Planting a garden is an expensive way to save money and feed your family fresh vegetables for less. You can stretch your dollar even more if you can or freeze your extra food to eat later in the year. However, there usually comes a time in every backyard gardener’s growing season where all of the plants are ripe at once and they practically beg neighbors and co-workers to take extra tomatoes, zucchini, squash, fruit – you name it – off of their hands because they’ve preserved more than their fill.

Helping Neighbors With Their Surplus

That’s when I gladly accept any and all offers of free garden grown vegetables because it is a cheap way to get fresh vegetables without gardening. If my co-workers put fresh vegetables in the work kitchen for the taking, I take some of it. What I cannot use immediately I freeze for later. I have enough corn in my freezer right now to feed an army!

I do not have room for a garden and frankly, I don’t want one. It’s all I can do to remember to water the herbs growing on my patio each day to keep them from dying.

Taking Advantage or ???

I’ve been wondering lately, am I freeloading or being frugal? I absolutely hate the thought of those vegetables going bad in someone’s refrigerator and being thrown out when someone, like me, would gobble them up and relish in the delight of homegrown vegetables.

However, another part of me knows that our local food pantries need donations and there are many more people, unlike me, that cannot afford fresh fruits and vegetables. Sadly, though, those same food pantries often turn down extra gardener’s produce because of potential liability issues.

Is taking extra gardener’s vegetables a cheap way to feed your family or is being a cheapskate? What do you think?