You Can Save a Lot of Money by Growing Your Own Seedlings Instead of Buying Plants

People tend to start gardening the same way: They grow their first plant outside, feel the pride of eating their own sun-ripened tomato, and decide to plant two plants the next year. Most of those plants are bought from a nursery, but as you build a garden, buying starts from the store begins to make less sense. If you’re at the point where you’re considering planting, say, eight tomato plants, it might make sense to start growing your own. And you should. You can save a lot of money by growing your own from seeds.

Buying garden starts makes sense at first

People buy garden starts for simple reasons: By the time the weather cooperates and the soil is warm enough to grow in, you don’t want to waste time waiting for seeds to germinate. Planting grown plants instead of seeds can save weeks—sometimes months—and plants at the nursery are usually tough, resilient, and close to fruiting. Buying grown plants also allows you to space them appropriately in your garden, and bigger plants are more likely to survive the elements, including weather and predators. All in all, it’s not a bad deal. But you’re paying for it. For an investment, someone else has done most of the work.

The downside of buying seedlings for your garden

Aside from being limited to a nursery’s inventory, the downside of buying seedlings is the cost. Starts tend to come in three sizes: a six pack for smaller vegetables, a six pack for larger vegetables, and four-by-four inch singles. In my city, prices of single plants have gone from $3.25 to $6 since 2020, and a jumbo six pack has jumped from $5 to $7. I browsed prices in Utah, Arizona, and Massachusetts for comparison and found that prices have jumped 25% of more in the last few years. It quickly adds up. If you’re planting twenty five vegetables in your garden (an average of how many plants gardeners buy each spring from my local nursery), that means your costs would have gone from around $100 to $150. 

Conversely, growing your own seedlings means that you get to choose specifically what plants you want to grow—not tomatoes versus peppers, but what kind of tomatoes or peppers. You can grow what you want, when you want, and you can start them much earlier than the nursery, which is great if you’re someone trying to extend your season by using low tunnels or greenhouses. And growing your own seedlings teaches so much about plants.

The costs of growing your own seeds

The downside of growing your own seeds is that it involves more work and comes with start-up costs. You need a place to grow your seedlings, and since most people don’t have a greenhouse, you might use a simple freestanding wire rack or shelving unit that you can buy at Home Depot (although I found mine by watching Craigslist, as people are always giving away garage storage units). You also likely need grow lights to hang over your plants, and that cost can add up too, as people commonly miscalculate how many lights they need. (For the shelves linked above, for example, most people would need two sets of the grow lights linked together.) You also need trays to plant your seeds in—like these nicer air pruning trays, but you can also ask your local garden group or garden center for old, free ones—and bottom watering trays for each one so you can water your seedlings. To keep your seedlings warm and humid enough to germinate, you’ll also need heat mats and tray domes.  

At this point, you’re in for a few hundred bucks, which admittedly seems like a lot. If you plan to garden into the future, though, it’s a capital investment into equipment you’ll use year after year. You can also scale your operation up or down easily: You really only need one tray of seeds (a tray can hold between fifty to one hundred twenty eight seedlings), a cheap dome, heat mat, and grow light, and to find a good spot in your home. With a little resourcefulness, you can likely bring that cost to under $75. 

Soft costs include the seeds themselves, obviously, which can go from $2 a packet to as much as $7-8 depending on how many you buy. I recommend starting with Burpee or Ferry Morse seeds, which are on the cheaper side, so you can learn with less expensive seeds before buying more expensive kinds. You can also often find free seeds at a local seed library or by asking neighbors or your local gardening group. Plenty of people save their own seeds and share them, and you can, too. You’re unlikely to use all your seeds each year, so you can organize your own seed library to spend less money year to year. You’ll also need seedling mix—often confused with potting soil—which is a specific blend of finer soil without nutrients that can cost you $7-15. Other soft costs like fertilizer and pest control cost the same whether you buy garden starts or grow your own. 

Comparing the costs of garden starts versus seeds

Let’s say, for example, that you’re buying the average twenty five plant starts for $150. If you grew them from seed, you could grow them in one tray for as little as $75 in startup equipment costs and, say, $40 in soil and seeds, bringing your total to around $115. More importantly, though, is that you’d be set for year one of growing, plus have a head start for next year when you won’t need to buy seeds or soil again.

Once you have your equipment are are freed from some of the cost restraints, my bet is that you’ll also grow more. (For instance, annual flowers—a few dollars for a packet of 100 seeds versus $6 for a pack of six starts—are expensive to buy as starts but cheap to grow from seed.) Even if you decide to scale up your operation with more lights and trays, the cost for the same number of starts would far exceed your start-up costs. In my experience, $400 spent on start-up supplies could easily cost a thousand dollars at the nursery. Instead, you can grow your plants from start to finish, save a lot of money, and learn a lot in the process.