🤯 Life Hack Alert
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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.
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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.
Mosquito's suck too, but I didn't want to get into a fight with someone about repellent, or citronella, or bundling up in winter clothes thick enough to resist the hummingbird-sized mosquitoes we get in Minnesota, while trying to garden in 105° heat.
What makes me happy is buying vegetables from the farmer's market, so that's what I do.
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Eliminate car repair bills with a bunch of tools and this weird trick!
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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.
Peaches come from a can
They were put there by a man
in a factory downtown.
And if I had my little way
I'd eat peaches everyday.
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The garlic at my local store is 69¢ a bulb. Nice!
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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.
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.
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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.
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That's nice, now I only need 200k so I can buy a house with a backyard so I can make my own groceries.
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That's nice, now I only need 200k so I can buy a house with a backyard so I can make my own groceries.
Have you tried giving up avocado toast?
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That's nice, now I only need 200k so I can buy a house with a backyard so I can make my own groceries.
Or just buy pots, you'd be surprised how much can grow out of just a few
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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.
This woman is 36 years old.
...and they vote...
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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 £230k and all I can realistically grow a years supply of in a year is a few types of herbs.
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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.
Yeah feeling that after looking at my garlic harvest this year. It was fun to grow it in some pots but unless I had way more space it isn't worth growing. Ill keep to perennial herbs instead.
Also looking at reducing how many pots I have as they use up way more water than stuff planted in the ground. Probably just mint and chives in pots going forward. Helps a lot that I have my own small garden now so I can plant things in the ground, its so much better than pots.
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spare land
Look at Mr. Moneybags over here
Guerilla gardening - who said it was my land?
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That's nice, now I only need 200k so I can buy a house with a backyard so I can make my own groceries.
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.
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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.
Chives make a nice border plant, they crowd out weeds, they are great for cooking and they have nice flowers in the spring.
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Where do you live that 200k gets you enough land to grow your own food? Mine was £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.
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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.
My parents grow their own vegetables and they even have some beehives and make and sell their own honey.
I once calculated their hourly wages for beekeeping, and I only counted the time they spent harvesting and processing the honey, nothing else. Not even the cost of materials, bees, food, medicine, nothing. Not the time spent doing anything but harvesting.
It came out to ~€5/h.
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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.
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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.
