Do You Grow Your Own Vegetables or Buy Them?

Over the years, we’ve done both, each having its pros and cons

Beets and dill that I grew two years ago. © Carol Labuzzetta, 2024.

Over the years, we’ve had different-sized gardens depending on where we lived. In the late 80s, we lived in a condo in Maryland and had just enough room to grow tomatoes and peppers. It wasn’t that successful, but both of us worked full-time.

In Buffalo, at our first house, I don’t remember growing vegetables at all, but we might have — again, just tomatoes and peppers. My father-in-law had a ten-acre garden plot full of every vegetable you can imagine, and we regularly got fresh vegetables, grapes, and apples from him. There was no need to grow our own.

But he planted an idea in me to get my Master Gardener Volunteer Certification, which I did many years later, after we moved to Wisconsin. Having the certification did not make me a better vegetable grower, just a more knowledgeable one. It also allowed me to get involved with my community and teach others (including kids) about plants — mostly flowers — and garden-based organisms like worms and a variety of pollinators.

In our first house in Wisconsin, starting in 1999, we grew a variety of crops, including popcorn. It was fun, and our boys were young, so I used a lot of garden time for informal lessons on how things grow.

Some of our apple trees, 2018. © Carol Labuzzetta, 2018.

Finally, we moved out of a subdivision and to a house just outside of town, which had 3.25 acres. There, we grew apples, pears, cherries, blueberries, and plums. We had a large pumpkin patch and sweet corn one year behind our barn.

The joke was on me, though, because the sweet corn cross-pollinated with the cow-corn (fodder) from the farmer’s fields that were both next to us and across the street. The pumpkins were fun to grow, though.

My tomatoes usually ended up with blossom end rot, and the peppers never got very big. I started those from seed, and it just takes too long to have them flower and be pollinated. My eggplants usually did well, though.

We had cats, so seed starting was a challenge as they liked to get into the soil pots. Finally, I did well the year I put the plants in the laundry room under some grow lights and kept the door shut.

Seed starting is a challenge. © Carol Labuzzetta, 2024.

During those years, we bought most of our vegetables from the local grocery store. Sometimes, we’d go to a farmer’s market, and other times, family friends who had grown too much would “donate” some zucchini, squash, or tomatoes to us. We did the same with our fruit when harvest time came for those, especially the cherries and apples.

Bowl of cherries from our own cherry trees. © Carol Labuzzetta, 2018

But we left that acreage in 2022 and moved to our Northwoods cabin. Our yard is mostly forested with beautiful pines, cedars, hickory, birch, and a few ash and oak.

Since we’ve been living here full-time, we’ve put a lot of work into the yard. I’ve been able to have vegetables in pots on our deck. Last year, I went to Colorado to visit our eldest son and came home to a lovely raised bed that my husband built for me.

New raised bed last year. © Carol Labuzzetta, 2025.

I grew tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, broccoli, cucumbers, zucchini, and some herbs. The tomatoes and peppers did fairly well, but the deer ate my eggplant and broccoli plants. We had a plethora of cukes and zucchini — too many. I did enjoy our basil and dill, however.

This year, I knew better. I waited until I was home from our trip out West at the end of May to go and buy plants. Before I went, I told my husband that I was going to purchase “big” tomato and pepper plants so that we had their fruit before the end of summer.

Tonight’s photo our our raised bed. © Carol Labuzzetta, 2026.

I had also started peas, beans, radishes, and beets before we left in mid-May. Those have all germinated and started to flower. The tomatoes and peppers could use more heat — it’s been a cool start to summer here. And, the plants I got were medium-sized instead of large because I wanted indeterminate tomato plants, meaning they will produce all year, not all at one time.

Why am I interested in growing my own vegetables?

I want to be healthier. Much of our food is packaged in plastic and sent across the country in trucks. As I’ve gotten older, I have an interest in knowing what I’m putting in my mouth.

I don’t want doses of pesticide or microplastics from packaging coming with my food. Growing it avoids that.

Also, I think it’s good to be somewhat self-reliant. These recent years have been so turbulent that I want to know “how” to grow something successfully before we “have to” know how to do it.

We still buy most of our vegetables from the grocery store. It’s thirty minutes away, so we think before we go. By the end of summer, if I want something fresh for dinner, I hope to just go out and pick it.

So what do you do? Do you grow your vegies or buy them?

Let me know in the comments. Thanks!

This is my prompt for the Challenged publication for June 17th. Thanks to Adrienne Beaumont for collecting ideas for the challenges, supplementing them, and putting together the monthly list.

[embed]June is Bustin’ Out all Over Writing prompts coming out the yin-yangmedium.com

If you want to play along and answer a challenge, there are plenty to choose from — the challenges for June (answer any time) are in the linked article.