What’s our garden’s cash value?

My first year as a gardener, I played the bumbling fool interfering with nature. Last year, season two, it was a nice reason just to be outside – a welcome break from house hunting. New year, new challenge. In 2011, Paolo and I dig for victory.

Food and flipping? It’s no tenuous correlation. Not the latté factor – you keep your milk away from my coffee – but a home-spun derivative. How much will we save by growing it ourselves?

Amongst the Applejack generation: we eat what we like. The tasty stuff is sacrosanct and scaling back has never involved food. Yet it was only recently I wondered whether we could save any real money by growing our own food – something we’d enjoy doing anyway.

Most definitely. In California, gardener Rosalind Creasy harvested $700 worth of food in a 100-square foot plot. If the same were possible in our smaller space (approx. 75 sqft), it meant we’d eat at least $500 worth of food for free. (Her harvest’s value increases to almost $1,000 when grown in less favourable conditions – Iowa).

Digging around to find grocery receipts, I pieced together a 6-week trend in our winter vegetable buying. Looking only at veggies we could grow ourselves (stuff like potatoes, carrots, onions, beets, leeks, kale, lettuce, spinach and garlic), we spend about $10 every week. Obviously my bank account hemorrhages when summer-time tastiness arrives (raspberries = bankruptcy), but I’ll assume we spend at least $520 on veggies per year [$10/week X 52].

Digging for victory. If we can indeed achieve a 2011 harvest worth $500 or more, that’s a massive gain. Having cake and eating it too? Thesis freaking statement. Here I am, bouncing in my chair, scheming “more, more!” Mostly everything worth doing these days regards two-for-me-none-for-them. Bigger down payment, less to the bank).

Right, back to all the planet-pleasing, noble green-thumbed ideals. Gardening. I recently re-read Barbara Kingsolver’s amazing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – oh it’s fantastic. Together with three ready farm-hands (husband, children), she spends a year nurturing just about everything her family eats – from tomatoes to turkeys.

A few paragraphs outline what she and her family saved by eating the best food they possibly could (organic, local, and totally fresh) versus buying its meagre supermarket equivalent. Keep in mind she has 3,524 square feet of farmland:

“Between April and November, the full cash value of the vegetables, chickens, and turkeys we’d raised and harvested was $4,410. To get this figure I assigned a price to each vegetable…per pound on the basis of organic equivalents (mostly California imports) in the nearest retail outlet where they would have been available at the time we’d harvested our own”.

She adds, “We had also saved by eating mostly at home, doing our own cooking, but that isn’t figured into the tally” (Kingsolver, 305-306).

The family turned much of their harvest into extra goodies (sun-dried tomatoes, pesto, pasta sauce and salsa, etc.) adding an estimated 50% value to their bounty. Despite growing a little of this and that in previous years, I’ve never cared to count it. Devour, yes. While Barbara and Rosalind might find our methods wanting, we’ll try our greedy best. (Just the veggies, though, I’m never plucking a turkey).

Any true scientist will object that I’m committing economic outrage: time is money and I’m assigning it a value of free. Whatever. We’d be out there playing in the dirt anyway, gardening is cool. If your free time nets you something even more free – isn’t that the winningest thing of all? Tooootally.

The math. Just like Barbara, I’ll assign Official Comparison Prices as and when things are in season, updating the spreadsheet as I go (download it here if you’d like a copy). For now, real-world rhubarb costs remain a mystery. As for our expenses, many of our supplies and seeds were purchased in years past. Avoiding complication, I’m only counting 2011 expenses – everything else magically appeared in the universe. Dig in! How will you spend any savings you make? I’m thinking espresso machine….

[Update!] It’s finished! By August it seemed we were growing money. So – what was the dollar value of our 2011 garden harvest? Find out!