this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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As an avid gardener near Bathurst of many years experience I've realised there are a short list of veges which are economical to grow, depending on various factors. All the rest are vanities except for their value as a luxury.
To start with, potatoes, garlic, pumpkin and silver beet are fundamental. You could live off them, and after a few years they become weeds so you never need to sow again. They don't need much fertiliser or special soil. I grow everything in raised beds with that layer of woodchip mulch and they just come up every year. No pests to speak of.
Second tier would be cos lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, rocket and carrots. These about break even if you don't include time spent cultivating them. I save seeds mainly so I can sow carrots and lettuce densely and prevent weeds. They need more fertiliser but it's worth it and the picking season is long enough for most. Cos lettuce because you can cut and come again.
Everything else is basically a waste of time. Heirloom tomatoes, beetroot, turnip, various brassicas, just not worth it. It's much easier to buy fresh and save money. I do grow broccoli but I use the greens and any heads are a bonus.
I grow beetroot in preference to silverbeet, and use the leaves of those as well as the roots. In the right conditions tomatoes are also very prolific and produce a very worthwhile crop - as long as you are not spending a fortune on advanced seedlings and tomato cages I'm not sure how you could find them not worth it.
It depends a lot on your specific growing conditions and what you tend to eat - in the right conditions some plants grow like weeds and are very worthwhile, whereas in someone else's garden the same plant may be nearly impossible to grow. The most important thing is to work out what grows well for you, in your garden.
In my experience root crops take more effort and are hard to get to a size equivalent to store bought. It's probably my techniques but I am a lazy gardener. While silver beet grows better for me than commercial crop.
With tomatoes I find bigger varieties are tasty targets for birds and other pests while smaller ones escape their notice and also crop over a longer period. Plus they self seed better and seem more resistant to pests. Speaking of which I once bought tomato seedlings from Bunnings but they had purple leaf curl virus which recurred the next year so I had to go without for some years to fix that. Never again.