Lets look at how much money you can save by growing your own organic tomatoes.
Tomato prices at the Farmers Markets are between $3.00 and $5.00 a pound. Although you are at least supporting a small local farmer, they may not even be organic. Organic tomato prices at local stores run in the same range.
If we are super conservative, you can easily get 15 tomatoes off one plant even if we have challenging weather. Each of those tomatoes (from a red fruited open pollinated variety like the Old Brooks or Thessaloniki) is 1/2 to 1 1/2 pounds each depending on variety and conditions. Staying with our conservative model, if those 15 fruits are 1/2 a pound each, your one tomato plant has given you 7.5 pounds of tomatoes, and would have cost from $22.50 to $37.50 if you bought them. If you got your tomato plant from us at $4.00, subtracting that from your savings total, you still saved from $18.50 to $33.50 and had plenty of tomatoes for several BLTs, salads and a pasta sauce or two – all from one tomato plant in a very conservative model. Plus, they are homegrown, so you didn’t have to go anywhere to get them, thus you saved more money on gas and saved time too by walking to your tomato plant instead of driving somewhere !
Prior Unity Garden Blog 