Herbs should be anyone’s starter for a garden and absolutely makes for an easy break-even.

We had a great run with heirloom (Cherokee Purple) tomatoes this year, purchased for $5.99 per plant at Lowe’s. Our raised bed cost about $100 to build and fill with soil. I spent $100 to build a deer fence. I also bought a $20 jug of Miracle Grow feed. Let’s just cocktail-napkin the water at $10 for the season, and say I have $250 in input to start my garden this year.

I got, at most, $15 dollars worth of tomatoes for the two plants. I could increase that and get into canning to reap some more value, but it’s a hobby to produce neat exotics I can’t even buy if I wanted to. Hopefully I can amortize the upstart costs over the years and achieve a break even on a long enough timescale :)

I'd love to grow tomatoes, but I live where it's too hot and they'll stop flowering sometime in June.

But I'm wondering if you're not growing your tomatoes right, or the cultivars you have are not great? One of the biggest issues I run into when I lived somewhere I could grow is the plants getting so large they uproot the posts I have them staked up with if it gets windy.

Good soil goes a long way, you'll want it to be mostly a decomposed manure. Then you'll really want to get the biggest plant you can find at the store as early as weather allows, then bury most of the plant you buy. If you're just planting it like a normal plant, you've wasted a ton of its potential.

In one of the best years I've had my plants grew nearly 8 feet tall and with only 4 bushes I had to have the kids load up a wagon with tomatoes and give away them to the neighbors I had so many.

Cherokee Purple and Black Krim are two of my favorites, but they admittedly don't always grow quite as vigorously as some other (less tasty) varieties. Still, they grow 5 to 6 feet high and produce 40+ pounds of fruit per plant. And the tomato growing season here is only mid-May through mid-September.

Can verify, and of the two, Krim has the better flavor in my opinion. But they do not produce like the hybrids and the Krims tend to crack.

Another (cherry) that is really tasty is Rosella (a dark purplish variety like the other two). So tasty.

Check this stuff out for growing tomatoes where it is hot.

https://shadeclothstore.com/product-category/aluminet-shade-...

I've had great success with the 40% setting tomatoes all season and my temps push 110F in the summer. One thing I learned the hard way, in addition to this, leave the plants bushy so it shades internally.

Eh, this year we had over 60 days of 100F+ weather, with temps not going below 85 at night for a considerable portion of that. Even if I grow them in the shade of the porch they won't get flowers for a month at a time.

Ya I live in a very dry climate and the nights cool down and evapotranspiration cools a bunch, so maybe that's why it works so well.

I was very impressed with the material though. Complete game changer in my environment. I can grow all kinds of things through summer. Parsley, lettuce, I even had Brussels sprouts and rhubarb go through the heat this summer looking perky the whole time.

>then bury most of the plant you buy. If you're just planting it like a normal plant, you've wasted a ton of its potential.

Elaborate ?

So you buy a tomato that is 8" tall at the store. When you plant it you'll only want 2 to 3 inches of it sticking out of the soil. You bury it deeper than the soil and roots it comes with. The now buried stem will grow roots and the existing roots will also grow and reach more deep soil.

> $5.99 per plant

Buy seeds, plant some in a beer cup of potting soil ~30-45d before the last frost. Don't need to worry with seed starting mix. Don't worry about how tall they get, just plant it almost all sideways.

> I got, at most, $15 dollars worth of tomatoes for the two plants

What were your lbs of yield per plant?

I do cherry tomatoes in 5gal buckets and get ~1.5-2 lbs per bucket. Soil mix is leftovers from contractors mixed with composter stuff and peat moss. Actual garden does better. Retail price for that qty is $7. I have too many buckets set up...

No offense but that seems like most expensive way to farm it. I mean I get it, you want something that looks nice and works, and not is just an old bucket filled with dirt (which is perfectly fine way to recycle broken bucket, just ugly one), but if you just want tomatoes you don't need to spend all that much so that cost is a bit overcalculated imo.

But still, yeah, at that scale its not much more than a hobby, certainly not a way to save any actual money.

> Hopefully I can amortize the upstart costs over the years and achieve a break even on a long enough timescale :)

Or some disease or insect will destroy it. The wonders of farming...