CUISINE & CULTURE
ELLEN PEFFLEY
Better nutrition and a healthy lifestyle were two reasons given in the April 9 column for growing your own vegetables. Another reason to plant a vegetable garden is in today’s column: cost.
Those of us who have watched and felt prices of produce creep up and up the last few years are not alone. Consumer Food Insights (ag.purdue.edu) conducted a recent survey asking respondents to describe grocery prices. Some statistics from the survey: a majority of respondents (84%) described grocery prices as “high” or “very high”; almost half of households said they currently produce or plan to produce their own food, with 82% saying vegetable and fruit gardening is the most popular planned production activity.
What caught my eye was that most of those who thought grocery prices were too high planned to produce their own vegetables. This is awesome.
Gardens do not have to be large to supply even a few commonly consumed vegetables: Sweet potatoes. One sweet potato can provide enough slips to grow several feet of tubers, yielding 10 or so sweet potatoes—at a cost of basically one sweet potato, maybe 50 cents.
White potatoes. Seed potatoes of white potatoes was the February 26 column topic. Seed potatoes can be made from store-purchased tubers—cost of one potato, maybe a dollar. Four to six seed potatoes can be cut from one potato; after planting, yielding as many as eight potato tubers from each. Thus, from one store-bought potato as many as 48 new potatoes can be harvested—all for a dollar.
Summersquash. A packet of summer squash holding 20 seeds sells for about two dollars. Summer squash sells for 99 cents per pound, making cost of one squash about one dollar. One seed packet can probably provide enough squash for a neighborhood for the cost of two dollars.
Tomatoes. A packet of tomato seed sells for about three dollars. Use the same reasoning as for squash. One packet can keep you and your family in tomatoes for the entire year by freezing or canning surplus fruit.
Peppers. Last year one poblano pepper plant in my garden yielded over 100 peppers, at a cost of $3.50 for one plant.
The list of possible vegetables to grow to reduce cost is almost inexhaustible. But maybe grow a garden just because you love it!
Ellen Peffley Harp, a retired professor of horticulture at Texas Tech University, writes about gardening for several Texas newspapers.
