Can Vegetable Gardening Save Money on your Grocery Bill?

The best answer to that question is, it depends. If you do not change your eating habits and cooking then, no, not much. The average shopper does not spend very much of his grocery budget in the fresh produce aisle and some of the items he does buy there cannot be grown in the vegetable garden, e.g. bananas, pineapple. Furthermore, much of what a gardener can grow in his garden is inexpensive in the produce aisle, e.g. potatoes, onions and carrots. Many prospective gardeners, when they realize what I have just said decide that vegetable gardening just is not worth the trouble; besides, they kind of enjoy shopping anyway.

If however you also change your cooking and eating habits toward a nutritionally healthier vegetable diet, what my family calls “good old Depression food”, making one meal per day a vegetable soup and another a plate lunch with two vegetable sides then you are not so much replacing what you would have bought in the produce aisle as replacing the expensive prepared ready to serve convenience foods from the frozen food aisles, and that is where the real savings on the grocery bill comes in. For this reason I have always said that when it comes to being frugal, cooking is more important than gardening but gardening vegetables causes the necessary change in cooking. If you grow vegetables, then you will find a way to cook and eat them. I have always felt that there were two kinds of chefs. The first buys expensive ingredients from the store to follow a recipe exactly. The second kind looks at what you have available in the fridge, larder, pantry, and root storage and says, “Oh, turnips, turnip greens, onions and butternut squash, yeah, I can make something good out of that.” This is not to say that a lot of time must be given to food preparation if one is to eat frugally. A large pot of potatoes can be boiled once a week and then put into the fridge to be micro waved and eaten throughout the week. A large slow cooker crock pot of soup can cook over night or while one is at work, part of it eaten over several days and part of it frozen to add variety to future menus. Ditto for hashes and goulashes. Red beans and rice with liberal hot sauce is one of my favorite quick micro wave convenience meals. Salads can be pulled from the fridge and ready in seconds. Vegetable gardening teaches us how to eat and cook frugally just in case hard times come knocking. My wife and I currently eat well and healthily on a grocery budget of less than $200 per month and that includes toiletries, laundry soaps and other miscellaneous bought at a grocery store.