GoDawgs wrote: ↑Wed Mar 05, 2025 9:14 am I stopped by Tractor Supply yesterday for something and saw their Bonnie Plants display outside. Of course, I had to see what was there and it was quite a shock. 4-packs of cabbage plants for $5.99! I had to look twice to make sure it was only four plants and not six. Boy, am I RICH with all the homegrown packs of veg I have going!

I think that this is going to be a great year for starting and producing your own food. The farmers are in for a very hard time this year. There are expected water shortages and issues with harvesting the crops and temperatures are expected to be hot again.

We can expect more price increases soon.
I posted on the controversial thread.

A 60 count box of eggs is 10 dollars cheaper at Walmart than HEB.
A 12 count large eggs is almost half as much as HEB.
This is ridiculous HEB seems to have a monopoly on food in this area.
I guess they want to pay for all the new ones going up.
And the remodeling.

Back to onions.
What onion I don't eat I have a place for it in the refrigerator.
If it dries out I just chop it up and put it in soup or cook with it.
It's the door shelf with the cover.

One good news for farmers, maybe? At least according to this news piece, suppliers stocked up on potash before the tarriffs went on. If you can imagine a major fertilizer going up suddenly 25% that's a hard knock for farmers if it did. So at the least, it looks like there is no imminent harm to the farm.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and- ... goes-ahead
Still I agree with @MissS we are all going to be extra glad of anything we grew ourselves to eat this year.
The price of seedlings certainly is nuts!
I'm thinking on your onion strategy @karstopography and I could probably pull that off with some onion sets... must do it. It's so much better to have your own. I already bought seed potatoes so, in for a penny as they say...

@bower the biggest problem as I see it is the lack of people to harvest crops this year along with a water shortage in California.

MissS wrote: ↑Wed Mar 05, 2025 11:31 am @bower the biggest problem as I see it is the lack of people to harvest crops this year along with a water shortage in California.

Speaking of farm labor I just talked to a young guy that was flabbergasted that I used to work the farms.
He told me that he worked the farms in Northern California.
He's 30 years old and lives in Texas now.
Yes he's Hispanic.
Farm harvest work is one of the most unappreciated under paid jobs there is world wide.
Our country as many others are in a terrible imbalance when it comes to wages and work done.
One way or the other the prices will rise either by paying fare pay or costing more due to supply and demand.
In this day and age one person working their tail off from daylight till dark easily 12 hours a day and bringing home 20 to 30 k a year is ridiculous.
That's why whole families live and work together.
But they have to follow the crops to keep this steady wage coming in.
They don't get paid by the hour they get paid by how much they can pick.
I can't count how many conversations I've had with these folks and working in the fields picking crops.
Nobody wants to do it anymore.
Some times they live on the property and have the so called rent taken out of their pay.

It happened to me when I was 16 years old working all summer hauling hay.
I felt robbed.
I lived in a tent that summer and got charged for it.

And tiny seeds (along with the other brassicas), so they are very cheap! Of course, that's another ripoff, when you see those kind of seeds sold @ something like 25/$4.99, when I get them from some places @500/$1.99.

TBH regardless of the causes of food insecurity, I thiink the obvious answer or part of it is for food to be grown everywhere, as much as you can. Less reliance on those huge enterprises is a safety net if you can do it.
Meanwhile the big farms have made it easy for everyone to eat, I won't deny that mass production brings prices down and all that. But as GoDawgs pointed out, when you're doing it from scratch your price is your time.
Likewise for the seed, so costly if you are buying by the pack, nothing wrong with supporting those enterprises that conserve some seed diversity but also no shame at all in growing your own seed for whatever you want to grow. Fresher seed, better seed.
I went a decade of hard times when I grew seed and swapped seed and never bought one packet, and I ended up growing all kinds of vegetables I never even dreamed of. What a great experience, and as for the food - no words. So good.

Cost also varies a lot depending on where you get your seed. There are vendors in the high price range and those more affordable. Then there's seed available at the big boxes (HD, Lowes, etc) where the choices aren't as wide but there's no shipping fee. Further down the price line are the feed and seed stores. Yes, the selection is even more narrow but costs a lot less.

At my feed and seed I got 12 Yukon Gold seed potatoes this year for $1.27 and I was able to pick the ones I wanted out of the big sack of them. For .65 I can get enough National Pickler cuke seed to plant half the county! Danvers carrots, Silver Queen corn, plain old yellow straightneck squash, purple top turnip and mustard all come from my local feed 'n weed. Of course I order a lot of other stuff too, hit the Ferry-Morse displays here and there if needed and save what seed I can.

Eggs. We were in the city today for an Aldi and Sam's run. Sam's had 24-count boxes of "cage-free" eggs for $9.37 (4.68/dz), limit two per customer (which we got) so we're good for a while. Those were the only kind of eggs they had today. Aldi's one dozen boxes were about $5.85 each and Walmart's online site said theirs was 5.97 for the one dozen box, 8.82 for the 18-count box.

Gas. Since gas in the city is about 20 cents less per gallon that out in the sticks where I am, I filled up today for $2.56/gal. The price has been going down over the past two weeks.

Eggs at HEB have dropped down to 4.35 on line.
Should be a little less at the store.
60 count is 20 dollars.
I'm keeping an eye on prices and if they start to creep up I'll buy more.