Seed Savings

By Marissa Ames
Updated on January 10, 2024
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by Patricia Petit

I’ve gardened for 35 years. But several of those years included adolescence, with a considerable gap when I was a single mom working two jobs living in apartments. When I rented a house and returned to growing food, I bought plants. When the cashier rang up the total, my husband asked, “How is this saving us money?” At $5 to $6 per plant, I spent several hundred dollars for a small garden.

By then, my mother had died, so I had nobody to laugh and say, “That’s why I always started seeds to feed five kids.” So, I took the education into my own hands and learned lessons the hard way.

Each year, I memorized frost dates and my garden’s microclimates. I learned which varieties grew best in the short seasons of northern Nevada. I created soil for container gardening. And I stopped buying plants.

Then, in 2012, I wondered how much money I was actually saving. I charted every cost for that 1/8-acre yard, only a quarter of which was cultivated into a food garden. Each time I purchased something for the garden – including a percentage of the water bill – I charted it. I recorded every new hose, shovel, and pack of seeds. Soon, the costs soared over $300. Then, the produce started rolling in. Whenever I harvested, I weighed the produce and then compared it with that week’s cheapest grocery-store price for a similar product.

By the season’s killing frost, I had saved $2,000 by growing food from seed, and all of our meals incorporated vegetables.

Overall, the savings accumulated, and not just within my own house. After that year, I mastered seed starting so much that friends asked if I had extra plants. So I increased my seed starting. Purchasing 25 packs of tomato seeds meant I could grow 25 different tomato varieties. Rather than keep older seed each year, I started every seed from every pack and sold the extra plants as fundraisers. First, I funded my son’s Boy Scout camp-outs. Then, after the kids grew older, I sold tomato, pepper, and eggplant starts and donated the money to feeding programs in Zambia. Within that less-than-1/16-acre growing space, I donated over $1,000 per year just from selling the extra organically grown plants in addition to cultivating almost all of my family’s food. Around that same time, I started keeping chickens for eggs. This evolved into a humane small-scale meat production to provide my family’s protein.

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