Have a go at growing your own food

“we have a raised bed vegetable garden with drip irrigation in our backyard, along with a compost. i grew up gardening as well and find it a relaxing and wholesome hobby. now that we have a child, it's great for them too and it's good exercise . we built the beds ourselves and had the irrigation installed professionally but we know how to maintain it on our own. theoretically, we could be feeding ourselves probably 75% from this garden, but it's a lot of work for the reward and a lot of produce is high-effort and/or low-yield. climate change also makes it harder to have consistent growing season. over the years, we've really come to focus on growing foods that taste exceptionally better home-grown and have a high yield. for us this means: salad, kale, tomatoes, strawberries, peas, radishes, citrus trees, fig trees, herbs, and hot peppers.”

“This is my first year growing all of our food on the homestead the burn out is REAL. There's days I don't even know what I'm doing anymore because I have 10 things going at once. Ive definitely limited my diet more, but just the process alone can be very demanding some days.”

“We've got a thriving food forest and vege garden at home, but I sometimes struggle to rationalise growing our own food. It certainly costs less than buying produce in terms of just dollars spent, but when you also factor in the value of your time, growing your own food can quickly become much more expensive (presuming you can earn a decent income elsewhere). I calculated the opportunity cost (money spent plus time spent at the hourly rate I work for professionally) of our season's kumara last year, and it came to around $1,800 - we could've bought the same volume of kumara for about $300 from the supermarket ($600 if we bought organic, which is a more fair comparison because we grow organically too). But ultimately, it's important to remember that there's much more to life than just financial efficiency. There's a lot of joy, satisfaction, community, and independence that comes with growing your own produce.”