9 vegetables that are cheaper to grow than buy in stores – I've grown them for years and know these crops can save you money

If the cost of your grocery shop is rising, you may be looking to save money by growing your own vegetables. More and more gardeners are thinking this way, as homegrown vegetables not only save money but are also more flavorful and nutritious than store-bought, plastic-wrapped ones.

You are not going to become fully self-sufficient overnight, and unless you are blessed with acres of growing space and plenty of time, a home vegetable garden will not provide everything you eat.

However, some key money-saving vegetables can help you save throughout the year. These include highly productive vegetables that can be harvested multiple times and crops that are priced at a premium in stores but can be easily grown at home. If you want to start a vegetable garden to reduce your grocery bills, these are some of the crops I recommend growing.

9 money-saving vegetables you can easily grow at home

I have grown vegetables for over a decade and spent many years as a professional gardener, including specialising as a kitchen gardener who grew vegetables for restaurants and sold them to visitors in public gardens.

I have always grown vegetables from seed, and this is undoubtedly the biggest way to save money when growing crops. A packet of seeds won’t set you back much, and you can get a big harvest from those plants. For a bonus, as some packets come with hundreds of seeds, you can even save what’s remaining to sow again next year.

The following selection of money-saving vegetables can all be easily grown from seed, and cultivated in the ground, in raised beds or a vegetable container garden.

Cherry tomatoes

One of the advantages of growing tomatoes at home is that you can pick from a much wider range of tomato varieties than you ever see in grocery stores, and their flavor surpasses their store-bought counterparts.

Cherry tomatoes, in particular, make great money-saving vegetables. They are prolific plants that can provide you with large quantities of delicious tomatoes throughout summer.

For the cost of a packet of seeds, you can grow lots of fruits in a small space. Even just a plant or two will provide more than enough tomatoes to eat fresh, add to dishes, or make a pasta sauce with a glut.

Tomato plants do need sun and warmth to grow, but you can grow tomatoes in pots on a deck or balcony in an urban space.

Heavy-cropping varieties like ‘Super Sweet 100’ are ideal tomatoes for growing in pots, but plants do require training and pruning, and you can get ‘Super Sweet 100’ tomato seeds to plant at Burpee.

For an even easier yield, compact bush varieties of tomatoes can reach less than two feet yet still reward with a large, delicious harvest.

Pole beans

A key attribute of any money-saving vegetable is that it produces prolifically, and beans certainly fit into that category. For the cost of one or two small packets of beans in a store, you can easily buy a packet of seeds that will produce a mass of beans during the season.

Green beans, runner beans, and climbing French beans are prolific plants that can produce lots of pods in a small space. Whether you start seeds indoors or sow seeds outdoors directly into their growing position, they germinate reliably and grow fast.

Climbing beans do need space to climb and something to grow up, but once you start picking them in midsummer, they’ll keep developing more beans. Thankfully, beans are suitable for canning, drying, or freezing if you do get a glut to deal with.

If you have a smaller vegetable garden, you can grow bush beans. They are smaller plants that don’t require the same training as pole beans, making them ideal for smaller spaces. However, despite being easy to grow from seed and producing a good crop, bush beans are not quite as bountiful as pole beans.

Discover the full range of bean seeds at Amazon

Discover the full range of bean seeds at Walmart

Discover the full range of bean seeds at Burpee

Discover the full range of bean seeds at True Leaf Market

Leafy greens

Bags of salad leaves can quickly wilt and look sad once you get them home and open them up. Instead, why not grow a wide variety of mixed salad leaves quickly and easily from seed?

These leafy greens can be grown indoors, outdoors, even on a windowsill and are fast-growing vegetables that can be harvested in 30-50 days from sowing. They can be harvested as baby leaves or left a little longer to reach maturity.

Whether you’re a fan of lettuce, arugula, spinach, or peppery Asian leaves like mizuna, these are all quick cut-and-come-again leaves that can give several harvests from one sowing.

As you tend to get a lot of seeds per packet, they can be grown successively from spring to fall for a large haul of leaves throughout the year.

Cucumbers

Growing cucumbers needs less space than many people will imagine, and you can get good harvests of fruits from relatively small spaces.

And there are more types of cucumbers to grow than normally seen in stores (take lemon cucumbers as one example), plus I bet homegrown cucumbers may surprise you by how different they are flavor-wise from those plastic-wrapped store-bought ones.

Cucumbers like warm temperatures between 70 and 85°F, either outdoors or in a cold greenhouse or indoors by a large south-facing window.

Admittedly, you often need to grow cucumbers vertically up a vegetable garden trellis to keep fruits off the floor, but there are bush or dwarf varieties ideal for growing cucumbers in pots in smaller spaces, such as Cucumber 'Bush Champion' at Burpee which grows to 24 inches but produces lots of fruits.

Cucumbers are vigorous and can produce 20+ fruits per plant during summer, meaning a lot of fruits for the cost of a seed packet. Certainly more cost-effective than buying 20 individual cucumbers from the store.

Finally, you can save cucumber seeds to sow again the following season.

Radishes

If you have a lot of summer salads, then you may go through a lot of radishes. While radishes may not hit you as a big expense, a packet of radish seeds is around five dollars for up to a thousand seeds, and they are one of the easiest and quickest vegetables to grow.

Growing radishes is super-speedy. Plant radishes successively from spring to fall, and you can harvest radishes within a month. And that seed packet is so large that it is likely to last you at least two seasons.

Look around and you’ll also discover the choice of characteristics that come with different radishes. There are the typical pink, globe-shaped roots, but also longer, finger-shaped radishes and varieties in shades of red, purple, and white – you don’t often see them in stores.

See the full range of radish seeds at Amazon

See the full range of radish seeds at Walmart

See the full range of radish seeds at Burpee

See the full range of radish seeds at True Leaf Market

Kale

Kale may be more fashionable now as a superfood, but for many years it was highly undervalued as a vegetable.

With a few successive plantings of seeds and growing a few different types, you can potentially harvest kale all year round. It is an easy vegetable to grow, as well as being one of the healthiest, as the leaves are packed with nutrition.

As kale is often sold in large bags in stores, it can be tough to use all of it before it turns.

When you grow kale at home, you can make small and regular pickings of outer leaves, so the inner ones continue growing for future harvests. If you harvest kale as a cut-and-come-again crop, it means many months of pickings.

Pick more unusual varieties of kale, such as Tuscan kale or dinosaur kale, along with more typical red and green-leaved types, for a wonderful selection of leaves. You can get Black Tuscan Kale seeds at True Leaf Market to sow in spring or fall.

Zucchini

If productivity is a marker of a money-saving vegetable, then is any crop more productive than zucchini? As anyone who has grown zucchini will know, the plants produce lots of fruits each summer.

One zucchini plant can be enough to feed one family, producing 10 or more fruits each. Add too many zucchini plants to your vegetable garden and you’ll be desperately seeking people to give fruits to before your zucchini develop into marrows.

While not used anywhere near as much as the fruits, you can also harvest zucchini flowers to stuff, fry, or add to salads or soups. And they are not something you see in a typical grocery store. When you do see them, they do not come cheap at fine food specialists.

See the range of zucchini seeds at Amazon

See the range of zucchini seeds at Walmart

See the range of zucchini seeds at Burpee

See the range of zucchini seeds at True Leaf Market

Chard

Swiss chard is another vegetable that can start to go limp quickly once brought home from the store, if you can even find it at all.

The leaves, which can come in different colors, have a sweet, earthy flavor and are rich in vitamins and minerals. If you want a mix of colors, these seeds of Chard 'Rainbow Mixture' at True Leaf Market can be sown for leaves in shades of red, yellow, orange, and white.

As chard leaves can be steamed, sautéed, braised, pickled, or more, there is real merit to growing Swiss chard at home.

When you plant Swiss chard into a vegetable garden, you can pick baby leaves once they are large enough to use or wait for mature leaves. Picking individual leaves as a cut-and-come-again crop means continual harvests for a long period, even into the colder months.

The seed can be sown in spring to harvest in summer and fall, and you can sow in mid-to-late summer again and overwinter plants to start harvesting in spring. That is almost year-round harvests of Swiss chard from one packet of seeds.

Asparagus

Asparagus is a perennial vegetable that can offer you harvests for 20 years once established, but it does require patience.

While this spring delicacy always comes at a premium price in stores, you can plant asparagus crowns to give you annual harvests of tender spears each spring.

However, if you want to grow asparagus to avoid buying it every year, then you do have to wait. You need to wait until the third year to harvest asparagus when you plant crowns, and this timeline extends if you try to grow crowns from seed.

The rewards are worth the wait, as with time and patience, you can get a lot of asparagus over the plant’s long lifetime. It is a money-saving vegetable if you are prepared to wait.

You can get 'Jersey Knight' asparagus crowns at Nature Hills to plant in your vegetable garden in zones 3-7.

As well as adding money-saving vegetables to your garden, you can also save costs by planting fruit. Adding soft fruit bushes such as blueberries, blackcurrants, or redcurrants rewards you with big harvests of delicious fruit for many years.

These perennial crops need annual pruning to keep them super-productive and also benefit from being fed once a year to provide all the nutrients they need to develop a rich crop of fruits to harvest every summer.