Grow or Buy?

Regardless of where you live, I think just about everyone transplants some sort of vegetable or flower.  The question is:  Do you grow your own plants from seed or buy plants?

Growing up I remember my Opa having to shovel a path through the snow to get to his greenhouse and lighting the woodstove so he could start his flowers and vegetables.  My mom would also have vegetables and flowers started in the house taking up residence where ever there was room.  Now they both buy plants.  Why?  Because it’s easier and before they didn’t have an affordable option to buy plants: this was before the Canadian Tire, Superstore, and Wal-Mart Era in the Yukon.

Last year I tried to grow my own tomatoes, zucchini and corn to transplant.  Key word: TRY.  I did have some success but not much.  I started the seeds with plenty of time and they grew great at first.  But then I became my own worst enemy: I watered them inconsistently, I fussed and played with them too much, they received inconsistent day light baking in the afternoon sun and then being cool on overcast days.  I could have bought many gadgets to aid in this adventure but I wanted to keep it simple and didn’t want to spend a fortune on growing equipment.

Last year I fiddled with plants for weeks on end will they crowded my living room.  I bought special dirt, fiber pots, trays to hold the pots and of course, seeds.  I probably spend close to $50 on my supplies.

In the end, my tomatoes didn’t get transplanted because they were so small they wouldn’t have produced anything, the corn got thrown out because it went moldy, and the zucchini plants died within a week of being transplanted.  I ended up buying tomato plants from the local greenhouse, re-seeded the zucchini directly into the garden (which grew wonderfully), and gave up on the corn when the seeds planted directly in the garden also went moldy. 

When I bought the tomato plants it set me back $1.49 (after a 20% discount) for a 4 pack of healthy beef steak tomatoes that were close to 10 inches tall.  I probably spent less than $15 on tomatoes (We had a huge tomato patch last year and I do tend to over buy.) 

So my question to you is this: Do you bombard your house with trays of seedlings fussing over them for weeks on end or go buy the plants when you are ready for them?

My conclusion: even though it’s nice to have everything in your garden grown exclusively by you, it’s okay to cheat and buy a few plants.  It can be expensive to grow plants to transplant and its heart breaking to see something you spent weeks tending to get killed by the frost, burned by the sun or get eaten by deer.  It’s much easier to tolerate when you can just go buy more!

This year I didn’t even attempt to start anything indoors.  It was much easier and less stressful to drive to the local greenhouse and Canadian Tire and buy my tomatoes and petunias.