Costs for 2018

This is going to be a sparse planting year. I'm having trouble getting inspired after last year's encounter with Lyme-carrying ticks. Plus, the garden area has gotten increasingly shady as trees have grown around it.

So, I'm keeping both planting and costs down.

So far:

Onion sets:  $3.99
2 tomato varieties (grape and San Marzano), red sails lettuce, swiss chard bright lights, banana peppers, basil, at $3.19 each = $19.14

Total: about $23

The lettuces, swiss chard and some of the basil was planted in the "annex" next door.


Updated to say that the investment was largely a net loss. Except for the garlic crop, which was pretty much the same as past years, except a higher percentage of the Russian variety compared to the German variety, everything else was essentially a loss. Got maybe a handful of grape tomatoes, a dozen or fewer banana peppers, no swiss chard (planted in a planter with unexpectedly terrible soil), no onions (due to drought at key growing times). Got some basil, which was frozen with olive oil for perking up winter meals.

I'm such a cheapskate

Shortly after I picked a couple pounds of asparagus this morning, I went to the local grocery store, and saw they had a special on asparagus. At TWO BUCKS A POUND.

It's not very nice of me, but I couldn't help gloating a bit. I'd just picked about four bucks' worth of asparagus. For free!

Okay, so it's not really free. We did spend twenty or thirty bucks on new plants to fill in some gaps in the asparagus bed last year, but the quality can't be beat, and we'll be harvesting from them indefinitely. After this year, at least; the new plants are a little scrawny still, so I'm letting them put all their energy back into the roots. We've got enough to pick from the pre-existing plants, which went into the ground something like twenty years ago!