Top 10 Crops for Cutting Grocery Bills
Who doesn’t want their garden to pay for itself and then some?
Whether you’re growing food at home or in a community garden, here are some crops that can save you real money at the grocery store and maybe even make you a few bucks.
Sweet potato
An easy crop to grow, which takes very little expense or maintenance and is possibly the most nutritious vegetable in the garden. Instead of having to buy expensive transplants, sweet potato plants come as “slips”, which cost between seven and twenty-five cents depending on how many you buy at a time. They also do not require your most fertile soil and can be grown on fences and down hills where other crops can’t grow. The best part is they produce about 2.5 pounds per plant and at a retail cost of about $2 per pound, and cost of about 50 cents to grow you are looking at a profit of about $4.50 a plant. That is about a 900 percent return on your investment!! You won’t find a return like that in the stock market. This is also not factoring in the environmental cost of shipping sweet potatoes across the country to your local grocery store. Don’t forget you can eat the leaves, too.
Zucchini
A prolific producer of food, with an average yield of about five pounds per plant and the potential for up to ten pounds! That’s a lot of food from one seed. At an average cost of about $2.50 per pound retail, that’s a gross of around twenty-five dollars per plant. Your cost is at most two dollars for seed, fertilizer and labor. That is an impressive return on investment if you ask me. My favorite varieties are Costata Romanesco and Raven.
Cucumbers
Similar to zucchinis in that once established they need to be picked every few days to avoid fruits getting too big for eating. The big difference is cucumbers do much better with a trellis while summer squash is fine without it. A typical slicing cucumber can produce about 15 fruits per plant and, at about $2 per cucumber, which is $30 a plant for about a $1 investment. Not bad! A 3x8-foot bed can produce up to 70 pounds of cucumbers. At about $3.50 per pound that is $245 worth of cucumbers in a single 24-square-foot raised bed. My favorite high yield varieties include Marketmore 76, General Lee and Suyo Long.
Heirloom Tomatoes
This is likely the most popular and expensive organic crop you can buy. An organic heirloom tomato can cost as much as $7 per pound. While they are not easy to grow, the rewards are well worth it. One well-tended tomato plant can yield up to 10 pounds and at even a conservative $5 per pound that’s $50/plant worth of tomatoes. The cost to grow a tomato is closer to about $15 when you factor in buying a transplant, compost, fertilizer, a trellis and labor as well as pest and disease controls. My favorite high value heirloom varieties include Cherokee Purple, Black Cherry, Green Zebra, Brandywine, Paul Robeson and Mortgage Lifter.
Bell peppers
Another one of the most expensive veggies to buy at a market with prices as high as $5 per pound. This is largely due to the fact that they are not very easy to grow, but if you have success, you will reap the benefits of some major savings. Red peppers are also one of the top 12 crops to buy organi,c as they are heavily sprayed when grown with conventional methods (See Dirty Dozen list below). A homegrown bell pepper plant can yield as much as 8lbs per plant, which is about $25/ gross per plant based on a conservative $3 per pound price. The cost to produce bell peppers is roughly $5 for the transplant, fertilizer, trellis and labor and pest and disease controls. Still a great value! The varieties I recommend are California Wonder, Ace, X3R Red Knight and Ozark Giant.
Eggplant
Another crop that can produce some serious value for the home gardener if the flea beetles can be kept at bay. A well-tended Japanese eggplant crop can yield about 15 fruits per plant and a more classic bell type will yield about 5 pounds per plant. Organic eggplant at the grocery store is going to run around $2.50 per pound so you are looking at a value of about $12.50 per plant. Though not as profitable as some of the others, the cost to grow eggplant is about $5 per plant so you are still more than doubling your investment. The varieties I recommend for the best yields include Black Beauty and Orient Express.
Garlic
When grown organically, garlic can go for as much as $16 per pound. While it takes up space in the garden for nine months, most of those months are during the winter and you can produce a lot of garlic in a small space. You can expect about an eighth of a pound per square foot, which means a 5’ x 10’ bed of garlic can yield about 6 pounds of garlic at $10 per pound, which is a value of $60. Your investment: one pound of garlic seed at about $10 and the time it takes to plant and harvest. There are lots of varieties out there to choose from. If you want the most productive that will turn one pound of seed into 12 pounds of bulbs, go with an Artichoke variety like Inchelium Red, Polish White or California Early.
Lettuce
A very rewarding crop for a backyard garden as there are few things that taste better than a fresh head of butter lettuce. A typical $4 packet of lettuce seeds will have upwards of 500 seeds. If half of them grow, you have 250 heads of lettuce (that is if you have the room) at $3/head, which is $750 worth of lettuce from a $4 packet of seeds. Sure you have some compost, fertilizer and labor to factor in, but you have a serious return on your investment here. Granted you only need about 15 heads of lettuce per week to have more salad than you and most of your neighbors can eat, so that’s only a 3’x5’ bed in your garden per cycle and you are getting $45 worth of lettuce for pennies. Plant a new area every two weeks during the lettuce-growing season to ensure you have an on-going supply. I love lettuce and there are dozens of varieties that I like to grow. Some of the popular heavy yielding types include Winter Density Bibb, Ermosa, Buttercrunch, Crispino iceberg, Sylvesta butterhead, Tropicana Leaf Lettuce, New Red Fire and oh so many more you can try.
Broccoli
This may be my favorite vegetable and we eat a lot of it in my house, more than we can grow in our backyard unfortunately. It is not an easy or quick one to grow, and it’s pricey, too, but worth the effort. A head of organic broccoli at the grocery store runs about $3 and if you grow it yourself, a packet of 100 seeds will run you about $3.50. You can reasonably produce 25 heads out of that packet in a 3’x8’ raised bed, which would be valued at about $75. It doesn’t make as much sense if you are buying transplants at $3/plant but it’s still pretty awesome to have broccoli growing in your garden. This is a good example of why it’s so valuable to get good at starting crops like this from seed. My favorite broccoli varieties are De Cicco, Arcadia and Marathon. If you are feeling very adventurous, try growing a few Romanesco Broccolis as their crazy fractal shape makes for a great conversation piece in the garden and on the table.
Winter squash
There are many varieties and most of them have amazing storage life and nutritional quality. Let’s take butternut, probably the most popular of all the winter squashes, which goes for about $1.50 per pound and each fruit weighs roughly 3 pounds. That’s about $4.50/per fruit. A packet of about 30 seeds will cost around $3 and each plant should yield about 4 plants. That means if half of your seeds grow to maturity then 15 plants will produce about 60 fruits, which is a value of about $270. You may have butternut squash climbing over your whole backyard but you will not go hungry, as 60 butternuts will feed your family and friends all winter long. Most of the winter squash varieties are vining so they will sprawl out over your garden with the exception of Acorn Squash, which stays bushy like a summer squash. Acorns yield about 5-6 fruits per plant at about 2 pounds per fruit. My favorite acorn varieties are Tuffy, Table Queen and Sweet Reba. My other favorite winter squash include Red Kuri, Burgess Buttercup, Waltham Butternut, Delicata, Spaghetti and Blue Hubbard.