40 Tomatos for $4

I did the math tonight and I think you could get about 40 tomatos for $7 if you followed the steps that I have. What you basically¹ need is a 5-gallon bucket, rocks, soil, compost and lastly, the tomato plants.

I found that fast food restaurants and bakeries get their supplies/ingredients in 5-gallon buckets and instead of recycling them they just toss them out. If you go in and ask a manager to set them beside the dumpster instead of throwing them away you could conceivably recover 5 or 6 per week.

Cost: $0

Take one of these 5-gallon buckets and be on the look out for rocks/gravel/pebbles. You’ll want to make sure that they are not hazardous to your mission. Make sure they are somewhat clean. These will be used to help with drainage at the bottom of the buckets when it’s time to plant.

Cost: $0

Soil is one of the more important factors so I usually try not to skimp on this ingredient. I usually get about 4 buckets worth of soil out of a large bag after I fluff it with compost. The cost per bag is $8, but like I said, that stretches 4 buckets.

Cost: $2

Next is the compost. You should be able to create your own compost by collecting the table scraps, organic material, and lawn cuttings. We started ours about 3 weeks ago and it’s already starting to decompose. Unfortunately it’s not ready for this season planting - so we had to purchase some from Producers. It’s cheap and seems to work pretty well when you combine it with the soil mentioned previously. A bag will run you about $4 and do the same as the soil and cover 4 buckets.

Cost: $1

The plants are next. You can get a 6-pack of tomatos for $0.99 which brings the cost down to around $0.20 after tax per plant. Or you can get a 4″ single plant that’s a little further along for $1. I usually buy those just because I’m anxious and I feel like I get a better idea of how strong the plant is. Mark has informed me to stay away from celebritys for container gardening as they have a taproot that wants to go a bit deep than a bucket can provide. Cherry and Romas though should do fine.

Cost: $1

So, when you think about it - tomatos can be extremely cheap if you grow them yourself. A Cherry Tomato plant will put off 40 tomatos and should have only costed you $4 for all the supplies. If you are in a pinch and don’t have time to track everything down like I explained above, you could get everything for under $10.

Total: $4

¹ I’m really trying to quit using split-infinitives, really.