In February, I estimated we could grow $500 of food in our 75-sqft community garden plot. With the parsnips harvested (& roasted to sweet, sweet perfection), there’s only soggy kale left out there – and kale wins no one’s heart.
2011 garden harvest total? Hold back your tears, guys. It was a very beautiful, very tasty $530.65+ worth of food.
Cue ticker tape! Send me to Disneyland! Get the Queen on the phone!
Let’s dissect, while swilling well-earned winery. My garden harvest spreadsheet looked like this:
Once we brought everything home, we’d wash & weigh it. I’d then look up the current price at Spud.ca. It was working fine until…
Missing mysteries. Best-laid plans… I got lazy as the summer went on, and started writing the totals on random scraps of paper in the kitchen. As such, I’ve totally lost the data for all but 1 day in September. It’s probably a recycled Starbucks cup by now. Anyway, I invented a low-ball estimate of our September harvest – taking the crops still producing then, and using 50% of their August total. Safe bet, yes?
Herbs not included. Although we grew 12 kinds of herbs, most often, I couldn’t be bothered to weigh a 2-gram stem of parsley. The princely sum of $14 comes entirely from an uprooted basil plant and a buzz-cut thyme bush. That’s the “+” in $530.65+.
Lessons learned?
- Blueberries need bees – and we have none on our balcony. Not a single berry. I’m not bitter….
- Something ate all our strawberries. Karma will see to this eventually.
- Blackberries were ‘liberated’ from city hedgerows – must try harder.
- Chard & kale took aaaages to get established. Worth the wait? Not exactly.
- Onions need way more water & compost than we realized. (Hopefully our composting worms will get the message & eat faster)
- Turnips are worthwhile for their greens, less fussed about the actual root.
- More garlic. Need way more garlic.
- Radishes are stupid & I don’t like beetroots. It seemed noble at the time, but I’d rather have more parsnips.
- Ronde de nice weren’t that good. We ate one and the rest rotted in the fridge. Next year – butternut squash.
- Salad burnet & marjoram are the most under-rated of herbs. Getcha some.
- Pineapple sage popsicles sound better in idea-form than popsicle-form.
And our top 3 winners: tomatoes, rhubarb & potatoes. $64 from 8 plants – a pathetic year for tomatoes, so I’m told (it never got hot in Vancouver).
These three are amongst my 5 favourite foods so, having recognized that they’ll grow prolifically, maybe we’ll streamline our 2012 crop production from 21 things to 10 or so.
Supply costs. For reference, our supplies were around $100 for the year. Our weekly grocery average is anywhere between $30-$75 (greed depending), so our total garden harvest (less expenses) equates to 6 to 14 weeks’ free food.
Worth repeating? Weighing everything was kind of a pain but I’m glad I saw the project through. I don’t know if I’ll bother again next year – as I said in August – gardening & growing vegetables is 99% hobby, 1% money. But perhaps I should do it a second year, using harvest totals as a metric for better planning, design & compost application?
For now, from a v-e-r-y rainy Vancouver, goooo rhubarb!
Hey, you want a s'more? Some more of what?
