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Growing your own food and foraging can help tackle your ballooning grocery bill. Here's how to start (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For all you urban gardeners out there. Article is Sydney based cos abc, but still valid. Good balance of ALL the factors involved including the downsides.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I grow beetroot in preference to silverbeet, and use the leaves of those as well as the roots. In the right conditions tomatoes are also very prolific and produce a very worthwhile crop - as long as you are not spending a fortune on advanced seedlings and tomato cages I'm not sure how you could find them not worth it.

It depends a lot on your specific growing conditions and what you tend to eat - in the right conditions some plants grow like weeds and are very worthwhile, whereas in someone else's garden the same plant may be nearly impossible to grow. The most important thing is to work out what grows well for you, in your garden.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

In my experience root crops take more effort and are hard to get to a size equivalent to store bought. It's probably my techniques but I am a lazy gardener. While silver beet grows better for me than commercial crop.

With tomatoes I find bigger varieties are tasty targets for birds and other pests while smaller ones escape their notice and also crop over a longer period. Plus they self seed better and seem more resistant to pests. Speaking of which I once bought tomato seedlings from Bunnings but they had purple leaf curl virus which recurred the next year so I had to go without for some years to fix that. Never again.