I've been looking into expanding my veggie crop and thought it would be interesting to see what the ozbargin community has found to be the best cost saving plants to grow.
What Are The Best Vegetables/Legumes to Grow from a Saving Money Perspective
LRagzs on 18/09/2020 - 01:21
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They are soooo cheap to buy though
I think it probably depends on what you eat regularly but I find salad greens and spinach/kale to be one of my best money savers. I buy bags of salad leaves when I don’t have lettuce growing and the cost ads up over time. Especially since it often goes off before I can eat it all. Grape tomatoes are good too because they’re so prolific.
Best Vegetables/Legumes to Grow from a Saving Money Perspective
- What you eat
- What's easiest for you to grow
- Current season
E.g. We eat a lot of leafy greens. I've found that slugs don't like rocket vs buk choy (both don't mind the cold and have grown over winter). To have buk choy requires fine netting to keep out the slugs, while the rocket is in the open.
We eat a lot of tomatoes too but they are only starting to grow now (not a winter veg) but grow like a weed (that is, very easy).
Herbs (rosemary, oregano, basil, parsley, coriander, mint, sage, garlic, ginger, turmeric) are healthy, improve taste and can be expensive and most can be grown from cuttings, that is, free and some are very hardy such as rosemary.
Consider some companions - love the smell and colour of passion fruit marigold for example.
I eat a completely plant based diet. And I live in melbourne although I am limited to space so looking to growing at my other property at phillip island. Herbs are definitely on my mind. As well as garlic and ginger. My biggest challenge would be keeping it low maintenance. As there will likely be a couple of weeks a year where I wont be able to tender my crops.
i hope you take a b12 supplement
If you don't already have a veggie garden then nothing is worth it. Soil, compost etc adds up.
Otherwise, tomatoes are good - 3 or 4 plants of cherry tomatoes will have you eating so many cherry tomatoes over a few weeks that you'll be so sick of them. If you can preserve them as sauce even better. They are very easy to grow and tolerate a lot. Just make sure to add some calcium and other trace elements to your soil so you don't get blossom end rot like I did
Herbs also good if you would normally buy them fresh anyway. Anything you normally eat - basil, coriander, parsley etc. Oregano and mint are bulletproof, more likely to take over your whole garden than die.
I wouldn't bother with snow peas, not enough return for the effort even if everything was free. They seem to be too sensitive. Cheap things obviously not worth it, like carrots (also super sensitive and hard to grow), and potatoes.
If you like pumpkins and have a lot of space, they are economical (on money not space) and fun to grow. The vines creep all over everything they can reach and it is fun to watch the pumpkins get bigger and bigger. You usually just grow them from a seed. But they need a very long growing time so you need to plant asap (if you live somewhere with a winter, in qld can probably grow year round). Don't plant seeds you get in bought pumpkins, the fruit may not taste nice (the seeds are the result of a cross, who knows what the other fruit was, could have been a melon or a zucchini). Definitely buy your seeds.
If you like zucchini they are also easy to grow, nearly as fun as pumpkins but don't take over everything
Soil, compost etc adds up.
If anyone is starting from scratch plan 6-12 months in advance and make your soil via hot composting (a lot at a time ~1m3) by layering browns and greens and wetting with plenty of water and turning pile every so often to speed up decomposition.
Hardest to come by are the browns - dried leaves need to be collected from parks in winter unless you have a lot of deciduous trees. Then add greens - lawn clippings, hedge clippings (we have neighbours with nicely manicured hedges) and kitchen and garden waste - this won't generally be enough for hot composting in one go unless you have the block chip in. You can also use newspaper (mow over, throw balls in) for browns and coffee grounds for greens (just ask cafes and some will be glad to help) - I get mine from cafes that provide garbage bags full of or in 5kg Greek yoghurt tubs.
Note that greens contain a lot of water and after decomposing nitrogen is released so a big initial pile results in far less soil.
Also, don't waste anything, the green tops are very healthy and tasty (I love carrot tops, beet leaves, etc., eaten in salad or thrown into smoothie).
okra, kale
I grow cucumber, tomato and lettuce, mainly because they are super easy to grow and seem to grow just about anywhere. If you get enough of them and pot them in the right place, strawberries are easy. Various types of spinach are easy to grow in rectangle pots. Celery is virtually a grassy weed and I swear it would grow in the cracks in cement given a chance. Peas and beans tend to do well and produce on a pretty regular basis if you have enough of them.
Anything else bigger than that, like pumpkins, potatoes etc, will all require a fair bit of space and/or cultivating. It all depends on how nuts you want to go with your gardening.
Also consider growing some herbs and spices, things like spring onions, lemon grass, basil and chilli. They are great to add to cooking and take almost no space.
Oh, and if you have an outside dunny, consider chokos…
Spring onion is the easiest, if you buy a bunch, cut off the tops for cooking and plant the bottoms, keep using until they get too old and die (try not let it go to seed/flower). Next easiest for us is chilli, sweet potato (crazy growth, can eat leaves then tubers at end of season), rosemary, bay (leaf), parsley, basil (annual, let it seed and collect end of season) and capsicum. We tried growing tomatoes twice now, keep failing.
Definitely get a lot of fruit/veg seeds from packets, supermarket fruit/veg seeds are probably GMO/not true to seed.
P.S. We are in Sydney near south-east side, our soil is terrible with high sand content.
P.S.S. Here is a pic of my overgrown sweet potato end of last summer https://imgur.com/a/acIXQMhThat's weird about your tomatoes, for me that's the one thing I've grown that has never failed!
look at the price per kg.
bak choy and snow peas and okra are value for money. the rest tend to be cheap at the grocers or too much trouble.
we gave up on choy sum as it is not a good cropper.
tomatoes are good but they are cheap in the shops.
we are going to grow bitter gourd and cucumbers next.
we now have lots of bok choy, and some snow peas which we could not afford to eat otherwise.
Ginger and garlic.
Broad beans are great. Very easy to grow, resistant to most pests, and it's a nitrogen fixer. The plants can be sown quite densely and of course you don't buy seeds for the second year. I put my beans on a frying pan with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. Yum.
Beyond the money saving perspective, consider growing tomatoes. Home grown tomatoes are super fresh and sweet, unlike anything purchased anywhere.
Consider, space, time to harvest, price to buy when in season (that’s when you will get your crop), how much time/tending it needs, pests and if/how it gets pollinated.
If your looking to just save money depending on what you eat, try the leafy greens although not overly expensive as singular they grow so fast you might not be able to keep up; non heading lettuce, spinach/silver beet/perpetual spinach, bok choy, kale, herbs like oregano/mint/parsley/rosemary/chives/garlic chives/dill/coriander.
Anything from the onion family onions/shallots/leeks can be picked at any size so without having to wait for maturity. leeks can be eaten for a few months starting small then upto picking to eliminate a glut harvest.
One pumpkin plant for me produced approx 50kg of pumpkin last year but took 6-9 months and a lot of space.
Zucchini is prolific-eat the zucchini and also eat the male flowers.
Beetroot, I’d rather buy already cooked, but baby beetroot in salad, similar for micro greens
Carrots might seem like a waste of time since they are so cheap, but if you serve guests mixed colour baby carrots with the tops it’s extra fancy.
Thanks for the feedback, some good ideas. What are peoples thoughts on growing nuts, has anyone had much experience. I reckon growing almonds, cashews and macadamias would be a good money saver.
Aus has an almond industry around Vic - see Select Harvest. Vietnam is the main producer of cashews so not sure if you need tropical like climate. I've picked macadamias that fell to the ground from a tree but getting access to the nut is a pain in the arse.
Also consider walnuts; Aus has an industry.
I'm also like you - pretty much whole food plant based. I eat a lot of beans and whole grains and nuts but never tried growing - wasn't sure of scale required and because they are staples, would need all year round. Veg staples can be grown pretty much throughout the year/half a year and also mixed up.
Also, consider fruit trees such as navel oranges in winter and Valencias later in the year.
Yeh I wasn't too sure about cashews. And agree about beans and grains. Their quite cheap, can buy large bags of dried out legumes. So wouldn't be worth it there. I've always thought it'd be cool to grow soybeans and learn how to make tofu and tempeh. Have you grown mushrooms? Oyster and shitakie mushrooms are pretty expensive would be great if you could grow those.
Same with soybeans, although tofu is very cheap. We eat a lot of button, enoki (from Korea mainly or Aussie when on clearance at my local grocer) in miso and also a lot of shiitake mushrooms. I have thought about growing shiitake mushrooms on logs with spores but the Aussie ones are starting to get very cheap in bigger sizes > 100g.
Cabbage and carrots for me :D
Potatoes