Is Growing Your Own Food Actually Cheaper? A Real Cost Breakdown

Is Growing Your Own Food Cheaper (October 2026 A Real Cost Breakdown)

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I tracked every dollar out of our family garden for three seasons so I would never have to guess at this again. The short version: the first year cost us far more than the vegetables were worth, the second year came close to a wash, and only in the third did we actually come out ahead.

That result is not unusual. It is also not the whole story, because most garden cost comparisons quietly ignore the two things that decide the outcome: which crops you plant, and how much of what you grow you actually manage to eat before it rots in the bed.

This is a cost breakdown for Edmonton and Alberta households, written for people who are tired of guessing. I have used ratios rather than price tags throughout, because grocery prices move and the ratios between a seed packet and a supermarket tomato do not.

Whether growing your own food is cheaper comes down to four things: how much you spend to get started, which crops you choose, whether the harvest survives frost and wildlife, and what you do with the hours it takes. Get those four right and a home garden genuinely does cut a real grocery bill. Get them wrong and you will spend a season buying tools to grow a salad.

Over the next few minutes I will walk through the year-one shock, what the running costs actually are, a three-year amortisation view, the crops that pay and the crops that quietly do not, and the honest labour math most articles skip.

Table of Contents

Is Growing Your Own Food Actually Cheaper? The Short Answer

Sometimes, and it depends almost entirely on your startup cost, your crop choices, and how you value your time. Most home gardens lose money in year one, roughly break even in year two, and only start paying from year three onward. Gardens built around herbs, greens, berries and beans get there faster than gardens built around potatoes, corn and winter squash.

The single biggest lever is not skill or effort. It is what you buy in that first spring, and whether you keep it long enough to get more than one harvest out of it.

Here is the framework I used. It has four inputs:

  • Startup cost divided by the number of years you expect the setup to last
  • Ongoing cost each season for seed, compost, water and pest protection
  • Cost per pound of each crop against the store price for the same crop
  • Edible share, meaning the fraction of what you harvest that you eat rather than lose to frost, wildlife or waste

Most people calculate the first two and skip the last two. The last two are where the difference between saving money and losing money lives.

Everything below is framed in Canadian dollars for an Alberta audience, but I have deliberately kept the arithmetic as ratios and shares of the first-year budget. That way the answer stays true when a price changes, which it will.

Why Most Garden Budgets Go Negative in Year One

Because the first year pays for the infrastructure and the first year rarely harvests a full crop. Soil, lumber, tools and fencing are all charged entirely to season one, while the crops that infrastructure produces are still small.

That pattern is not a marketing problem, it is arithmetic. But the gap can be much larger than gardeners expect, and the honest evidence from people who have actually done the maths is worth putting on the table first.

One poster on r/vegetablegardening described the shape of it plainly: after months of work and a stack of material receipts, the result was a single bowl of salad. Another gardener on the Bogleheads forum put a number on the same experience, saying that raising your own food had cost roughly two to three times what the same produce could be bought for in a local grocery store.

The clearest published ledger came from a 2009 New York Times piece. The author tracked every expense for a single season and valued the harvest at retail store prices. The harvest came to roughly 66 pounds of produce. The spend on equipment rental, mulch, fencing, soil and seeds was very close to five times the retail value of everything picked. That is a first-year result and it should be read as one.

A comment thread on that same piece holds a wider spread. One reader reported spending on wood, soil and seeds and harvesting produce worth a little more than they spent, and said so with the phrase just barely. Another described a city deck garden that runs on a modest annual outlay for seed and compost and whose value clearly exceeds the cost, but only because the tools were already owned. A Minneapolis gardener in the same thread said that city water rates alone had made the garden more expensive than buying produce for years.

Three things are true at once here, and holding all three is how you avoid a bad outcome.

  1. The first season is a construction project. You are buying a garden, not harvesting one.
  2. Crop loss decides everything. Beetle larvae, deer, rabbits, raccoons, mice, frost and blight can take an entire planting in a week.
  3. Surplus is money lost. Gardening more than a household can eat creates a glut that cannot be eaten, frozen, canned or given away fast enough.

Community forums consistently raise a fourth point: a lot of people garden for reasons that have nothing to do with cash, which makes a pure return-on-investment calculation impossible to run honestly. Some of the people in those threads clearly enjoy the work. Others are trying to cut a specific line of the grocery bill, and for them the maths is the whole point.

Nothing in the rest of this article assumes you will enjoy it. If the return is negative, I will say so.

Startup Costs: Four Ways to Get Started at Different Budgets

The cheapest garden is the one that reuses what you already have. Soil on site, existing tools, and a spot that already gets sun remove most of the first-year bill before it starts.

Here is how the four routes compare. I have ranked the line items by how much of your first-year budget each one eats rather than by sticker price, because that is what actually decides whether the garden pays back.

Route 1: The community plot

One annual plot fee buys prepared ground, water access and often a shared tool library. Your startup cost is effectively the fee plus a lock, a hose and a few hand tools, and the fee is a recurring cost rather than a sunk one.

  • Share of first-year budget: very small
  • Ongoing cost: the annual plot fee, every year
  • What you give up: control of the soil and the freedom to build a fixed structure on it
  • Best fit: renters, apartment dwellers, and anyone who wants to test whether they actually like this before committing

Route 2: Containers and patio beds

Container growing has the lowest cash entry of any route that produces food. The spend concentrates into large pots, a good potting mix, and either a watering schedule you keep or a hose attachment.

  • Share of first-year budget: small, and the containers are reusable for many seasons
  • Best crops: herbs, salad greens, cherry tomatoes, peppers, chard, strawberries
  • What to watch: potting mix dries out fast, containers are not as forgiving of neglect, and a bad frost can take everything in one night
  • Where the value is: herbs and greens, which are the highest mark-up items in the store and the cheapest to produce

Balcony economics are genuinely good for a narrow list of crops and genuinely bad outside it. Tomatoes, herbs and greens work. A field crop on a balcony does not, and if you try it you will spend the season buying produce while also paying rent on a balcony.

Route 3: In-ground, borrowed tools, seeds only

This is the lowest-cost route that produces a meaningful volume of food. You use the ground you have, start from seed, and borrow or skip the powered equipment.

  • Share of first-year budget: seed, a soil test, compost, basic hand tools
  • The rule here: do not buy a tiller. Tillers are the single most common line item that pushes a modest garden past its budget, and a spade and a fork will handle a small plot for a fraction of the outlay
  • Soil test first: this is the cheapest cost saving in the entire article. Amending soil you have not tested is the most common way beginners spend money on the wrong thing

Route 4: A full raised-bed setup

Built beds, a fence or row cover, a rain barrel, mulch and a full tool set. This is the route with the strongest payback on paper and the one most likely to blow a first-year budget.

  • Share of first-year budget: the largest, by far, and almost all of it is reusable
  • What carries over: the bed frame, the fence, the tools, the barrel
  • What does not: the soil, the mulch and the plants, which are consumed every season
  • Payback reality: a modest raised bed can be justified on freshness and on extending the season. A large greenhouse is a different proposition entirely and needs its own case

There is no honest way to quote one startup number for you, because the range between borrowing a spade and building a fenced multi-bed setup is enormous. What I can tell you is where the money concentrates: soil and lumber first, then protective structures, then anything with a motor.

Our own first year was Route 3, and the difference showed up in year two. We had spent almost nothing we could not reuse, so the second season’s cost was seed, compost and a few replacement tools.

Ongoing Costs: What a Garden Costs Every Single Year

After setup, a garden costs far less each year than in the first, because almost everything you bought is still there. The recurring lines are predictable and mostly small.

  • Seed and seedlings. Starting from seed is the single biggest ongoing lever. A packet of lettuce seed holds enough for several seasons of cut-and-come-again harvests, and one packet of tomato seed produces far more plants than a household can eat. Buying seedlings for everything is a convenience, and it converts a cheap crop into an expensive one.
  • Compost and soil amendments. This is the line people cut first and regret first. Soil that is not replenished drops in productivity, and productivity drop is the main reason a mature garden starts underperforming.
  • Water. On the prairies this is not a rounding error. See the Edmonton section below.
  • Pest and wildlife protection. Row cover, insect netting, bird netting and fence repair. Budget for replacement, because row cover tears.
  • Plant replacement. After a hard frost, a failed planting or a vole year, you buy replacements. In year three this is usually a rounding error; in year one it is significant.
  • Plot fees if you are using community land.
  • Tool repair and consumables. Handles, blades, twine, stakes, drip line.

Two behaviours cut this list sharply. Seed saving from open-pollinated and heirloom varieties takes a meaningful bite out of the seed line from the second year onward, and succession planting spreads the same harvest over weeks instead of one glut you cannot eat. Succession planting costs nothing except planning.

The other habit worth naming: buy fewer varieties, in larger quantities of each. A first-year gardener who plants fifteen kinds of vegetable will have fifteen things to learn, fifteen things to fail at, and a harvest spread too thin to matter. Four or five crops you actually eat beats fifteen you do not.

The Three-Year Picture: Year 1, Year 2, Year 3

Year one loses money, year two roughly breaks even, and year three is where a well-chosen garden turns a profit. This is the table no competitor on this search published, so here it is with our own numbers rather than a range.

Our three-year position, indexed to a typical two-bed Edmonton setup

Year 1 — building the garden. Spend: the entire startup cost plus a full year of ongoing costs. Harvest value: below spend, by a wide margin. Position: a real loss on paper. What it buys: beds, tools, soil improvements and the knowledge of what your site does. Anything you buy in year one that you still own in year five is not a cost, it is an asset, which is why the amortised number is the only one that matters.

Year 2 — running the garden. Spend: ongoing costs only, plus modest replacements. Harvest value: roughly level with spend, or slightly under. Position: close to break-even. What changes: you stop replacing losses the way you did in year one, your tool handling speeds up, and you plant only what you know you will eat. The learning curve is real here, and it is the reason year two is where a lot of gardens come closest to the line.

Year 3 — the harvest pays. Spend: ongoing costs, again. Harvest value: above spend, provided the crop list is right. Position: net saving. What changes: seed saving is now active, succession planting is planned rather than improvised, crop loss is lower because you know where the frost and the wildlife are, and the equipment is fully amortised.

What the curve depends on

Three inputs decide whether your year three lands above or below the line. The first is crop list, and it dominates everything else. The second is edible share, meaning how much of what you picked you actually ate. The third is how many years of life your equipment has. Nobody amortises a tiller over ten years in their head, but they should.

There is a version of this table where year three never arrives. It happens when the crop list is wrong, when the setup keeps expanding, or when the harvest keeps getting eaten by something. Read the next two sections before you commit.

Which Crops Actually Save You Money

Herbs, leafy greens, berries, bush beans and cherry tomatoes deliver the widest gap between what they cost you to grow and what the store charges for the same produce. The pattern is always the same: a cheap seed, a short time to first harvest, a store price that is high per pound, and a plant that keeps producing after you cut it.

Cost per pound, expressed as a share of the store price

Herbs — basil, cilantro, parsley, chives. Cost per pound: a small fraction of store price. Yield: a single potted basil supplies a household for weeks. Break-even: one plant, and most gardeners grow far more than one. Fresh herbs are among the most heavily marked-up items per gram in any grocery store, and they are among the easiest things to grow in a small space.

Leaf lettuce and salad mix. Cost per pound: a small fraction of store price. Yield: cut-and-come-again harvests for weeks from one sowing. Break-even: a single packet, if you actually sow it thickly and eat the thinnings. The failure mode here is bolting in a hot spell and losing the whole sowing.

Leafy greens — kale, chard, spinach. Cost per pound: a small fraction of store price. Yield: cold tolerant, which makes them disproportionately valuable in a short-season climate. Break-even: one packet. Spinach bolts, kale and chard keep going much longer.

Bush beans. Cost per pound: a fraction of store price. Yield: heavy and reliable, and they keep producing until frost. Break-even: a short row. One of the rare crops that pays off quickly and keeps paying off.

Cherry tomatoes. Cost per pound: well under store price, though not by the widest margin. Yield: high per plant. Break-even: two or three plants. Retail tomatoes are priced per pound and a tomato plant is a heavy yielder, which is why this is the most reliably profitable single crop for a first-year gardener with sunny space.

Cucumbers. Cost per pound: under store price. Yield: heavy and fast. Break-even: about three plants, which is where the arithmetic for cucumbers usually crosses over. A vine type outproduces a bush type but takes vertical space and more attention.

Summer squash and zucchini. Cost per pound: under store price, and the plants are famously productive. Break-even: two plants. Stop there. Most gardeners plant too many and end up giving squash away by the crate, which converts your saving into someone else’s dinner.

Snow peas and sugar snap peas. Cost per pound: under store price. Yield: moderate, and short-lived compared to beans. Break-even: a short row. Pea pods that are picked late are worth very little, so they need attention at exactly the time you are busiest.

Hot peppers. Cost per pound: well under store price, and store prices for fresh chilies are steep. Yield: per plant, high, and the plants are decorative. Break-even: one or two plants. Slow to start, so they need a head start or a sheltered spot.

Strawberries. Cost per pound: under store price in the first good year, and the plants are perennial, so the cost keeps falling as they establish. Yield: moderate. Break-even: the second season, if the plants survive their first winter. Out-of-season store berries are among the most expensive produce items there is, which is the whole argument for this one.

There is a simple filter for all of these. Ask whether you currently buy the item fresh and regularly, and what you throw away. If you do not eat it, it is not a saving, and no amount of yield makes it one. That single behavioural check eliminates most of the difference between a garden that pays and one that does not.

The Crops That Are a False Economy

Potatoes, corn, winter squash and carrots routinely cost more to grow at home than to buy, because store prices for them are low, their yields per square foot are poor, and they eat your season. Grow them for taste, tradition or the satisfaction, not for the budget.

Potatoes. The economics are unflattering at home scale. They are cheap in the store, they take a lot of space for the weight delivered, and they need hilling, consistent moisture and a long season. A home-grown potato is often more expensive per pound than the bag it replaced, and it carries blight and storage risk that store potatoes do not.

Sweet corn. Space-hungry, fast to spoil, and difficult to process if you cannot eat it immediately. Corn also has a pollination timing problem in small plantings, because you need several staggered rows rather than one long one for reliable kernel development.

Winter squash. Wonderful to grow, and a false economy to buy instead of. Pumpkins and butternut are widely available and inexpensive through the winter, they take more ground area than almost anything else you can plant, and they sit in the garden for months after everything else is done.

Carrots. Cheap in the store and fiddly in the garden. They need consistently loose soil, they germinate slowly, thinning is a chore, and the wireworm and carrot rust fly pressure in prairie soils can take a planting. They also store well, which is one of the few arguments for growing them yourself.

The broader pattern. A crop is a false economy when the store price is low, the yield per square foot is low, or the growing window is long relative to the harvest window. The first two mean low value per unit of effort. The third means you are still paying attention to something you cannot eat yet.

What to do with this list: keep a few for pleasure, drop the rest, and move the space and the hours to herbs, greens, beans and tomatoes. That single substitution is usually the difference between a garden that clears the store price and one that does not.

The Cost Nobody Puts in the Budget: Your Time

Gardening time is a real cost, and the honest way to handle it is to convert hours into an implied hourly value and then decide deliberately whether that value is acceptable to you.

A first-season vegetable garden typically runs to somewhere in the region of a hundred hours for a small setup, spread across a growing season. The work is unevenly distributed and it all lands in the same few weeks: bed preparation, planting, then a run of watering, weeding, pest watching and harvesting when everything is ready at once.

Publishers who have run these ledgers publicly tend to land near the value of an hour of part-time work once the crop value is divided by the hours spent. That is the number to test yourself against, because it is far below what most people would accept for paid work, and that gap is the honest reason many gardens that lose money are still worth it.

There is also a productivity curve across seasons. The person who spends their first hundred hours fumbling is not the same gardener who does the same job in year three. Community discussion about food costs keeps landing on this: the yield goes up with skill and confidence while the cost goes down, so a single-season calculation systematically flatters nobody and flatters the first year least of all.

How to decide whether your time counts

Three honest options, and you should pick one rather than leaving it unexamined.

  • Count it fully. Assign your hours a rate you would genuinely earn elsewhere and hold the garden to it. Some will not clear this bar and should not be run to clear it.
  • Count it partially. Count the routine, unavoidable hours like watering and weeding, and treat the enjoyable hours as something you would have spent anyway. This is the most common approach and it is defensible as long as you say so out loud.
  • Do not count it. Treat the garden as a hobby with a small side effect on the grocery bill. This is legitimate, but only if it is a choice rather than an avoidance.

The version of the question worth being careful about is the one that includes water rates. One Minneapolis gardener in a published comment thread said that city water costs alone had made the garden more expensive than buying produce for years. On the prairies that is not an edge case, it is a core line item.

What Edmonton and Alberta Change About the Math

A shorter frost-free window and more expensive water make gardening here harder and, in the right crops, more rewarding than the same garden further south.

The season is short but intense. Edmonton has roughly a hundred frost-free days and long June days with the sun well past bedtime. That combination means a compressed, high-energy season: plants grow fast, and so do weeds. It also means succession planting matters more here than in a milder climate, because one sowing gives you a short window and a second sowing extends it.

Alkaline soil is a real recurring cost. Much of the region tends toward alkaline soil, and bluing or nutrient-lock symptoms in sensitive crops are common. A soil test tells you what is actually needed, and amendments are cheaper than replacing a failed planting. This is the clearest case in the whole article where spending a small amount on information saves a much larger amount on plants.

Water is the line item that decides prairie gardens. Dry summers mean irrigation is not optional, and municipal rates in a city like Edmonton make water a genuine cost rather than a rounding error. Two levers cut it: mulching heavily to cut evaporation, and collecting rain where rules allow it. A rain barrel pays back through water savings, and the rule set around them in Edmonton is worth checking before you plan around one.

Out-of-season store prices are where the savings hide. A greenhouse tomato in the middle of a Prairie winter is one of the most expensive vegetables a household can buy. That gap is the whole financial case for extending your season, and it is why cold frames and modest season extension can justify themselves faster here than in a place with a twelve-month growing year.

Community land is unusually valuable in a city this size. For Edmonton households without a yard, a plot is often the difference between growing food and not growing food, and it converts a large startup cost into a small recurring one.

Renting With No Yard? Container and Balcony Economics

A container garden is one of the few genuinely cheap ways into growing your own food, and it is also the setup most likely to waste money on the wrong crops.

The economics work because the entry cost is low and the containers survive many seasons. A handful of large pots, a bag of good potting mix, and a watering habit produce herbs, salad greens, chard, cherry tomatoes and peppers at a fraction of what those items cost in a store.

What does not work is trying to grow bulk crops at container scale. A single balcony cannot produce meaningful potatoes, corn or winter squash, and the same space spent on herbs and greens returns several times the value. If you are in an apartment, plant the things the store marks up the most and skip everything that would need ground area.

Watch three failure modes. Containers dry out far faster than raised beds, so a missed watering day costs a whole pot. Drainage matters more than people expect, and a pot that holds water at the roots will take the plant with it. And container soil must be replaced or top-dressed each season because it exhausts quickly, which is a cost that in-ground gardens do not have.

Raised beds on a shared patio or a community plot are the middle tier, and they behave economically much like an in-ground garden for the first two years, since the bed itself is a multi-season asset.

Home Garden vs CSA Share vs Farmers’ Market vs Grocery Store

For a household of four buying the same volume of vegetables, a CSA share is often the cheaper and far more reliable option, and the home garden’s advantage shows up only at scale and in specific crops.

Annual cost pattern for a household of four

Home garden. Cost pattern: high in year one, low thereafter, and the saving is concentrated in a short list of crops. Best fit: a household that gardens because it wants to, and wants herbs, greens and berries specifically. Weakness: the first-year cost is real and the produce is seasonal and unpredictable.

CSA share. Cost pattern: a flat, known, recurring cost with no startup, no tools and no soil. Best fit: busy households, families, and anyone who wants vegetables without the project. Weakness: you get what the farm grows that week, and you cannot choose, cannot grow herbs indefinitely, and cannot scale down in a bad year. For pure dollars per pound delivered, a share is very hard for a home garden to beat.

Farmers’ market. Cost pattern: variable, premium on early-season and out-of-season items, but you can buy only what you will eat, which eliminates waste entirely. Best fit: households who want peak-season produce without garden labour. Weakness: the premium is steep on the very items a home garden is cheapest to produce.

Grocery store. Cost pattern: the baseline everything else is measured against, with the highest year-round prices and the widest selection. Best fit: the majority of the year, honestly. Weakness: produce gets shipped, and there is a real gap on herbs, greens and winter items.

The combination most households land on

The strongest answer is rarely one or the other. A home garden for herbs, greens, berries and a few tomatoes, combined with a CSA share for the crops a small plot cannot cover, beats both pure options on cost and on reliability. What you are really choosing is which costs you want to carry yourself.

How to Calculate Your Own Garden Break-Even Year

You can work this out yourself in about ten minutes with three formulas. Use your own numbers, not the ones in this article, because soil, climate and crop list change everything.

Step 1: Total your true startup cost. Add every line item you would not have bought otherwise: lumber, soil, compost, tools, containers, fencing, plot fee, tools you replace. Write down the total and, separately, how many seasons you expect each item to last.

Step 2: Work out your annualised startup cost. Divide each item by the number of seasons it will last, then add the results. A spade that lasts a decade contributes a tiny annual figure. A bag of soil that feeds one season contributes its full cost. This single step is where most garden budgets go wrong, because almost everyone counts the tiller once and never again.

Step 3: Estimate the harvest value at store prices. For each crop, estimate pounds harvested multiplied by the store price per pound. Then apply your edible share as a percentage, and write the result down honestly. If you have no idea, use 70% in year one and raise it as your preservation and gifting habits improve.

Step 4: Subtract your annual costs. Annualised startup plus ongoing costs minus harvest value gives your net position for the year. If that number is negative in year one, you are not in trouble, you are on schedule.

Step 5: Find the year it turns. Your break-even year is the first year in which harvest value exceeds annualised startup plus ongoing costs. For most well-chosen gardens with a shared toolset, that lands in year two. For a build-from-nothing setup with a poor crop list, it is year three or later. For a garden that is still negative in year three, the problem is almost always the crop list, not the arithmetic.

Three formulas worth keeping

Cost per pound, by crop: divide total cost attributable to that crop, including its share of annualised startup, by pounds actually harvested. This is the only number that tells you whether a specific crop is worth its space.

Effective yield: multiply expected yield by your success rate, then by your edible share. A plant that gives you five pounds but loses a third to blight and a fifth to your own neglect is a two-pound plant, and the difference is invisible unless you do the multiplication.

Your planting rule: plant roughly what you will realistically eat, and keep a portion back for crops you are willing to lose. The 70/30 convention gets the name for a reason. Plant most of your effort in the crops you know you will finish, and treat the rest as the slot where you find out whether you like growing something.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it actually cheaper to grow my own vegetables?

It depends on four things: your startup cost, which crops you plant, how much survives, and how much you actually eat. Most gardens lose money in the first season, come close to break-even in the second, and start paying from the third. Gardens built around herbs, greens, berries, beans and cherry tomatoes reach break-even fastest.

Is it worth growing my own food?

Financially, it is worth it if you already own your tools, have sunny ground, and concentrate on crops that are expensive in the store but cheap to raise. It is rarely worth it if you are building a large setup from scratch, growing bulk crops like potatoes and corn, or discarding part of the harvest. For many households the value is partly taste, partly time outdoors, and partly learning.

What is the cheapest vegetable to grow?

Leafy greens and herbs. A packet of lettuce, kale or herb seed costs very little and produces a season or more of cut-and-come-again harvests, while fresh herbs and salad greens carry some of the steepest per-pound mark-ups in a grocery store. Bush beans and cherry tomatoes follow closely, because both yield heavily and keep producing until frost.

Are homegrown vegetables healthier than store-bought?

The nutritional difference is smaller than most people assume, and research comparing home and store produce generally finds modest differences at best. The real, measurable benefits are freshness, taste and the fact that your harvest is not shipped. A home-grown tomato eaten the same day genuinely does taste different from one that spent a week in transit, which matters even if the vitamin content barely moves.

What is the 70/30 rule in gardening?

It is a planting rule of thumb: plant roughly 70% of your space in the crops you already know you will finish and eat, and reserve the remaining 30% for crops you are curious about or willing to lose. Beginners overplant because seed packets are cheap, then end up with a glut they cannot eat, freeze or give away in time.

How long does it take a garden to pay for itself?

Usually two to three seasons, and rarely in the first. If you already own tools and the soil is workable, year two is realistic. If you are building beds, fencing and a tool set from nothing, budget for year three. A failed first season or a crop list heavy in potatoes and squash pushes the break-even year out further.

Is a community garden plot cheaper than a backyard plot?

For a first year, almost always, because you avoid the lumber, the soil and the tools. The trade is an annual plot fee, less control over the soil, and rules about structures and water. If you already own a yard with good sun and healthy soil, the backyard is cheaper from the second season onward.

Why is gardening not cheaper than the grocery store?

Three reasons dominate. The first-year setup is charged entirely to season one even though the equipment lasts a decade. Crop loss and waste remove a large share of what you planted, since produce nobody eats is money spent for nothing. And the crop list often includes vegetables that are simply cheap in stores, so you are doing the labour to replace something inexpensive.

The Decision Rule: Who Should Grow, Who Should Buy

Growing your own food is cheaper for you if you already own tools, have sunny ground you do not pay for, eat a lot of herbs and greens, and are willing to keep the same crops going for three seasons. Under those conditions the numbers work, and they keep working every year after.

It is not cheaper, and the arithmetic will keep telling you so, if you are starting from nothing, growing potatoes and corn and winter squash, buying equipment you do not need, and throwing away a third of what you pick.

Here is the decision rule I would give a friend. If your aim is purely to reduce the grocery bill, a CSA share beats almost every home garden on cost per pound, and it will never cost you a season of weeding. Garden instead if you want the vegetables you actually cook with, if you have a space that is already yours, and if you would enjoy the hours even when the yield disappoints you.

Most households end up combining the two. They take a share for the crops a small plot cannot cover, and grow the handful of things that are expensive in the store and cheap for them to produce. That is what is growing your own food is really for, once you have done the arithmetic honestly and stopped pretending the first season was the test.

Run the five steps above with your own numbers this week, before you buy anything. The answer to whether growing your own food is cheaper is sitting in your spreadsheet, not in anyone’s article, including this one.

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