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Saving seeds to lower gardening costs
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A small garden will not use a whole packet of seeds.
As roadside and farmers market produce tapers off, frugal families may want to think ahead to next spring while making purchases. Growing your own vegetables (and decorative gourds) can be a frugal way to feed your family and become a meaningful hobby.
While you're shopping this month, consider next spring. If you already keep a vegetable garden, think about vegetables that you cannot find transplants for. If you are new to vegetable gardening, think about vegetables that you cannot buy as mature, ready-to-use produce at a conventional grocery store. Maybe big carving pumpkins cost more than you would like to spend, or you simply want to grow a new plant as a personal challenge, but seeds or transplants are expensive enough to push the challenge away. After you've thought about what vegetables you may want to have next year, go out and buy those vegetables and save their seeds.
For example, the store had transplants for red and green peppers in the spring, but not yellow like the grocer. You like striped or white eggplants, but most places carry only purple eggplants. Or, you read that tomatoes were easy to grow in a pot and more nutritious when picked immediately before eating. In these examples, buying vegetables to eat AND to save the seeds makes sense. And nothing could be more convenient and easy on the budget than grocery shopping in your yard.
Seeds from most mature vegetables can be saved and grown the following season. Hybrid plants will not produce viable seeds, but many farmers market vendors do not grow hybrids, and most will tell you about the plant origin if asked. Packages of seeds at retail stores range in price from less than one dollar to well over three dollars. Small gardens will especially benefit from seed saving. Many small gardeners have to buy a packet of seeds and plant but a fraction of it, which makes for waste. Frugal families can see that the price of one vegetable that is eaten and/or used for saving seeds is a cost-effective purchase since most vegetables produce more than enough seeds to fill their garden plots.
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