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The story
With vegetable prices climbing, home improvement stores in Shizuoka City are seeing more customers snapping up seeds, seedlings, planters, and other gardening supplies, with seedling sales reportedly up 1.6-fold. On the thread, posters traded concrete growing tips — “onions and garlic are worth growing,” “in summer, cherry tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, and cucumbers are a safe bet” — while plenty of cooler heads chimed in with “seedlings and fertilizer have gotten so expensive you’ll never break even” and “if you can’t enjoy it as a hobby, you should just quit,” splitting opinion on whether home gardening is really a money-saver or just a pastime.
With vegetable prices climbing, interest is growing across the prefecture in one approach to easing household budgets. Vegetables are a kitchen-table staple, and unusual weather has kept prices high. Amid this, one thing is drawing attention…
“Home gardening, which helps ease household expenses, is growing more popular right now.”
At a home improvement store in Shizuoka City, the entrance is lined with vegetable seeds and seedlings, along with planters, fertilizer, potting soil, and other gardening supplies.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
What's with the "lol"? Bragging? That's super off-putting
Everything else is so-so on cost efficiency
Summer: cherry tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, cucumbers
Winter: mini daikon, long green onions
This lineup never fails
For beginners, something low-maintenance is best — mess it up and you literally can't go on a trip
And go for stuff that grows fast and big
Same here
Never expected them to grow that fast
No wonder they're not very nutritious
Must be nice for people who can actually pull it off
For most people it's a waste of effort
I never come close to breaking even lol
Exactly. If you can't enjoy it, better to just quit.
Seedlings, fertilizer, and mulch sheeting have all gotten pricier lately
If you're starting from zero you need to buy tools like a hoe too, so unless you keep at it for several seasons you're guaranteed to be in the red
That's because you're not farming like 10 hectares — the smaller the plot, the higher the cost per yield
When I did home gardening, I always figured buying from the local farm co-op (JA) was cheaper anyway.
I kept at it for the joy of eating stuff fresh-picked, though.
Probably just a hobby thing.
This year I grew and harvested habaneros, jalapeños, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli sprouts, green shiso, and red shiso indoors.
Left the outdoor shiso alone and just picked the seed pods off it.
For stuff like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, the seedling cost isn't that big a deal
What seedlings are you even talking about?
Onions had a bumper crop too, so they're cheap
Napa cabbage prices are coming down as well
The vegetable price spike was really more of a thing from a little while back, caused by the long autumn rains
Though I'm sick of being asked "why don't you do it?" and having to justify my reasons every single time
Wonder what that's about
I do home gardening and like it, but I don't go around giving produce away
or recommending it to people
Why can't people just accept that it's nothing more than a hobby?
Strawberries in spring and watermelon in summer are the fun part
Planted seeds saved from a watermelon I ate the year before and got a big one out of it
Or is it pricey simply because it doesn't pay off, so hardly anyone grows it, driving the price up?
Wanted to try balcony gardening and started with herbs
but gave up after beetle grubs infested the planters
Those things wrecked my other houseplants too — no wonder they're nicknamed "root cutters"
I think it's a cartel
Aomori-grown garlic is good quality, sure,
but even with the weak yen, the price gap with Chinese garlic is still huge.
If you're not selling it, you can just grow it in a planter with some fertilizer, no problem
It's just that the climate here isn't suited for it, the growing period is long, and getting big, uniform cloves is hard
Continuous cropping brings disease, and a rainy year can wipe out the whole crop
Shipping logistics and storage are a hassle too, so making it market-ready is tough
Garlic is hard to multiply
It catches viruses, and it drains the soil fast, so fields wear out quickly
First you have to buy brutally expensive virus-free seed cloves — like ¥1,000 a clove —
then propagate them yourself bit by bit each year
but it takes over six months of growing just to turn one clove into four or five, so the increase is next to nothing
If your field gets hit by nematodes, that's game over right there
And the stock gets reinfected with viruses as you keep propagating it
so you have to periodically buy fresh seed cloves anyway
It's an extremely difficult crop to produce at scale
Watercress, basil, rosemary — those are pretty useful, right?
Rosemary just never grows well for me
Wonder if it's a sunlight issue
Rosemary's the one thing that never clicked for me either — killed it over and over
but I looked into it later and apparently it's about soil pH
Japanese soil tends to be acidic, but rosemary is adapted to alkaline soil
If you've planted it directly in the ground, using dolomite lime might help
Thanks, I had no idea
I'll give that a try next time I plant
Didn't realize it could even die. It's popular as a yard shrub so you see it everywhere,
and even the neglected ones at houses nobody tends are all thriving and turning into full-on trees lol
but that's a totally different ballgame from producing enough neatly uniform bulbs to actually put into distribution
And it's not just garlic — being able to maintain consistent quality, grow it in bulk, and turn it into an actual product,
I really do respect professional farmers for that
Pros are on a whole different level from home gardening
With stuff like cherry tomatoes or okra, they harvest something like 30 times more from a single plant than normal
Well, obviously
The comparison here is against other home-garden vegetables
Compared to leafy greens, garlic doesn't need much upkeep — it's actually on the easy side
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The vegetable price surge traces back to poor growing conditions caused by unusual weather, including long autumn rains. The original news report cited in the article frames growing interest in home gardening as a response to this, but the thread was split: some said “seedlings and fertilizer have gotten pricier too, so once you factor in startup costs, you’ll never break even,” while others said “it’s something to enjoy as a hobby, not something you measure in profit and loss.” Garlic in particular drew a deeper explanation — that expensive virus-free seed cloves and poor propagation efficiency make large-scale cultivation structurally difficult, a nuance that goes beyond the simple “it’s a cartel” theory. There were also comments noting that by the time of posting, prices for items like napa cabbage, regular cabbage, and daikon had already started settling down — making clear, in a way the original article alone doesn’t convey, that the “vegetable price surge” isn’t a uniform phenomenon across all produce.
*This article is composed from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Something’s Up With Vegetable Prices: ‘Home Gardening Popularity Surges,’ Seedling Sales Up 1.6x! The Buzzy Vegetable That ‘Harvests in 7 Days’ Also Gets Attention“.
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