Posted by Julie Parrish, a Shopping Strategist and co-owner of Hotcouponworld.com

It’s my favorite shopping season—outdoor planting! Every store I go into has seeds, bulbs and bare-root trees prominently displayed. Spring is almost in the air with plenty of time left to plan a garden.

I’ll be honest—the start up costs for gardening aren’t inexpensive. In fact, it can be pricey to get a good garden going, and then you really have to be ready to commit to eating out of your garden to make it cost effective. So, if you’re not a gardener, but you have an interest in growing your own food, the one item you should try to grow this year would be lettuce. Here’s why:

• Lettuce, as a daily staple vegetable, isn’t cheap. A 12-ounce bag of the non-iceberg variety is $3.69 for full retail, and barely feeds a family of four at dinner. Heads of romaine, butter, or red/green leaf varieties are upward of $2 per head. At $3.69 per bag, eating your own lettuce every other day during the summer will save you over $160 on your grocery bill.

• Every variety of lettuce (with the exception of iceberg) is rich in vitamins and nutrients and part of a healthy diet.

• Lettuce seeds are cheap. A single $1.79 packet will grow you all the lettuce you can eat all summer long.

• Lettuce can be grown in containers, so even if you don’t have garden space, a bag of soil and a dozen containers will keep you rolling in fresh lettuce this summer.

• You can grow your lettuce without chemicals, so if you’re trying to go organic, growing your own lettuce is a good way to incorporate your own organic harvest into your diet.

• Lettuce grows in just a matter of weeks, so you can start early, and then rotate more into your garden throughout the summer and well into early fall.

Best of all, you can use that money you save growing your own lettuce on fun little extras with the kids this summer.

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