@The Prepper Project: Can't Afford Fruit Trees and Shrubs? Make Your Own!

You guys will appreciate one of my latest articles at The Prepper Project:

"In the spring, many gardeners go down to the local nursery or home improvement store and load up their carts with transplants. You can buy transplants for everything, including corn and melons. This, my friends, is rather ridiculous. First of all, a lot of plants don’t really transplant all that well – and the ones that do will often grow just as well from seeding in place, if not better. Buying transplants is often a waste of money.

Let’s look at tomatoes, since they’re hugely popular and also transplant well:

6 pack of tomato transplants: $3.50 = $0.58 per plant.

$0.58 per plant? That’s not bad, right? It is when you do the math on seeds:

Pack of 50 tomato seeds: $2.25 = $0.045 per seed.

Even if you had a 50% failure rate, you’d still be managing to start tomato plants for $0.09 each. That’s cheap. Plus, seeds sown in place, as written above, do better. They’re growing in the ground where they’re planted, meaning the roots can expand rapidly down into the soil, rather than being bunched up in a tiny cell. They’re also not having to deal with radically different growing conditions at a young age. Transplants are grown in perfect conditions, in perfect soil, then sit in variable light conditions until sold, wrapping their roots around and around in a tiny space. When you direct-seed, they acclimate to the sun and soil right away and start jumping immediately, without a rough transition from pot to earth... (read the rest)"

In the complete article, I not only cover seeds, I also write about cuttings and other methods of propagation. If you're gardening on a budget and need more plants, this article is for you.