In this video Clint from gardenfrugal.com teaches you how to get seven times as many tomato plants for FREE!!!! It’s very easy. Take cuttings (suckers) and t…
Question by J.L.: Is it more cost effective to buy a couple tomato plants or buy tomatoes from the market?
We saw a couple tomato plants at the garden store ranging from 2.99 to 4.99 a plant, there were many varieties. Do the plants produce a lot, do they do well in cooler climates? Are they more cost effective to grow them or should we just buy them when we need them at the store?
Best answer:
Answer by Smokey da Bear
Tomato plants are heavy producers that will give you many fresh tomatoes with minimal work on your part. If you have a local grower you can buy fresh tomatoes and don’t want to bother with watering, fertilizing, spraying for bugs, it may be easier ( and cheaper) to buy what you need WHEN you need them. If your plants produce more than you can eat, you have to give them away or make sauce.
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Tomato plants
Image by rachelandrew
These are the tomato plants I photographed back in May. They’ve grown a bit!
Where I get my plants there are tomato plants for $ 1.89 for a 4 pack. They also have many different varieties all for the same price. These are what I buy. Larger individual plants cost more per each.
For the casual tomato consumer, it would probably be well worth it to simply buy them in the store. If you find yourself eating a lot of tomatoes or are looking for a hobby, growing them may be the way to go. Gardening can be time consuming (though tomatoes aren’t too difficult), so you have to weight that into your equation. Don’t forget the cost of possibly making your soil right for the plant, buying or building cages to keep them upright, possibly fighting off thieving animals, fertilizer (if you choose).
That one was figured out by an honest guy in 2006 – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5360768
Personally? I like to garden too much, and a fresh Cherokee Purple is a completely different tomato compared to that last-for-10-years roma from the supermarket. I think they should call those tomatoey looking things in the supermarket something else, because they don’t taste anything like a home-grown tomato. Kind of like eating wet cardboard in comparison. (And that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.)
The guy who wrote that book probably is the biggest idiot I’ve ever seen. Here are my general costs:
Used garden tiller: $ 40. Used it for nine years now, never broken down. Breaks down to $ 4.44 per year.
Seeds: Free. Taken from previous tomatoes I’ve grown over the years.
Gas for tiller: Around $ 6 a year for me.
Potting soil to start seeds: Around $ 4 a year.
Fertilizer: Paid $ 10 for a pickup truck load of horse manure last year. Make my own compost.
Yield: 200+ pounds per year.
I grow more than tomatoes. I also have five rows of potatoes, a row of great northern beans, three rows of onions, a row of sweet potatoes, a row of peas, a row of green beans, and a row of tobacco. As you can see I get quite a lot for very little money. When the regular harvest is over I cover the garden in turnip seed. About half of that gets eaten and the rest gets tilled under for the soil.
By the way, my compost bin cost me nothing. I got the fencing free and used twist ties to put it together. My tomato cages were also free. I got them off Craigslist in the free section a few years ago.
Having a garden is like everything else in life. You can buy a hundred thousand dollar car or you can buy a five thousand dollar car. Chances are both will get you to where you want to go.
Its up to you. but for the price.Theres nothing like homegrowen tomatos. Right now is the time to plant them if you are. 3 plant might get you up to 100 tomatos all summer long.