garden@home

This began because Husband sent me the Get Rich Slowly website for a cost analysis on home gardening.  It encouraged me to see how much we save (or lose) in a year in our edible garden.  I am going to try and post monthly with the cost and benefit.  This will in no way be exact or comprehensive, rather a rough estimate (mostly for my own records).

First harvest
We harvested our first spinach and leafy greens in May.  So far I’ve harvested

• 1.02 pounds (.46 kg) spinach
• 1.19 pounds (.54 kg) lettuce
• 3 bunches arugula, I forgot to measure this so I’m guesstimating it was around 4 oz
• .77 oz (.0218kg) basil
• 2 leeks
• .4 oz beet greens
• 1 small turnip, which went straight from the ground to the mouth

The season is still getting started and I was a little late on planting.  I could have harvested much more arugula, leeks and onions, but didn’t have the need.

The spinach we would buy is $3.98 for 24 ounces (1-1/2 lbs) so our small harvest was worth $2.71.  Lettuce was $1.98 for 21 ounces, so our harvest was worth $1.80.  The arugula is hard to price, because no stores we shop at had it for sale.  And in fact I can’t find a price for it anyway.  The closet thing I’ve found is in California the is an 11 oz container for $0.99 which would make me profit around $0.36.  My suspicion is that it would be much higher in cost around here.  Basil is a money maker.  If I were to buy it at the store it costs a whopping $1.98 for .75 oz, meaning this month (and in the continuing months it will only increase) we made $2.03.  The leeks (and I kid you not, we have a never ending supply of them) are also not sold at WinCo (our typical grocery store).  At Fred Meyer they were selling at $3 per lb.  The two leeks I used weighed (guesstimation again) around a half pound, meaning we profited around $1.50.  The beet greens and turnips are not going to be counted for two reasons, 1) I didn’t check for prices at all and don’t want to, AND 2) they were gobbled straight up and were really just the “testers”.  I took all my cost based on what we would buy if we didn’t have the garden.  My garden is organic, because I’m lazy and I don’t mind if the bugs and slugs share.  I don’t look at the store organic price because we wouldn’t buy that.  (I welcome advice and debate over this methodology, by the way — I don’t actually know the best way to compare prices.)

In total, we harvested $8.40 of food from our garden this month.  If you subtract the leeks, because they weren’t a cost we incurred this year, we profited $6.90.

We have spent (these are rounded off at dollars):

$0 this month

TOTAL SPENT $0 (Woo!)

Time spent: 4 hours (very much an estimate)

We have made:

TOTAL THIS MONTH: $8.40

Note: We have an established plum tree, 2 cherry trees, 2 apple trees, a strawberry bed, a bunch of walking onions, a TON of leeks, and a whole lotta seeds already.  I will include the “profit” from these, but I will try to note this.  I will also do some seed swapping and this should be the last year of buying trellising, (hopefully) compost, and more than ten dollars worth of seeds.