Question. Have you noticed the price of food going up? If you think you have, it has not all been in your head.

I actually did a little bit of quick research before this episode just to see how much have prices

risen. I've seen a little bit on the news and I've noticed my own grocery bill inching up slightly,

but how much of that is real and how much

is in my head? Well, according to the USDA, the average price of food from 2019 to 2020 rose by

3.5%. And then from 2020 to 2021, the price of food rose another 3.3%. That is pretty significant.

While the pandemic and the lockdowns in 2020 encouraged a lot of us to garden, mainly to pass the time,

or maybe in the back of our mind we were a little concerned that this

might actually come to pass, the food insecurity issues, that kind of thing.

Perhaps 2022 will bring another wave of gardeners that are coming to grow their own food to

actually save money because of the price of food rising so significantly. Whatever the reason we

choose to garden, I'm all for it. But today I wanted to talk a little bit about if you do land in

that camp where you're going to try to grow more food because you see the price of your produce going

up and you want to do something to offset that,

then I want to talk about how you can actually choose some of the crops that are going to give

you the most bang for your buck, so to speak, in comparison to what you can buy them at

at the grocery store. This is something I actually have some firsthand experience with. If you know my story,

you know that when I started my garden, I started it for this very purpose. I quit my job to become

a stay-at-home mom and I was doing what I could to lower our family's grocery bill.

Now back in 2012, which is when I kind of started doing this, I was doing a lot of

couponing because that was kind of the rage back then. I'm not sure how big a deal it is now,

but that's kind of what I was doing, but I decided to grow a garden to supplement my couponing

...