Store bought tomatoes seem to taste more fucking bland every year. Like I have to spend $6 per small bag to get “gourmet” tomatoes to even taste like a tomato. It’s actually infuriating. I grow tomatoes now literally not to save money but just because grocery store tomatoes (at least in my area) are trash.

And you know what’s even better? Those fresh peas.

You can beat a tomato off in many ways 😏

tell this to everyone giving advice to people in poverty

We had 1/2 acre and planted a bunch of things, ate for free. Water was from a well so not even a water bill. Best tasting veg ever. Potatoes though, those are hard labour.

Depends on where you live. If you live in Italy, you can just throw random shit around your house and a couple of months later you will crap loads of free food!

A tomato straight from the vine is basically candy 🍅🤤

absolutely this. I see so many people who look at the very real possibility of economic instability, even in the temporary case, and are sure that the three most important things to get through it are guns, guns and guns. Some of them, maybe, know a little first aid. So I’ve made it a thing for me to be the guy in the apocalypse that can do a little bit of everything else. Canning, winemaking, cheesemaking, all the other various ways that people have figured out how to preserve food, and basic gardening and herb lore. I’m networking with people who know how and what to forage, nurses who know what basic supplies would be needed to treat minor injuries and diseases and how they can be improvised with what’s to hand, and other like-minded people. Everyone is sure that in order to survive they’re gonna need to be self-sufficient rugged individualists and that it’s mostly gonna involve raiding and repelling raiders but if you look at times of uncertainty the people who actually survive know how to generate food and medicine from nothing and have small, tightly knit communities where they know and take care of one another. If your plan for economic uncertainty is just guns you’re gonna end up dead of a bacterial infection next to a pile of guns. If, however, you know how to make soap from fat and ash, and have a sensible number of guns with which to acquire animal fat, and can generate food from the dirt, you’re a lot more likely to actually do well. Economic uncertainty isn’t going to be an action film.

This. I made pasta sauce with 100% produce I grew on my garden and it was by far the best I had ever tasted. Made about 2 jars and preserved the second one and was still amazing a couple of months later.

Yes, this meme works for almost all vegetables but definitely not tomatoes. Homegrown vs store bought is night and day.

Just buy them from your local farmers market.

And you can grow more than 4 fucking tomatoes in two months

It’s not too surprising. Tomatoes are usually eaten uncooked, so the seeds are almost always viable when they hit the sewer system. Add to that tomatoes are tropical, so when a seed hits the soil it’s gonna start growing.

Or the fucking squirrels

I think they’re meming that 4 that was their total yield from all the plants they were able over the 2 months.

if you were to grow your own you’d probably be limited by something - space , light, and soil quality, and weather (maybe)

that’s probably why you say “if”

You sound like a weird tomato version of Gaston.

Besides weed, is there anything profitable to grow at home?

Also the cost of your time. People always forget labour costs.

Also, tomatoes require pretty much the same Ph, moisture, and light levels that Marijuana does. Once you’re good at growing tomatoes, you can switch to a more profitable crop

My MO is much cheaper. I just throw produce waste into a corner of my back yard and see what starts growing. Right now I’ve got about 10 pumpkin plants taking off like crazy. A jalapeño plant too!

I do think that numbers here are much more complex than people give them credit for, firstly no gardener I know only grows six tomatoes and secondly there are added benefits which come from it being an active hobby plus various health benefits.

I think there are bonuses that are very hard to get elsewhere, making friends by sharing excess harvest for example - if you brought tomatoes and give a bag full to someone you barely know they’ll think you’re odd but give them a bag of ones you’ve grown and next time you see them they’ll tell you how nice whatever they cooked with it was and at some point they’ll probably give you a couple of courgettes or invite you to pick from their strawberies while they’re away.

It gives a real connection to reality and passing time too, watching your plants struggle from the soil, potting them up and helping them through the various stages of life until they’re fruiting and ready for harvest. Watching the weather, keeping track of how much it’s rained and when to plant different things or what to water and feed - it’s very grounding, especially learning to accept whatever comes because you can only do so much and the rest is out of your control.

I could go on but just one more thing, having excess fruit opens up so many possibilities that you’d never bother with otherwise, making pies and jams just to make use of them feels so good and it’s such a great way to discover new things - my dad made a recipe he found for courgette cake partly as a joke in a year they had a bumper harvest and now it’s everyone’s favourite cake.

Actually one more thing, I was away from home recently and had to buy things I’m used to picking, herbs are insane prices! And awfull quality. A widow box full of herbs saves about twenty dollars a month and that’s without even taking into account having a tub of coriander (cilantro) for mojitos.

I have like six different tomato plants growing out of jars (started as seeds) hydroponically. They take almost no effort. It’s actually super easy to grow them if you eliminate nature from the process lol.

The tight temperature range is something I very much agree with you on. I think climate conducive to their growth play a big factor in disease immunity as well. I’ve seen them thrive like weeds in sub tropical regions. But for some reason, even in controlled conditions, they fail to do that well here in my area.

Dude, I grow tomatoes in a 4’ x 6’ plot of dirt by the sidewalk in Montreal with zero tending and I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with every year. What are you doing so wrong?