solarpunk memes

Don’t forget to price out your time and labor.

It’s certainly not free (not that that is the point) but if you’re spending $5 on a pepper you either are a bad gardener or don’t know how to amortize the cost of reusable supplies over many peppers. Or both.

Well I use the chilly seeds and plant them on the terrace, and voila, infinite chillies and chilly flakes. My investment is time, used jars and dirt I bought once. I water them with fertilized aquarium water and I don't know what to do with them.

I'll just leave this here.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_gardening

The last three apartments I've lived in I've been able to have a garden. Not a large one mind you, and I've had to learn how to utilize grow bags rather than growing directly in the soil, however home ownership isn't a requirement to being able to grow your own food.

https://www.thedailymeal.com/heidelberg-germany-zucchini-toxin-poison/82315/

Something like that..

Yeah, cucurbits in general are kinda jerks that way.

Prolific gardener here; I have never once successfully grown spinach, despite many attempts. There are tons of different greens species out there; once your garden is filled with endive, chicory, lambs lettuce, mizuna, beet greens, turnip greens, and a million different varieties of mustard, lettuce, and kale, you won't even remember that spinach exists.

I have many spinach leaves in my garden.

They're about the same size as a grain of corn and have been for a month :(

They do, but chances are they're f1 hybrids, meaning they don't grow true to seed. You'll get a random mutant, but it'll be an edible pepper .

Even if they're marketed as heirlooms, if they're designated for produce, they might be planted next to other varieties and while the fruit is True, the seeds are going to be Hybrids.

Also, Green Bell Peppers are unripe Red/Orange/Yellow/etc Bell Peppers. The seeds aren't viable anyway.

Luckily that only applies if you signed an agreement with them. If you use seeds from an item you bought, they wouldn't be able to stop you.

If you're just growing in your backyard for your own use then there really isn't much risk.

Subsistence farming sucks for grains and similiar things that can be efficiently machinized.

For many fruits and vegetables farming still relies on a lot of manual labor, often done by immigrants and vulnerable people under terrible working conditions.

My parents grow most of their fruits and veggies for half a year on about 40 m2 which is a tenth of an acre.

So with very little land it is possible to replace a lot of your grocery bag with self grown produce.

I grew twenty jalapeno peppers in pots in my first year of apartment living, all descended from a pepper I had in my window in college. Any container can be a plant pot as long as you can add drainage holes - I used a lot of milk jugs and soda bottles cut in half, with old takeout trays to catch the drainage water. Soil is cheap (or free if you're not picky about what's in it) and I just watered them with tap water. Ten years later I have fewer peppers but I still have one from that lineage, and my spouse has over two hundred plants in pots scattered through our apartment. We use water from the fish tank as fertilizer, and our main expense is a spritzer of insecticidal soap bought every year or two, and thrift store teacups I drill drainage holes in for some of the succulents. Time and the energy to care for plants are probably the biggest hurdles when you're broke, but money isn't necessarily a huge barrier. I hope that helps.

i mean tons of people live in houses with massive yards, for them it's effectively free.

Homegrown tomatoes reveal that the stuff we're served at grocery stores and cheap restaurants aren't really tomatoes at all. I've never tried to grow from seeds out of grocery store produce because you can get packets of seeds for a couple of bucks, and I've heard that the produce from grocery store seeds will be sub-par.

The issue is whether the produce you're procuring seed from is a hybrid or not. If it's not, you should be good to go with seed saving. If it is a hybrid, the results will be unpredictable, although not necessarily bad. This is an interesting read on the topic: https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/save-hybrid-seeds-zbcz1602/

I think I know what tomato product you're referring to, and I think you'd really like a lot of the heirloom cherry tomato varieties out there, which are even tastier. They're very common in almost any seed catalogue nowadays (so many varieties it's overwhelming!), but if you want to sample them first, I'd recommend stopping by a farmers market next summer. Be sure to chat with the seller to find out if they're hybrids or not; larger farms will probably have hired help selling the products so you may not get a good answer, but if the seller is the farmer themself, they'll absolutely know whether the tomatoes they're selling are hybrids or not. I also would recommend either the seed catalogue or farmers market routes because that way you'll be able to match the tomato variety to your growing conditions; a tomato variety bred for hydroponic growing for instance may not do well in soil. Also there are two types of tomatoes, determinate and indeterminate, which have slightly different care and harvest requirements. In short, you're better off knowing what variety of tomato you're growing so you can research care and growing conditions, vs growing seeds from an unknown tomato variety where you have to wing it and hope for the best.

Tomatoes only grow true to seed if they haven't been cross-pollinated. You can try, but there is no guarantee. Dry the seeds on a paper towel next to a radiator for a day before you plant them, it reduces the chance of mold foiling your plan.