🤯 Life Hack Alert
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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.
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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.
It’s not worth the labor.
I wholeheartedly agree.
It’s not worth the labor if you don't know what you are doing.
Gardening is like printing free money, and it is an enjoyable hobby that provides some stress relieving exercise, IF you know what you are doing.
Using cheap-ass store bought garlic is a big mistake.
I don't plow, till and hardly weed yet have a fantastic garden that provides way more high quality produce than we can use. My fresh tasty heirloom produce is not sprayed with any toxic chemicals. I get free rotten hay bales from farmers for mulch and fertilizer from our chickens. I save seeds from varieties that do well in our area. -
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.
There are still cheap places to live all over England and Scotland - I bought a 1 bedroom flat with small garden for £90k in Peterborough (a smaller city about an hour north of London) 3 years ago, and the garden has enough space for a few raised beds with vegetables in them
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Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.
Hunter-gatherers had most of that, too.
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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.
I let it grow when it happens accidentally.
It happens often because I take my vegetable trimmings and peels to the garden and use it as mulch. I try to remove the seeds and stuff that can grow (like potato peels), but there's often root of garlic that end up mixed with the peel. Which is no big deal. Often, they only start growing in the spring or summer, so I only harvest immature forms. Which is fine. It's not like I was invested in that garlic.
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Or just buy pots, you'd be surprised how much can grow out of just a few
Garlic is actually pretty easy to grow, the main issue you will have in an apartment is where you are going to hang it to store it for the rest of the year
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There are still cheap places to live all over England and Scotland - I bought a 1 bedroom flat with small garden for £90k in Peterborough (a smaller city about an hour north of London) 3 years ago, and the garden has enough space for a few raised beds with vegetables in them
Don't flats like that usually come with the worst of renting and owning though, as you usually still have ground rates that cost quite a bit and the leasehold expires eventually? Plus they usually don't have gardens.
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Hunter-gatherers had most of that, too.
Not really. An exception are hunter-gatherers benefitting from the rich marine resources and salmon of Pacific North America, but for most hunter-gatherers:
overpopulation: well, populations tend to hit the carrying capacity, whatever it may be, but I think here it refers to living conditions like with poop being in the street and stuff like that
hierarchy: hardly any to speak of, it's mostly family-based, with special respect for great hunters or people who solve conflicts
authoritarian forms of government: no
malnutrition: of course hunger and famine exists for hunter-gatherers as well, but they generally had much better nutrition than early agriculturalists
slavery: no, they don't have the social organization to manage this
war: meeting strangers was always a dangerous event, and war can exist in specific times and places, more often being small-scale ritualized warfare in places of high productivity, but food production really brought that to another level
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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.
Tomatoes have been bad for us for the last couple of years. Last year, we got a good yield of cherry tomatoes but large tomatoes only started to ripen before the cold killed them. This year, we only planted cherry tomatoes and are just now getting the first few. My coworkers have confirmed that their tomatoes are also super late this year.
You are right about chives, asparagus, and berry bushes. Once those get established, you will have to work to keep them under control.
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Don't flats like that usually come with the worst of renting and owning though, as you usually still have ground rates that cost quite a bit and the leasehold expires eventually? Plus they usually don't have gardens.
Kinda yeah, but I was still able to buy it with only £10k down, my mortgage is only £350/month, and I've repainted the place to suit my taste and cut out a wall to make space for a washing machine (I put a dishwasher in the kitchen instead).
Not saying it's for everyone, but it worked for me
