• stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net
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      3 hours ago

      Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.

  • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    As someone who has a garden and has successfully grown garlic from cut ends of store bulbs…

    It’s not worth the labor.

    I garden, yes, but the economy of scales of buying at the grocery store is much lower than growing your own vegetables. You garden because you want to enjoy vegetables that are either heirloom or you want the freshness.

    Between the labor, watering, fertilizing, maintaining, etc. it’s simply cheaper to buy at the store.

    • kieron115@startrek.website
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      4 hours ago

      Were you trying to grow softneck or hardneck? Most grocery store garlic where I live is softneck garlic from china which doesn’t grow well in colder climates. Hardneck garlic, on the other hand, requires a long cold winter in order to flower in the spring. We bought a clove of hardneck from the farmers market, threw two of the biggest cloves in the garden about 6 inches down, and then did absolutely nothing to them for 9 months. The bulb wasn’t as large as the original one but I plan to replant 6 or 7 of the second harvest and see what happens. I usually buy garlic just because of how fucking loooooooooong it takes. I’m tryin to make some pasta not a baby!

    • It’s not worth the labor.

      This is my perspective. I hate weeding, more than almost anything. I hate crouching and bending over, and shuffling slowly from patch to patch. I hate gardening. I hate getting sweaty and the kind of dirty you get in the garden: gritty, and it finds its way into your shoes and gloves. Gardening sucks.

      If I was really invested, I might do hydroponics. Elevated, minimum to no weeds, no crawling around in the dirt. I don’t know whether, in the end, I’d actually save any money, though.

      • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 hour ago

        I have a terrible back but love gardening so I invested in 3 foot high bins. They are a life saver for not only my back but keeps rabbits from eating the vegetables. If you get the right soil mixture you don’t have to worry about the weeds.

        The dirt…you can’t do much about that except hydroponics like you said but that has its drawbacks too. At the end, you do what helps you and keeps you happy.

        My biggest issue at this point is mosquitoes so I’ve started wearing long pants and a light jacket. That seems to have helped things.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Just don’t plant cheap stuff.

      I will probably never grow onions, potatoes, corn, celery and other vegetables that are always cheap.

      I will plant things that are easy and or pricey. Tomatoes for sure, if I bought the tomatoes at the store I would probably have spent $500 just on tomatoes a season. Chives are also easy to manage and expensive in store. Aspargus is stupid expensive and is almost hard to get rid of once established. Some berry type fruits are also worth growing if you have spare land for them since they come back each year.

      • kieron115@startrek.website
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        4 hours ago

        Haha, yeah, asparagus is hard to get rid of. It forms these mats of roots like 8 inches down that hollow out during the fall/winter and then new roots shoot back out through the tubes. That said… I’ve never had store bought asparagus that was JUICY. I usually pluck them as as snack to eat while I’m weeding or whatever, they’re perfectly tasty raw.

      • Jrockwar@feddit.uk
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        11 hours ago

        I have a similar view. Plant things that are fun. It is a hobby and it needs to be that. Why bother planting potatoes when they take up a good amount of space and they’re cheap?

        I plant chives as well, rocket because I love it, weird varieties of chillies, and I’m thinking of adding also other herbs that I can’t get easily or that are a faff to get. Coriander is a good example, as I have to get a bag whenever I have to use a tiny bit and the rest goes to waste.

        Hobby farming is fun and a great way to get you (and the family) to eat more veggies. Subsistence farming is just painful.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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          23 hours ago

          I have a similar philosophy with basil. It’s cheap enough in our stores, but it’s way more convenient to always know its outside.

          • LousyCornMuffins@lemmy.world
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            16 hours ago

            i have so much goddamn basil, lemon balm, rosemary, lavender and laurel because of this philosophy. every few weeks i pick some and fill a jar for each room of the house. it smells fantastic in here.

      • Fermion@feddit.nl
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        24 hours ago

        Yeah that’s my attitude as well. I grow the things that are significantly better straight out of the garden. The best tomatoes are too fragile to go through the sorting machinery, so growing your own enables much higher quality produce. Berries are way better picked ripe. Green beans are also super easy to grow and are better fresh.

        Then there’s varieties that just aren’t popular enough for many stores to stock and specialty stores are far and expensive: patty pan squash, molokhia, ground cherries, shallots, celery leaves (I don’t like the stalk), a variety of herbs, peppers that aren’t bell or jalapeno, etc.

        • RebekahWSD@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          I’m going to grow canning pickles next year because find those specific types in the store is a nightmare, and that’s even with someone who works there and can special order them, it’s just easier and cheaper to grow my own!

          I’d never grow garlic. Store has huge cheap bins of it.

          San marzano tomatoes though? Growing. Strawberries? Absolutely growing, the store ones are okay but fresh is amazing.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Been growing plants inside and out for over 30-years, never had success with garlic. I feel so dumb because it seems the easiest thing in the world to grow. Going to plant this October and see what happens.

      • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        23 hours ago

        My experience with using grocery store bought garlic is mixed. When it did work, it grew a lot of leaves but not the bulb. When I researched this, it’s because garlic requires specific soil conditions to grow its bulbs.

        But bulb aside, garlic is a good natural critter repellent. It’s good to grow around lettuce and kale. Though I haven’t found a good cover plant to keep white butterflies away. Right now I’m using netting which they can sometimes find a way into.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    This is how I see all of the “I’m going to move to the country and grow my own food” crowd.

    They’re essentially glorifying subsistence farming, a lifestyle that humans have collectively been trying to escape since we invented agriculture.

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      I’ve lived in a subsistence farming community. You know who doesn’t glorify and romanticize it? Farmers.

      Don’t get me wrong, hobby farming often is the best of both worlds, and smallholder farming and gardening fucking make life 20,000 times better. But making the jump to letting your whole life depend on rainfall just to eat is madness.

      We as a species have 50 centuries of receipts to tell us that subsistence farmers eventually lose the game in a long enough time line. It only takes 1 season for that to ruin lives and communities.

      • LousyCornMuffins@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        i mean the food is better when you picked it that morning. but like, i can pay someone else to pick it that morning.

        • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          Yeah, I joined a CSA so someone gets money to buy the machinery in order to farm at a larger scale than they could have on their own and I get fresh fruits, vegetables and honey periodically.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      17 hours ago

      the “I’m going to move to the country and grow my own food” crowd

      If this statement appeals to you (it does to me) it might mean you need to find more hobbies that keep you outdoors. (I have and it’s great!)

      • MrVilliam@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        By this logic, why not buy 200,000 tomato plants with the million dollars?

        $50 in a few decades will be worth very little compared to now because of inflation. Take the lump sum and invest more on the early side. That’s how smart people successfully implement compounding.

        Edit:
        Also, that $6,250 times 52 weeks in a year is not $46M; it’s $325k. Not to mention that the $6,250 takes a year from initial investment, so it takes 2 years to hit that $325k. And that’s revenue, not profit. And it assumes dependable harvest. It’s a joke shit post that I’m taking way too seriously, right?

        • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          100%

          Also, you’d need to live for over 380 years for those $50 weekly payouts to add up to a million dollars.

          This was spectacularly bad advice in every aspect.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          By this logic, why not buy 200,000 tomato plants with the million dollars?

          Because that’s a lot of planting. Gonna throw my back out at that rate.

        • AliasVortex@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          Glad I’m not the only one, because that’s exactly where I’m at. The premises almost relies on consistent yield and unconstrained growth, which nature very much does not like. Plus it doesn’t consider the opportunity cost of having to sink your time into becoming a literal farmer (nor any other recurring costs to maintain and harvest your plants).

          In this case, the upfront cash is hands down the way to go. You don’t even have to do any complicated investing, just huck the mill in a jumbo CD and take the monthly payout. Going off my local credit unions (about 3.75% in dividends for a 5 year term), at $37,500 per year it probably wouldn’t be enough to quit your job, but you’d be doing an order of magnitude better than $50 per week. If you’re really looking to grow it, you could just dump the lump sum in the S&P 500 (up 95.3% from 5 years ago). (Assuming no taxes and that the dollar still has any value in the next 5 years).

      • hansolo@lemmy.today
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        1 day ago

        On what fuckin land?

        Broseph, I could just build a factory. Just take $20 a week making sourdough starter and wait 6 weeks and build a factory making bread. Just ignore every other cost and the cost of owning land and taxes and real life.

        • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          And in 10 years you’ll have more wealth than all previous humans combined! Payday advance places hate this one trick.

  • ThermonuclearCactus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    My parent’s garden has literally thousands of garlic plants that show up unplanned every year. When clearing part of the garden to plant something else, pulling up like 30 garlic stalks is normal. Come harvest time, they give away as much garlic as they can and they still have so much that they have to throw a bunch of it out because it all goes bad before they can use it.

  • don@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    This is tiktok after all, so yes, they fully believe they’re the very first to discover agriculture, and no, no one else has yet. It’s so cool to be them, according to them.