Its just not worth growing some vegies

For me it isnt a matter of being cheaper but whether its worth the time and sweat to grow something that I can buy for next to nothing. "Free" is only true if your time and energy are worth nothing. I like to work hard but I have more hard work to do than I have time to do it so I pick and choose.

Well that is something different entirely. I can understand that as there are a lot of veggies I just dont want to bother with too. But dollar for dollar its going to be cheaper to grow it yourself so long as its an appropriate crop for your climate/soil and etc. Some here are talking about potatoes which have to be, hands down, the easiest and cheapest crop to grow just about anywhere.

If its costing you more to grow a potato, than you can buy it for ( dollar for dollar, not talking about your "time" which is completely arbitrary ) there is something horribly wrong with your gardening method.

Some neighbors used to grow green beans commercially. They would not eat the beans they grew for the companies because of the type and volume of nasty chemicals the company demanded to be sprayed on them.

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I grow certain things and buy others. Corn and eggplant don't do well here, so I buy it at the farmer's market. If we were forced to rely only on what we could grow, then we just wouldn't have corn or eggplant! I like to grow things that just aren't available at the farmer's markets. Certain heirloom veggies or cultural foods, etc. I don't like planting onions or root crops unless I grow them in containers. I know longer plant potatoes because they are so cheap and they've been volunteering in my flowerbed and compost pile for years. I plant beans and peas every year because I love the way that they taste when freshly picked.

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Yes, I would be ahead working minimum wage instead of in the garden. But, before I had a garden, I spent that time watching TV, not working, so I am still ahead.

I grow my own veggies for two major reasons, i.e. it keeps me active and I know my produce is healthy.....hearing too much about GMO and know what is available in stores have been preserved.

I did learn I did not need to grow as much sweet corn as we're still eating on some grown 2 years ago. And my root-crop bed is still under construction. I can hardly wait to start planting in that!

Working a garden for me is a spiritual time and I value that very much.

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There are a few things being discussed here...

Are veggies in season, in farm country where they are grown commercially cheaper to buy than produce? For most vegetables the answer is yes. For me it's peas. A big basket of peas is easily harvested, shell them out for an hour,The result is a tiny bowl of actual food. Hardly worth the effort. Can you "profit" by growing some veggies? Yes. Specific varieties or types that do well in your micro climate. Veggies that take a long time or a lot of care to produce. Asparagus comes to mind. Does your time have value? Sure does.

For "profit" I grow what grows well in my garden. Cole crops, potatoes are a weed, carrots are so simple it's silly. Quick summer veggies like cucumbers, green beans, and summer squash produce with little effort. The quick veggies do so well we sell our excess in a road side stand and make actual profit.
But I don't grow tomatoes, peppers, melons and other heat lovers. We don't get "Heat" 75F is hot, 85F is unbelievable, The old timers claim 90 happed once. So they suffer and I suffer the loss of the garden space. Grow what grows well is my plan and for "profit" I suggest you do the same.

We LOVE your state...

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Many here confusing time with money. Time can only produce money when you have the opportunity to do so. If you work 9-5 then come home and garden...that is 100% profit got from your garden because you did not have the opportunity to use that time to produce any money ( the office is closed, your work hours are over ). Its called spare time. And for many who do not work in the traditional sense but homestead/farm full time, then there is no 'opportunity cost' all your time is alotted for producing a harvest.

What some seem to be doing is assigning an arbitrary value to their "time". "My time is worth $10 per hour, so anything I produce less than that is a loss"...that is guerrilla accounting at best. Your time is only worth $10 per hour if you could have used that time to actually make $10 per hour. For most of us, that is not possible and/or we would actually be using that time to dally on the internet or watch TV. If, instead of watching TV you spend 10 hrs producing .02 cents worth of produce ( after cost ) then you have profited the full .02cents.

There's a difference between 'cheaper' in dollar terms, and 'easier' in terms of time and effort.

Assigning an arbitrary value to your time, when no such actual opportunity exists or would be utilized, is a great excuse to do nothing because "it isn't worth it...I'll lose money...so I'll sit here and watch TV instead.." Your time isn't worth a dime unless you can use it to produce a dime, anything you can do that is productive is more profitable than doing something that is not productive.

As you said its not just time but also effort. Sitting on your butt for leisure is worth something too (to some people). Is the effort put into growing the food worth the 2 cents worth of food? Only if you enjoy the effort and/or dont have the money to buy the food. If I can afford to buy the food and I'd rather be sitting and drinking a beer instead of gardening then its probably not worth it. But I drink while I garden so maybe my profit is double.

It also has to do with how much you "travel around." It costs me about $7 round trip to get to the edge of town.
So I grow what I use frequently and want really fresh or want enough volumn to put up.
I grow blueberries, using a number of different varieties maturing at different times, so I can walk 30 feet and get a fresh bowl of blueberries for my breakfast in June-October. For this privilege, I put a bird net over them once a year and take it down once a year.
I feel the same about strawberries, lettuce, green onions, bok choy, peas, string beans, etc. All grow like weeds most of the year here.
For things that save well in bulk, like organic carrots, I buy. Things that are very difficult to grow here, like tomatoes, I'm forced to buy fresh.
I used to feel the same about potatoes- cheaper to buy. Then they went up a lot for my favorite Yukons so I decided to grow them. I could taste the difference and liked being able to get them whenever I wanted. So they are now on my list too. I think I'm overdoing it now because I've had so much fun with them.

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Around here the tv may be on but only for the noise. I don't watch a lot of tv. Don't sit on my backside doing a lot of nothing either. I stated plainly that there were certain crops which I can put my time and effort into and get more of a reward than I can with other crops. Planting sweet corn here is a plain waste of time and money. You'll never get a crop even though the soil is perfect. After the potato catastrophe of 2012 I am seriously reconsidering even growing any. All that time (which could have been spent on other crops) and a handful of spuds because of some critter digging up and devouring (taking?) nearly the whole crop. Broke my heart because I had carried the red pontiac along for several years and another variety which can no longer be purchased. I think all the blues are gone too. I didn't see any yesterday when I checked the little pile of the potatoes I did get. And the seed for the red potatoes wasn't cheap so I was out money on that crop. If I had spent the time moving and netting the raspberries I would have had a tremendous harvest of those.

As soon as I am done with my break I am going back out to finish my terraces and hopefully move some plants around. And I have to set up the buckets so I can plant my few remaining red flesh potatoes in those. And the carrot patch needs to be worked. Not like I'll gain anything from the time I spend on that but I keep hoping, and dd already bought the seed.

Exactly, the economic concept of opportunity costs is not just about money.

I saw herbs mentioned earlier and it reminded me of today when i went to town. Our chives didn't do so well so we bought seeds at WM a few days ago. Today, at the local place they had them 3 bunches (planted in pots) for $5. A lot better deal than the seed.

We don't buy green beans, as we like canned ones almost as well as fresh ones. Not to mention that the deer and rabbits here love them from my garden and I can buy them much less expensively than I can raise them.

Some crops, like carrots, I don't raise because my time is more valuable at the moment than having homegrown ones. That will most likely change when I retire in a couple of years.

I have raised onions and garlic with good success, however it is so humid here in the summer when it comes time to cure them that it is hardly worth the effort. Every time I have tried, I have had a great crop, but they will mold or rot before I can get them dried properly, so I end up losing half of my harvest.

Potatoes are easy and no commercial enterprise around here raises them for sale except a few market gardeners. Apples and peaches are less expensive to buy than to raise, and I have a local source that doesn't saturate them with insecticide.

We could never grow enough broccoli for ourselves... so we stick with growing cabbage and hope we aren't getting poisoned from getting it at the store. Same thing for lettuce except in the spring and fall when it is easy to grow here.

Nothing is cheap here, not even straight from the farm, so it's cheaper to grow.

That's easy to say if you own a lot of property and have free access to everything else which goes with gardening. I have approximately 1250 square feet at home which to me isn't much more than an over-sized salad garden. If that land is supposed to be free, my tax assessor has a different opinion. All fertilizers and amendments must be obtained elsewhere. Even if free, vehicle and fuel are not.

Since that 1250 isn't going to fill many jars and already filled mostly with garlic, we have one of the cheapest community garden rates in the area at $35 for 432 square feet. To handle what I think a normal family might grow, I'll be planting in 10 of them this year. That's $350 just to get started. With enough fencing on hand to protect 6 of them from the deer, and at least $100 initial investment per plot, that's another $400 along with the $600 already on hand.

For canning, there will be no sweet corn or peas in those 10 plots. Those plus snap beans are grown in 100+ acre fields around here and several farmers even let me know a day or so before harvest so that I get all I want at the peak of ripeness. I do grow over 100 varieties of beans but mostly for seed since I can get all I want just for picking.

Wisconsin is big on growing potatoes. 30 miles off in 2 directions will find chances to buy enough to last all winter for less than the cost of buying seed to produce the same amount. A 432 square feet plot can handle about 20 running feet of potatoes or 100 hills. That's not going to produce $35 worth of spuds when all other costs are figured in.

Winter squash is the one thing which never pays to grow unless one has unlimited ground to do it in. I did that last year with almost 4,000 square feet devoted just to squash and melons. They were grown only as an option of mowing that area all summer. Again, need only drive about 30 miles to a wayside market where one can literally fill a pickup truck with squash and pumpkins for less than it would cost to grow a bushel.

One person mentioned chemicals sprayed on snap beans? Unless there is a massive aphid attack, nothing sprayed around here. Even then, it's soybeans which are most often affected and later than snap beans. Those available to me have potentially less chemicals than those from my own plots. Same farm has cucumbers and several hives for pollination. And, no surprise that I can pick a bushel or two of cukes when I want to can some!

Martin

Yes, of course if you are renting a lot to grow veggies then that is a completely different scenario. I'm talking about growing veggies on your property, as probably 95% of the people here do. You cannot count your property tax bill as an expense to growing your garden, LOL! That is just ridiculous. You're going to pay your property tax whether or not you use the space to grow veggies. You have to live somewhere regardless of whether or not you grow food. If you own you pay property tax, if you rent you pay rent. I don't pay 'more' property tax because I use the land to produce vegetables. In fact, when I lived in the suburbs I paid LITERALLY 4x more in property taxes, and I had 1/2 an acre ( lawn ). Now I have about 100 acres and pay a fraction of that. Of course, all that has nothing to do with the price of growing vegetables. Either way, you have to pay something to live somewhere ( unless your in jail or a homeless shelter ).

As far as fertilizer, I've said before I use manure from my sheep, rabbits, and chickens and I buy 1 bag or so of fertilizer per year for my corn. Beans do not get fertilized, only some manure to get them started. Potatoes get nothing. Soil gets prepped with manure and wood ash before planting, all of which is free.

It seems that some want to count every single possible penny against gardening ( even property tax!) but fail to do so for the alternative, which is going to the supermarket. Let's use the same measure to compare them. You say 'fuel' is an expense of gardening as amendments and such have to be gone out and bought. But don't you burn fuel going to the supermarket? Alot more often, I'd wager. How much is your car payment for all those trips?What do you do with all the bags and boxes and containers that you end with from the supermarket? They have to be thrown out unless you have an entire room dedicated to cans, bags, and lids. What do you pay for your sanitation service? Or do you go to the dump yourself? Do you drive there? How much do you pay for your vehicle? How much to they charge to dump? How much of your property tax is alloted to sanitation?

You can see how silly this becomes. It gets that way when we get confused about how to calculate profit and loss.

Despite being in the city limits, we raised rabbits commercially for almost 12 years and often peaked at about 80. We stopped when the price of feeding them exceeded what we could sell them for. Although the rabbits did not charge us for their manure, it was not produced free.

Our recycle fee is $15 per annum with bi-weekly pickup, nearest supermarket is 8 blocks away, and wife has worked for another for over 35 years.

My garden area last year was 12½ miles away and that took a little more than a gallon of fuel to make a round trip. Each $50+ tank fill was garden expense just as much as the quart in the Mantis.

Martin