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I am an avid gardener. I have an appreciation for lush green environments and over the years I’ve grown all sorts of veggies along with flowers, bushes, and trees but there seems to be a myth lurking in the pf blog sphere that growing your own food is a way to save money. Over the years that I’ve grown my own food, I can tell you that the math simply won’t add up.

Consider the two ways you can obtain food: buy from a grocer (or farmers market) or grow your own. Who do you think has the advantage in either scenario?

A farmer will typically grow food on a large scale leveraging land, equipment, seed, water, and labor on a wholesale level where a home gardener will pay retail prices for most of those things on an un-leveraged basis. You can crunch the math numbers any way you want but at the end of the day the economies of scale do not favor the individual home gardener and I’m not even including tax payer subsidies!
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What really concerns me about home gardening however is that if millions of people decided to grow their own gardens, then the demand for water would increase dramatically. A farmer will cautiously use water to maximize the growth of his fields where a consumer will haphazardly water his/her plants to the point when a home gardener may let their “crops” fail due to poor over/under watering resulting in waste.As a person who gardens, I can tell you that I’ve been in situation where I’ve gone on vacation for a couple of weeks and come back to see some of my plants die. There have been situations where I forgot to “harvest” some of my yield and come back to seen it decay on the ground.
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As you can see from the photos, I have a few tomatoes plants growing in containers and the yield has been anything but spectacular. Actually, I think two of my tomato plants in one bin are dying while the others are yielding some finally!

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I would guess that the tomatoes in the plastic above cost $40 in fertilizer, water, potting containers, mulch, and soil. I’m not including labor! I grow roses, bell peppers and other items in my home but I don’t do it to “save” money because if anything home gardening is an expensive hobby. I do it because it helps me unwind after a grueling day at the office and it’s the one hour in the day where I don’t have to think about mergers and acquisitions, international travel, project schedules, budgets, bills or anything else and I’m willing to pay $$$ to get that hour of solitude.