You don’t need a spreadsheet to work out whether a vegetable is worth growing this season. GardenBuddy.au’s price tracker already has the numbers. Here is how one household would actually use it to decide, using tomato as the real, live example.
A minute and a half on reading the price tracker as a grow-or-buy decision, not just a shopping list.
The situation
Say you’re deciding whether to put a tomato seedling into a spare bed this spring, or just keep buying tomatoes from the shop. You don’t want to guess. You want the actual price and the actual trend, today, not a rule of thumb from last year.
Step 1: check today’s real price
Open gardenbuddy.au/prices/ and find tomato in the list. As of today, the tracked average is $7.44 per kilo, and the tracker’s own trend badge reads “rising at 7.7% per month.” That’s the tracker telling you the price moved, not us guessing.
Step 2: read the trend, not just the number
Click through to gardenbuddy.au/prices/tomato/ and you get six months of monthly averages behind that one figure. Tomato was most expensive in autumn, averaging $9.17 a kilo, and it’s currently at its cheapest in spring, averaging $7.55 a kilo across the season. The tracker’s own seasonal note says outright: “Best time to buy is Spring.” That’s a genuine finding from the data on file, not a guess.
That matters for the grow-or-buy call. A single day’s price can be noise. A six month trend across three seasons tells you whether tomato is genuinely getting more expensive, or just having an expensive week.
Step 3: compare what the shops actually charge
The per-retailer breakdown on the same page showed Aldi at $5.98 a kilo and Coles at $8.90 a kilo on the day we checked, a $2.92 gap for the exact same crop. Before you decide to grow it, check whether you’re even paying the higher price by habit. Sometimes the honest answer is “shop somewhere else,” not “grow your own.”
Step 4: apply the decision rule
Here’s the rule the tracker’s own guide spells out, and it’s the one to actually use:
- Price rising fast (15% or more over several weeks): usually a genuine supply squeeze, floods, drought, or a pest problem hitting commercial growers. This is the signal that growing your own starts to pay off.
- Price falling (15% or more): usually a glut, growers harvested more than the market needed. Buy it cheap and save your garden bed for a crop that’s actually scarce.
- Steady (within 1%): no strong signal either way. Fall back on what you already prefer to grow.
Right now tomato is rising month over month but sitting in its cheapest season on record. That’s a mixed signal, not a clean “grow it” or “buy it,” and the honest answer is to keep watching the trend for another few weeks before committing a bed to it.
What we won’t do: invent a dollar saving
A real seed-to-harvest saving needs a real seedling or seed-packet cost and a real yield, multiplied out. We checked GardenBuddy.au’s own crop economics data behind the scenes, and the seed packet price feeding that calculation for tomato is not currently verified, so the site itself does not show a dollar ROI figure for tomato either. What we can verify: agricultural guidance from QLD DAF, NSW DPI and Gardenate puts a single healthy tomato plant’s typical yield at around 4.5kg over a season, at roughly 3 plants per square metre of bed space. Multiply that yield by whatever tomato is costing you at the shop that week, and you have your own, honest number, better than any number we could make up for you.
Why it matters
Most home gardeners decide what to grow by habit or by what looked nice at the nursery. Reading the actual price trend first means the bed space you’ve got goes to the crop that’s genuinely worth growing this season, not just the one you always grow.
FAQ
Does the price tracker update in real time?
No. Prices are collected each morning and the analysis behind the tracker regenerates once a day at noon. Today’s figures were generated at 12:00pm.
Why don’t Woolworths or IGA show a tomato price on some days?
Retailers rotate stock and sometimes run out of a matching product for that day. IGA in particular is marked “limited” on the price tracker because it carries fewer of the 79 tracked crops than the other three chains.
Can I do this for a vegetable other than tomato?
Yes. The same four steps work for any of the 79 tracked crops, just swap the URL, for example gardenbuddy.au/prices/zucchini/.
Related features
- The live supermarket vegetable price tracker: what it shows and how to use it
- The per-vegetable price pages: what they show and how to use them
Try it now
Check today’s vegetable prices at gardenbuddy.au/prices/ and see for yourself whether what’s in your own garden plan is actually worth growing this season.
