Great “Easy Lucrative Garden Crops” Hunt: What costly foods can you grow with ease?

fluffig

Divide up a bulb of garlic and plant each clove a couple of inches down and a couple of inches apart. It's ready to harvest when the leaves wilt and go brown

MissPop

cjb02 wrote: »

Goji berries. very expensive to buy. cost loads of air miles as they come from China mainly. buy some dried goji berries. soak them in water, take seeds out of berries the following day and plant (this time of year is ideal) They can be grown in the ground or in a tub (I would suggest tub as they are easier to control) Can get to 12ft high but with a little pruning each year. Can be maintained at 3-4ft and you still get berries. They are very hardy plants and will over winter on a patio or in the garden.

Oooh, I saw goji berry plants in QD the other day - I was ever so surprised! They were only £2 IIRC. Apparently ever so good for you

choille

Rhubarb - has gotten ridiculously expensive to buy. All you do is force it if you want it early & sweet.
Sugar snap & mange tout are both pretty easy to grow as well.

angelavdavis

Is any fresh veg cheap any more?

My list is as follows:

Beefsteak tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes (taste 100% better too)
Patty pans
Baby courgettes
Mange Tout
Sugar Snap peas
Baby sweetcorn
Chilis
Rhubarb
Mixed salad leaves
Spinach
Herbs
Runner Beans
French Beans
Aubergines
Blueberries

Can all be grown easily in a garden - most in pots.

amcluesent

Basil so you can make you own pesto
Suger snap peas
Asparagus
Lollo rosso

TBH, in season pretty much everything else is cheap at the supermarket and peeps growing at home are going to be producing just when the main crop comes in from the commercial growers.

nodwah

Salads has surely got to win - if you look at a bag of perpared salad for £2 or so you could buy a packet of mixed seed eg unwins for £1.79 and get 1200+ seeds. Grow in old fruit punnets or tetra pack cartons halved legthways with a wee bag of economy compost (asda 89p) you don't really need expensive stuff - you have fresh salad leaves all summer- bargain!

Also for me Blueberries are amazing value - we originally bought 6 plants for something like £8 each - expensive outlay I know -( we have fairly acid soil and Hm compost so don't really need and special composts and I empty teabags round them too) and for about the last 10 years the bushes have given us pounds and pounds of fruit. Blueberries can be £2.99 for a 125g punnet and flown around the planet so my homegrown ones must be worth at least £100 a season - fantastic!

A._Badger

Raspberries, without a doubt!

If you plant a row of Autumn fruiting raspberries, you will get, for almost no effort, save cutting them to the ground in the winter and applying a handful of fertiliser, a big crop of a very expensive fruit, for next to no trouble and at little expense.

tsstss7

I think the easiest things to grow that are also pretty expensive are the following perennial plants/ bushs :-

Rhubarb needs very little looking after and like said above once established can be forced by placing a dustbin over or some such device to provide lovely long red, sweet stalks.


black/red currants, - they are pretty hardy and provide mammoth crops after a few years they can be grown in pots too.


gooseberry - - ditto above


raspberry - need to clear ground quite well initially but afterwards they are little work.

Other than that the very easiest annual crops are radish and lettuce purely because they don't take long to germinate and are quick croppers so for the price of a packet of seeds, a biggish pot and some compost you could have these all summer.

Muffin99

Interesting post!

I have rooted a stem of lemon grass I bought from supermarket and from that one stem I now have eleven! I tried it outside but it does best on my sunny window sill!

Pumpkins are well worth growing.

If you grow broad beans the tops of the plants are an absolute delicacy! Just boil them and see

I'm having a go with asparagus peas and cape gooseberries this year. Never tried either of them before, but I'm v hopeful!

jpwhittle

brocolli is expensive now £1.98 in asda today, but can be done quite easily from seed, also butternut squash, i bought one then instead of throwing the seeds out i put them in a pot and hoped for the best now got about 20 plants coming through from about half the seeds i pulled out of the squash.
I am a beginner to enough so that my mum laughed when i said id just put them straight in soil without drying them out, she was equally as shocked when i said about all the strong plants ive got coming through lol.