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Saving money with a garden
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photo courtesy of KitchenGardeners.org
A couple weeks ago, I had the good fortune to meet the organizer of Kitchen Gardeners International, Roger Doiron. KGI is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people learn about growing their own food, cooking and preserving that food, and living sustainably.
Every day I come across another half dozen articles/tweets/news bites about the emerging trend in home vegetable gardens. Numbers are being bandied about: 2008 saw a 40% uptick in the sales of vegetable seeds and plants. Seed houses are selling out early, organic gardening/small space gardening classes which had 20 attending now have 150 showing up.
So, let's file this in the "FOR WHAT ITS WORTH" column. How much money can you realistically plan to spend planting a home garden, and how much dough can you save by eating from that garden? Here are some numbers from Roger's garden in Maine, Zone 5.
Roger and his wife, Jacqueline, have three sons, and kept track of their garden's expenses and productivity last season. They weighed every tomato and counted every carrot and bunch of greens. A time consuming but illuminating project. Here's what they found:
"On the cost side, we had $130 for seeds and supplies, $12 for a soil test, and exceptional costs of $100 for some locally-made organic compost (normally, we meet most of our soil fertility needs through our own composting). I don't have a scientific calculation for water costs, but we don't need to water much and, when we do, water is relatively cheap in Maine. Also, I mulch my beds pretty heavily to keep moisture in and weeds down. Let's say $40 in water. So, if we consider that our out-of-pocket costs were $282 and the total value generated was $2431, that means we had a return on investment of 862%. The cost of our labor is not included because we enjoy gardening and the physical work involved. If I am to include my labor costs, I feel I should also include the gym membership fees, country club dues, or doctors’ bills I didn’t have.
If you really want to play around with the data, you can calculate how much a home garden like ours produces on a per acre basis. If you use the $2400 figure and consider that our garden is roughly 1/25th of an acre, it means that home gardens like ours can gross $60,000/acre. You can also calculate it on a square foot basis which in our case works out to be roughly $1.50/ft2. That would mean that a smaller garden of ,say 400 square feet, would produce $600 of produce. Keep in mind that these are averages and that certain crops are more profitable and space efficient than others. A small garden planted primarily with salad greens and trellised tomatoes, for example, is going to produce more economic value per square foot more than one planted with potatoes and squash. We plant a bit of everything because that’s the way we like to garden and eat.
Clearly, this data is just for one family (of five), one yard (.3 acre), one garden (roughly 1600 square feet), and one climate (Maine, zone 5b/6), but it gives you some sense of what’s possible. If you consider that there are about 90 million households in the US that have some sort of yard, factor in the thousands of new community and school gardens we could be planting, this really could add up. Our savings allowed us to do different things including investing in some weatherization work for our house last fall that is making us a greener household in another way. Some might ask what this would mean for farmers to have more people growing their own food. The local farmers I know welcome it because they correctly believe that the more people discover what fresh, real food tastes like, the more they'll want to taste. In our case, part of our savings helped us to buy better quality, sustainably-raised meat from a local CSA farmer."
Thanks Roger and family. Good to know.
I have been tracking the progress of another great local garden, in Garden City, ID. At the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, Garden O'Feedin, they grew ten tons of food on a mere one third of an acre. Doing the math on that, it came out to about $1.37 per square foot for productivity. Similar to what the Dorions came up with. In other words, for every one square foot of garden area you could produce $1.50 worth of food.
Of course, different folks will have different expenses. I like to think of my water bill as $50 per month- but its really high in the summer. I am working very hard on cranking that DOWN this year. I've spent too much money on seeds already, and I don't have the space to grow some of the big sprawly plants I love, like heirloom pumpkins and squash. Some pals and I are working out a plan for each of us to grow what we DO have room for, for instance, one family has some land outside their fenced lawn, where they have a nice big irrigated area for pumpkins. I grow raspberries, so we can do a trade. Folks in colder areas might have expenses for walls of water or row covers. You get the point.
Kitchen Gardeners' website has lots of good information. Check them out here.
And come back tomorrow, as we continue to explore home gardens together.
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