nothing until the harvest is ripe—I know, we had a decent family garden when I was a wee lad. Took a lot of work to keep it going.
If I worked 4 or even 6 hours a day—sure, I could add some homework to my day. But not when working 8 hours+commuting. And many people are working even longer days.
Gardening has its own associated costs with supplies and requires space
It's the cost of supplies and garden maintenance and see requirement vs the cost of food at the supermarket
It needs to cost less than the growable food you can buy at the store
You can get away with very little supplies, actually. Basically just a small shovel, the rest be salvaged.
Pots can be made from old plastic bins/containers, soil/fertilizer can be made from food waste using worms, seeds can be made from surprisingly many fruits/vegetables. Pumpkin seeds are right inside the pumpkin, potatoes and beans can be put right into the soil, even tomatoes can be grown from store bought ones.
And while it's a really cool hobby: you're right regarding the cost effectiveness. Unless you happen to have a significant plot of land, it won't make a dent in your grocery bill.
This is not great advice. Using random crap for planters can leech chemicals into your fruits and veggies. Also, you need seed-potatoes to grow potatoes you can eat. You cannot grow edible potatoes from what you buy in a grocery store.
"Random crap" is what's used in agriculture as well, if you buy a big plastic tub, it won't leech more into the soil than your coke bottle already did. There's only so much plastic that can leech out and planters can be used for years, the plastic you're using around your house gets thrown out in a week or two and replaced. Much higher chemical content there.
And you can absolutely use store bought potatoes, they are clones, there's no difference between seed and regular potatoes. At most, there might have been something done to prevent sprouting for a bit, but that's it. You can simply wait for them to sprout, if that's a concern. You know how I know? I've been growing "old" food potatoes in pots for years. Works just fine.
Plastic can leech plastic into your food, I know this personally from getting headaches from using soda bottles as water bottles
And my aunt gets headaches from 5G.
You're not getting headaches from water bottles. It's placebo (or nocebo, in this case).
https://www.comfortncolor.com/HTML/Polystyrene_Styrene%20Ban/Toxic%20of%20Plastic/2018_Toxic_effects_of_plastic_on_human_health.pdf
This is just a paper citing plastics affects on health in Bangladesh but it does demonstrate that plastic can have these effects
You are wrongly comparing scientifically proven effects of plastic with misinformation
Nope, you're simply wildly exaggerating the effects of the dosage you're actually getting.
That's like saying water causes cancer, because everyone with cancer drank water at some point.
You are not getting the minimum doses needed to get from a water bottle. And again, if you're getting headaches from a water bottle, that's your imagination. Period.