There’s nothing like pulling an heirloom tomato fully ripened off a vine, slicing and tasting the complex flavors that developed. There can be many hurdles to getting there. The leafy vegetables are a great way to get your hands dirty and bring in produce regularly throughout the growing season. Fresh bib lettuce, arugula, butter lettuce, etc are easy to plant the seeds, germinate, and grow. Plan for succession crops in the same space, interweaving in the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants as the season warms. When your arugula blooms, use the blossoms for an extra peppery surprise in your salads.

You need to watch each part of the process to see what costs and how you can make it affordable. For some, that can be fun, it can be a chore, and it may cost you 64$ per tomato!

The most important factor for vegetables is SUN. You need at least 6 hours of sun per day for most vegetables to produce like you would expect. If you don’t have that many hours, consider growing the leafier items (e.g. herbs, lettuces, chard) that you will be growing for the foliage instead of the fruit.

Finally, growing your own produce is more than saving money. It’s about watching the miracle that a plant can convert sun to energy, extract nutrients from the soil and produce something that is wholly unlike anything you can buy in the store. You are growing for flavor, not for transporting it to market. Also, that’s not our graden in the above picture. We’d have more weeds, and very few ripe tomatoes. That looks like a determine variety that produces all at the same time. We do occasionally grow a determinate like ‘Early Girl’ or ‘Better Boy,’ but if those tomatoes are that ripe, you can be sure my wife has already pulled them off the vine and either shared them with neighbors or started her “cook it down, cook it down, cook it down” sauce making.

Good luck!