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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.
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.
spare land
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not worth the labor.
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.
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!
Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.
This is how I see all of the "I'm going to move to the country and grow my own food" crowd.
They're essentially glorifying subsistence farming, a lifestyle that humans have collectively been trying to escape since we invented agriculture.
I've lived in a subsistence farming community. You know who doesn't glorify and romanticize it? Farmers.
Don't get me wrong, hobby farming often is the best of both worlds, and smallholder farming and gardening fucking make life 20,000 times better. But making the jump to letting your whole life depend on rainfall just to eat is madness.
We as a species have 50 centuries of receipts to tell us that subsistence farmers eventually lose the game in a long enough time line. It only takes 1 season for that to ruin lives and communities.
i mean the food is better when you picked it that morning. but like, i can pay someone else to pick it that morning.
Yeah, I joined a CSA so someone gets money to buy the machinery in order to farm at a larger scale than they could have on their own and I get fresh fruits, vegetables and honey periodically.
the "I'm going to move to the country and grow my own food" crowd
If this statement appeals to you (it does to me) it might mean you need to find more hobbies that keep you outdoors. (I have and it's great!)
once a week i hunt for a shop and gather some groceries.
Just like my forebears
You're descended from bears?
Yes, four of them to be exact.
Helps with the hunting
And makes the leather fit better.
Might make some other things fit better too, but that isn't my wheelhouse, so I'll let experts weigh in.
Do you still shit in the woods?
Wait until they stop adopting children after finding out about impregnation
12000 years and weβre back
That's nice, now I only need 200k so I can buy a house with a backyard so I can make my own groceries.
Where do you live that 200k gets you enough land to grow your own food? Mine was Β£230k and all I can realistically grow a years supply of in a year is a few types of herbs.
Easy enough. Every country has an area where nobody wants to live. On the side of a mountain, hours away from the next city, maybe on an old garbage tip or an old industrial chemical spill. In Eastern Europe you might even find a cheap piece of land in a mine field. Should be possible.
There isn't really any unowned land left in England. Some patches that are abandoned perhaps but its not exactly publicised as someone would probably take it if it was well known that there was free land somewhere.
LOL. I started out with a little wooded land, cut trees, cleared it, bought a $1,200 well used mobile home and now have a nice home with three gardens. Buy small and grow.
Have you tried giving up avocado toast?
This sounds like a wall-e type sci-fi concept. Except our actual future.
Garlic factory owners hate this one simple trick.
This is tiktok after all, so yes, they fully believe theyβre the very first to discover agriculture, and no, no one else has yet. Itβs so cool to be them, according to them.
My parent's garden has literally thousands of garlic plants that show up unplanned every year. When clearing part of the garden to plant something else, pulling up like 30 garlic stalks is normal. Come harvest time, they give away as much garlic as they can and they still have so much that they have to throw a bunch of it out because it all goes bad before they can use it.
I would say they could pickle the garlic... but then they'll probably just end up with too much pickled garlic.
Garlic Confit, use like butter, also really nice on sandwiches, caprese, the oil is great for dressings
Garlic will grow like a weed too. Growing up we had an entire bed along the outside north wall that went from mixed plants to oops all garlic and chives alarmingly quickly.
Eliminate car repair bills with a bunch of tools and this weird trick!
The garlic at my local store is 69Β’ a bulb. Nice!
Idiicracy