StarBird Farm has an interesting post about deciding what to grow in your garden. This has long been a question for us as well. For example, our first year we grew potatoes. They grew quite well. This is Idaho, after all. But then it probably cost us more to grow those potatoes than we can pick them up locally. This is Idaho, after all. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to grow a lot of foods that you can obtain locally quite inexpensively.

On the other hand, we do well with strawberries, and they are not cheap to buy. Ours also taste a lot better than the ones you buy in the store. We often joke about forgetting about everything else and just growing strawberries.

Of course another option is to still plant things you can grow easily even if you can buy them cheaply. Even though most vegetables are cheap when they are in season, they go up in price quite a bit at other times of the year. When they are cheap, go ahead and stock up and store them for the off season. Then you are able to enjoy that food cheaply year round.

This year we’re going to take that approach. We’re planting a lot of tomatoes–something we eat a lot of in various forms–so that we actually get enough to do something with. We’ll let you know how it goes.