🤯 Life Hack Alert
🤯 Life Hack Alert
72 comments
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This is how I see all of the "I'm going to move to the country and grow my own food" crowd.
They're essentially glorifying subsistence farming, a lifestyle that humans have collectively been trying to escape since we invented agriculture.
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I've lived in a subsistence farming community. You know who doesn't glorify and romanticize it? Farmers.
Don't get me wrong, hobby farming often is the best of both worlds, and smallholder farming and gardening fucking make life 20,000 times better. But making the jump to letting your whole life depend on rainfall just to eat is madness.
We as a species have 50 centuries of receipts to tell us that subsistence farmers eventually lose the game in a long enough time line. It only takes 1 season for that to ruin lives and communities.
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the "I'm going to move to the country and grow my own food" crowd
If this statement appeals to you (it does to me) it might mean you need to find more hobbies that keep you outdoors. (I have and it's great!)
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Peaches come from a can
They were put there by a man
in a factory downtown.
And if I had my little way
I'd eat peaches everyday.
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Wait until they stop adopting children after finding out about impregnation
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12000 years and we’re back
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This sounds like a wall-e type sci-fi concept. Except our actual future.
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That's nice, now I only need 200k so I can buy a house with a backyard so I can make my own groceries.
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Where do you live that 200k gets you enough land to grow your own food? Mine was £230k and all I can realistically grow a years supply of in a year is a few types of herbs.
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Easy enough. Every country has an area where nobody wants to live. On the side of a mountain, hours away from the next city, maybe on an old garbage tip or an old industrial chemical spill. In Eastern Europe you might even find a cheap piece of land in a mine field. Should be possible.
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There are still cheap places to live all over England and Scotland - I bought a 1 bedroom flat with small garden for £90k in Peterborough (a smaller city about an hour north of London) 3 years ago, and the garden has enough space for a few raised beds with vegetables in them
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LOL. I started out with a little wooded land, cut trees, cleared it, bought a $1,200 well used mobile home and now have a nice home with three gardens. Buy small and grow.
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Have you tried giving up avocado toast?
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Or just buy pots, you'd be surprised how much can grow out of just a few
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Garlic is actually pretty easy to grow, the main issue you will have in an apartment is where you are going to hang it to store it for the rest of the year
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Garlic factory owners hate this one simple trick.
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This is tiktok after all, so yes, they fully believe they’re the very first to discover agriculture, and no, no one else has yet. It’s so cool to be them, according to them.
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Garlic will grow like a weed too. Growing up we had an entire bed along the outside north wall that went from mixed plants to oops all garlic and chives alarmingly quickly.
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Chives make a nice border plant, they crowd out weeds, they are great for cooking and they have nice flowers in the spring.
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My parent's garden has literally thousands of garlic plants that show up unplanned every year. When clearing part of the garden to plant something else, pulling up like 30 garlic stalks is normal. Come harvest time, they give away as much garlic as they can and they still have so much that they have to throw a bunch of it out because it all goes bad before they can use it.
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I would say they could pickle the garlic... but then they'll probably just end up with too much pickled garlic.
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Garlic Confit, use like butter, also really nice on sandwiches, caprese, the oil is great for dressings
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Make aioli.
EDIT: also, eat Lebanese while you have fresh garlic.
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Eliminate car repair bills with a bunch of tools and this weird trick!
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The garlic at my local store is 69¢ a bulb. Nice!
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Idiicracy
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That's pretty much all youtube shorts are now. Most are just poorly done ragebaits
72 comments
As someone who has a garden and has successfully grown garlic from cut ends of store bulbs...
It's not worth the labor.
I garden, yes, but the economy of scales of buying at the grocery store is much lower than growing your own vegetables. You garden because you want to enjoy vegetables that are either heirloom or you want the freshness.
Between the labor, watering, fertilizing, maintaining, etc. it's simply cheaper to buy at the store.
Just don't plant cheap stuff.
I will probably never grow onions, potatoes, corn, celery and other vegetables that are always cheap.
I will plant things that are easy and or pricey. Tomatoes for sure, if I bought the tomatoes at the store I would probably have spent $500 just on tomatoes a season. Chives are also easy to manage and expensive in store. Aspargus is stupid expensive and is almost hard to get rid of once established. Some berry type fruits are also worth growing if you have spare land for them since they come back each year.
Look at Mr. Moneybags over here
we plant onions because that way we never have to think "hey, do we have onions?"
Yeah that's my attitude as well. I grow the things that are significantly better straight out of the garden. The best tomatoes are too fragile to go through the sorting machinery, so growing your own enables much higher quality produce. Berries are way better picked ripe. Green beans are also super easy to grow and are better fresh.
Then there's varieties that just aren't popular enough for many stores to stock and specialty stores are far and expensive: patty pan squash, molokhia, ground cherries, shallots, celery leaves (I don't like the stalk), a variety of herbs, peppers that aren't bell or jalapeno, etc.
I have a similar view. Plant things that are fun. It is a hobby and it needs to be that. Why bother planting potatoes when they take up a good amount of space and they're cheap?
I plant chives as well, rocket because I love it, weird varieties of chillies, and I'm thinking of adding also other herbs that I can't get easily or that are a faff to get. Coriander is a good example, as I have to get a bag whenever I have to use a tiny bit and the rest goes to waste.
Hobby farming is fun and a great way to get you (and the family) to eat more veggies. Subsistence farming is just painful.
Haha, yeah, asparagus is hard to get rid of. It forms these mats of roots like 8 inches down that hollow out during the fall/winter and then new roots shoot back out through the tubes. That said.. I've never had store bought asparagus that was JUICY. I usually pluck them as as snack to eat while I'm weeding or whatever, they're perfectly tasty raw.
Tomatoes have been bad for us for the last couple of years. Last year, we got a good yield of cherry tomatoes but large tomatoes only started to ripen before the cold killed them. This year, we only planted cherry tomatoes and are just now getting the first few. My coworkers have confirmed that their tomatoes are also super late this year.
You are right about chives, asparagus, and berry bushes. Once those get established, you will have to work to keep them under control.
That's why tiktok and youtube shorts are just braindead. I read this other thing where "kids" bought all the cucumbers in stores because there is this crazy new thing called cucumber salad. A week or so later a friend visits me and for some reason it came up and she was like: yeah, i had to try this cucumber thing, because it was everywhere on tiktok, and it turns out it's:s just a salad.
This woman is 36 years old.
I worked at a grocery store during lockdown and Celtic Sea salt trended on tick tock. We couldn't keep that shit on the shelf. One or two dudes would clean us out as soon as we restocked and flip it online for a huge markup.
It's just fucking salt. You'd have to eat a pound of it to get any sort of benefit from the trace minerals.
...and they vote...
This is my perspective. I hate weeding, more than almost anything. I hate crouching and bending over, and shuffling slowly from patch to patch. I hate gardening. I hate getting sweaty and the kind of dirty you get in the garden: gritty, and it finds its way into your shoes and gloves. Gardening sucks.
If I was really invested, I might do hydroponics. Elevated, minimum to no weeds, no crawling around in the dirt. I don't know whether, in the end, I'd actually save any money, though.
I have a terrible back but love gardening so I invested in 3 foot high bins. They are a life saver for not only my back but keeps rabbits from eating the vegetables. If you get the right soil mixture you don't have to worry about the weeds.
The dirt....you can't do much about that except hydroponics like you said but that has its drawbacks too. At the end, you do what helps you and keeps you happy.
My biggest issue at this point is mosquitoes so I've started wearing long pants and a light jacket. That seems to have helped things.
Were you trying to grow softneck or hardneck? Most grocery store garlic where I live is softneck garlic from china which doesn't grow well in colder climates. Hardneck garlic, on the other hand, requires a long cold winter in order to flower in the spring. We bought a clove of hardneck from the farmers market, threw two of the biggest cloves in the garden about 6 inches down, and then did absolutely nothing to them for 9 months. The bulb wasn't as large as the original one but I plan to replant 6 or 7 of the second harvest and see what happens. I usually buy garlic just because of how fucking loooooooooong it takes. I'm tryin to make some pasta not a baby!
Yeah feeling that after looking at my garlic harvest this year. It was fun to grow it in some pots but unless I had way more space it isn't worth growing. Ill keep to perennial herbs instead.
Also looking at reducing how many pots I have as they use up way more water than stuff planted in the ground. Probably just mint and chives in pots going forward. Helps a lot that I have my own small garden now so I can plant things in the ground, its so much better than pots.
Been growing plants inside and out for over 30-years, never had success with garlic. I feel so dumb because it seems the easiest thing in the world to grow. Going to plant this October and see what happens.
My experience with using grocery store bought garlic is mixed. When it did work, it grew a lot of leaves but not the bulb. When I researched this, it's because garlic requires specific soil conditions to grow its bulbs.
But bulb aside, garlic is a good natural critter repellent. It's good to grow around lettuce and kale. Though I haven't found a good cover plant to keep white butterflies away. Right now I'm using netting which they can sometimes find a way into.
I wholeheartedly agree.
It’s not worth the labor if you don't know what you are doing. Gardening is like printing free money, and it is an enjoyable hobby that provides some stress relieving exercise, IF you know what you are doing.
Using cheap-ass store bought garlic is a big mistake.
I don't plow, till and hardly weed yet have a fantastic garden that provides way more high quality produce than we can use. My fresh tasty heirloom produce is not sprayed with any toxic chemicals. I get free rotten hay bales from farmers for mulch and fertilizer from our chickens. I save seeds from varieties that do well in our area.
I let it grow when it happens accidentally.
It happens often because I take my vegetable trimmings and peels to the garden and use it as mulch. I try to remove the seeds and stuff that can grow (like potato peels), but there's often root of garlic that end up mixed with the peel. Which is no big deal. Often, they only start growing in the spring or summer, so I only harvest immature forms. Which is fine. It's not like I was invested in that garlic.
My parents grow their own vegetables and they even have some beehives and make and sell their own honey.
I once calculated their hourly wages for beekeeping, and I only counted the time they spent harvesting and processing the honey, nothing else. Not even the cost of materials, bees, food, medicine, nothing. Not the time spent doing anything but harvesting.
It came out to ~€5/h.