Garden On, Vashon

Bob looked at the grocery receipt this last week and announced “our bill is running twice what it was this summer.”

So what’s making the difference? Vegetables, of course: we have to buy them now that the December freeze turned my winter garden to mush. Still, “twice what it was” doesn’t tell you much about what you saved by growing your own.

But Nancy Lewis-Williams, Master Gardener and teacher of last year’s popular vegetable-growing class, HAS kept a running tally of what her harvest has been worth to her pocketbook. From June through December first, she weighed all the produce she’d harvested and kept a running tally, in pounds, of 33 different crops, from apples to zucchini. 

“Well, maybe 75% of it—I didn’t count the stuff we ate right off the vine,” she hedged. “And it also doesn’t include all the greens we grew in early spring, before I started this count.”

Her computer went on the fritz the same week I asked for her end-of-harvest totals, so I stepped in and looked up current prices at Thriftway. So here’s another hedge: we didn’t use height-of-season prices (except for the raspberries, which I had recorded for myself in Quicken when I bought a half-flat this summer).

Given all these qualifiers, what did we find? That Nancy had harvested nearly $500′ worth 0f organic vegetables per MONTH from her 2000 s.f. garden. 

The harvest total was worth $1810, using winter Thriftway prices for non-organic produce. If compared to organic prices, the harvest would be worth $2952.

“And I’ve still got a month’s worth out there in leeks, kale, carrots, chard, turnips, rutabagas and spinach,” she said.

The Big Pay-offs

The big pay-off, both in weight and in dollars grown, was from POTATOES. With a pound of seed potatoes for “Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings” from Ronnigers in Colorado (www.ronnigers.com), her return was hundredfold: 110 pounds worth $440 smackaroos. She also planted around 10 lbs of seed potatoes for regular spuds and got 250 lbs in return, worth $250 or $500 at organic prices. 

Leda Langley told me last spring that you get the biggest bang in calories and productivity/acre with potatoes, and here Nancy’s proved her point.

Other seeds with a large return, literally, were: TOMATOES at 109 lbs, worth at least $218 and probably well over $300 organic; 95 pounds of WINTER SQUASH (delicate and butternut) worth $1 per pound; 36 pounds of CUCUMBERS worth $72 or twice that if organic; LEAFY FRY GREENS like kale, chard, and spinach that come bagged at premium prices anywhere from $4-6 per pound. “I didn’t count all the corn: I must have pared kernels off of hundreds of ears.” 

If you’re a fruit-fancier willing to pay for fresh off-season berries, you might want to invest in a few bushes and a freezer. Nancy’s 28 pints of RASPBERRIES were worth at least $65 compared to in-season local berries, or $448 compared to last week’s Chilean winter imports at a Buck an Ounce. 

Other results: HERBS: 13 handfuls worth $65; 15 lbs of LEEKS worth $45; 32 pounds of BEETS worth anywhere from $1.50/lb to $5/lb for organic; 29 pounds of CARROTS worth from $22-30; 15 lbs of CABBAGE worth 50¢ a pound but four times that organically. 

The Investment

My husband, always the skeptic, pointed out that there’s costs involved: water, fertilizer, seed trays, seed. 

“And you HAVE to have a deer-fence,” Nancy added when I asked about her costs. Deer-fencing runs about a dollar a running foot; you could fence a garden her size (2000 sf, equal to a 40′x50′) for  $100 plus the poles and gate materials.

Looking at her records, she estimated she spent $100 on seeds, $30/month on water, and $100 on organic fertilizer and amendments. Given that one doesn’t water in three of the months of her trial, that’s approximately $300 a year to install a 2000 s.f. vegie patch producing $3000 worth of food. That’s a tenfold return for your money.

Now Nancy’s put in a greenhouse last year; with such a large expense, you’re looking at costs close to what the author of “The $64 Tomato” ran up. But you don’t have to spend a lot on gear, as Steve Solomon points out in his latest book, “Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times”: you can direct seed instead of growing or buying transplants, you can start warm-season fruiting plants in a sunny window, you can blend your own fertilizer, and you can restrict your tools to a hoe, a bow rake, a good shovel, a sharp knife, and a hose. 

You may not be able to grow as large a bounty as Nancy did, but most folks DO realize some savings. In a poll done last year by the National Gardening Association, they found that “a well-maintained food garden yields a $500 average return per garden.”  

So save yourself a few or a LOT of bucks: Grow Your Own.

Stories I’m working on:

• A Seed Swap at the Food Summit Meeting: bring some, take some.

• Gates for deer-fencing

If you have ideas for stories or inputs on the above ideas, comment here or write me at karendale@centurytel.net.