Grow Your Own Groceries + Take Back Control

Between unpredictable grocery prices and supply chain hiccups, it’s easy to feel a bit powerless when walking through the supermarket aisles. But what if the ultimate security system wasn’t something you bought, but something you grew? Growing your own food doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t need to grow everything. Just start with something!

Taking back your power starts with planting a few plants, using whatever space you have.

A colorful harvest photo including tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, squash broccoli, peppers, cucumbers and cabbages.

Growing your own food is about more than just fresh flavor. It’s about self-reliance, building food security, and putting nutrient-dense ingredients directly onto your table. Best of all, you don’t need acres of land to make a massive impact. Whether you have a spacious backyard plot, a community garden bed, or just a sunny patio with a few pots, you can dramatically cut your grocery bills.

If you’re ready to dig in and maximize your return on investment, focus on these backyard superstars.

Best Bang for Your Buck: Herbs and Lettuces

Harvest basket full of spring greens and radishes, herbs.

If you want to see an immediate drop in your grocery receipt, skip the grocery store lettuces suffocating in plastic clamshells (the waste and environmental impact from those is astronomical) and head to the garden center instead.

Culinary herbs like basil, cilantro, parsley, and rosemary are also incredibly expensive at the store, often rotting in the fridge before you can use them all. In a pot outside your kitchen door, they thrive on neglect and can be harvested on demand, week after week.

Pair those herbs with a continuous supply of salad greens. Leaf lettuce, spinach, and arugula grow incredibly fast from seed. Because you can use the “cut-and-come-again” method—harvesting just the outer leaves while the center keeps producing—a single packet of seeds will yield a summer’s worth of gourmet salads for pennies.

At this time of year (early June) it’s best to focus on heat-tolerant varieties, and succession sowing arugula, cilantro, and basil. I’ve got lots of specifics in my article, Growing Great Lettuce.

Maximizing Small Spaces with Vertical Gardening

If you think you don’t have enough room to grow your own food, it’s time to shift your perspective and look up. Vertical gardening is the ultimate game-changer for small spaces, patios, and balconies. Instead of letting plants spread outward and take up precious ground or floor space, you train them to grow upward.

A wall of tomatoes growing straight up a cattle panel, easy harvesting, huge food production in a small space

For comparison, if you grew bush beans and cucumbers on the ground, it would take roughly 240 square feet, but growing pole beans and having the cucumbers trained up a trellis would take only 20 square feet.

You can easily transform a blank wall, a deck railing, or a sunny corner into a vertical farm. Vertical planters, stacked pocket systems, and hanging baskets are perfect for keeping a continuous supply of herbs, strawberries, and leafy greens right at eye level. By going vertical, you not only multiply your growing area but also improve air circulation around your plants, which naturally keeps pests and diseases at bay.

Pole Beans and Bush Beans

Hand holding ripe Rattlesnake Pole Beans growing on a wooden Trellis

When it comes to vertical gardening, pole beans are absolute champions. By training them up a simple trellis, teepee, or cattle panel, you utilize vertical height while leaving your ground soil or pots free for low-growing herbs. They produce heavily and continuously all summer long until the first frost.

If you don’t want to use a trellis, bush beans are an excellent alternative. They stay short, compact, and thrive beautifully in fabric pots, window boxes, or vertical pocket planters. Because bush beans mature quickly and are generally all harvested within a few weeks from the first to the last bean, they are perfect for succession planting. Even in northern climates with shorter growing seasons, you can easily get two full plantings of bush beans in a single year by sowing a second round of seeds in mid-summer.

A row of bush beans in a raised garden bed

Best Storage Crop: Winter Squash

A wagon of winter squash, with a metal basket full of more winter squash, butternut, Autumn frost and patty pan squash.

True self-reliance means eating from your garden long after the summer sun has faded into memories. That is where winter squash shines. Varieties like Butternut, Acorn, and Delicata are remarkably low-maintenance during the growing season, and they excel at long-term storage. They do sprawl, but can be grown from containers, trained up trellises and arches, or left to take over a patch of lawn. These squash are generally not eaten by critters either, so they don’t need to be grown in a fenced-in area.

Once harvested in the fall and properly cured, these tough-skinned beauties will sit happily in a cool, dark pantry or basement for months. No canning, freezing, or dehydrating required. When the snow is flying, you will have a reliable, hearty source of vitamins and carbohydrates ready for cold-weather soups and roasts.

Get Growing Your Own Food and Take Back Your Power

The world feels unstable right now, but the rhythm of nature and her soils remain constant. If you really want to make a long-term change, consider planting some edible perennials into your landscape!

Remember- You do not have to become completely self-sufficient overnight to make a difference!

Start small.
Plant what you love.
Enjoy Growing Your Own Food!

By growing even a fraction of your own groceries, you save money, reduce your environmental footprint, and rediscover the unmatched satisfaction of feeding yourself.

Plus, I’ll guarantee you it tastes better!

The time is right to take matters into your own hands. Grab some soil, choose your plants, and dig in!

Peas,
Michelle