Can Growing Garlic Really Save Money Over Buying It at the Grocery Store?

Homegrown garlic can become more economical after the first season because gardeners can save healthy cloves from their harvest to plant again the following fall. University of Minnesota Extension recommends keeping the largest cloves for the next year’s planting. Alexlukin/Shutterstock

Garlic seems like the perfect frugal garden crop: bury a clove, wait several months, and pull up an entirely new bulb. But when grocery-store garlic is relatively inexpensive, does growing garlic actually save enough money to justify giving it garden space? The answer depends heavily on what you pay for planting stock, how many bulbs you harvest, and whether you save some of that harvest to plant again. Garlic has an advantage over many garden crops because you don’t necessarily need to buy new planting material every season. Run the numbers over several years rather than one harvest, and the economics of growing garlic become much more interesting.

One Garlic Clove Can Become an Entire Bulb