by Perry McCarney

Created on: July 25, 2010   Last Updated: April 14, 2011

Growing our own vegetables and herbs will provide us with fresh, healthy foods. With a little research and careful planning, we can grow our produce for less than it would cost to buy, thus saving us money on our grocery bill as well.

 Deciding what we will grow is considerably more complicated when one of our primary motivations for doing so is to save money on our grocery bill. We are not going to be saving any money if it costs us more to grow a favorite vegetable than we can purchase it for at the store, although our own may be better quality.

 First we should start with a list of all the vegetables and herbs that we like and use. There is no point in growing something we dislike unless we wish to branch out into marketing and sales as well as food production. If you do, please see the articles under Helium's title “How to make money from your vegetable garden”.

 The first things to cross off our lists are the vegetables and herbs that won't grow or not grow well enough under the environmental conditions, such as local climate, where we live. A quick search on each one on the Internet should allow us to determine this.

 Next we need to consider the local cost by weight of each item. The cheaper a vegetable is per pound or kilogram, the less cost effective it will be to grow our own. Potatoes, for example, are a bulk item that have a low cost by weight value in some parts of the world, particularly Western nations. They are therefore unlikely to be a cost effective food crop for our gardens. Many people like tomatoes and they are relatively easy to grow in sub-tropical and temperate regions, but how cost effective it would be to grow them ourselves may be borderline. We might need to make the decision based on our taste preferences. Home-grown tomatoes being much tastier than many of the varieties offered in stores these days.

 Once we have our lists whittled down to the vegetables and herbs that may grow cost effectively in our home region, we need to consider our skills level and the work required to grow them. Growing guidelines for most specific plants can be found on the Internet. From those we can determine whether we are likely to be capable of growing them and what costs we may incur to do so. Any we are uncertain we can grow should be crossed of the list and any with requirements that may be costly should be until we are more confident in our gardening ability. Those should be permanently removed if the growing costs move them into the not cost effective group.

 We should now look at our list from the other direction. Which of the vegetables and herbs would be most cost effective for us to grow in our home region. The greater the difference between how much it will cost us to grow them and how much they cost to purchase, the greater the benefit for us in growing them ourselves.

 Lastly the amount of space we have available needs to be considered and compared to the growing room required for each of the plants. The most effective way of utilizing our space is with a permaculture garden, a form of sustainable agriculture that is particularly eco-friendly. But even those of us living in a city apartment can save on our grocery bill be growing our own herbs in window boxes.

Learn more about this author, Perry McCarney.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.