2025 costs

 I've  been mostly container-gardening the last few years (greens and strawberries) plus garlic in the ground, but I'd like to expand a bit. Still a container garden of a sort -- a 4' x 8' x 2' raised metal bed in the side yard (more sun).

Definitely higher costs than returns this year, but I'm doing it mostly for entertainment and getting a wee bit of exercise and the quality of the harvest, rather than cost-saving. The plan is a few peppers, tomatoes (grape, maybe a couple of a sauce variety) a row of swiss chard, and maybe some onions (a friend offered a few plants). Oh, and a zuke and yellow squash. One each. That will more than fill the bed. Maybe a few basil plants? Oh, and thyme. Gotta get thyme plants. 

I'm curious about the costs, so I'll edit this as they accrue. 

• Metal 4x8x2 bed from Amazon: $100
• Sand & garden soil (Home Depot): $125
• Bottom layer of fill (decaying logs, sticks, cardboard, etc): free
• Top layer, composted manure (Ventura Grain): $64
• Mulch (cardboard & clippings): free
• Seeds & starting supplies (ocean state) $26
• Tomato & pepper plants (Garden Patch): $15

                                    TOTAL: $330

Seeds include: 2 lettuces, basil, thyme, catnip, swiss chard, 2 squashes, nasturtium, marigold

Separate from the raised garden, I'm planning to move the one surviving rhubarb plant (possibly divided into three or more) from a too-shady spot to a sunnier spot. Might get a couple more plants to fill in the sunny bed. (Done, from GrowJoy, 2 Crimson Red rhubarb plants, $29). I checked on the rhubarb plant today, and it's thriving. Maybe I'll throw some garlic volunteers in that bed too. I bought a spade to do the transplanting, which cost $32, but hardly seems fair to include in this year's costs, since it's something I've needed  for a while.

I also have garlic plants everywhere! A half-whiskey barrel planted with seed cloves I'd saved. Volunteers out in the old garden bed AND in the strawberry planter containers on the deck and in assorted spots near the deck and the old garden. There's a catnip plant growing in a container in the old garden (need to grow more catnip; adding to list of seeds). 

Late, but not really

Memorial Day weekend is the traditional planting time for warm-weather crops like tomatoes and peppers, so the nursery was almost out of plants when I went today. Except it's not really late; it's just that Memorial Day was early. It's probably better to say that these plants can safely go into the ground the last weekend of May, which is the next two days. So I'm right on schedule.

Or I would be if I'd done any bed prep before now. The weeds have pretty much taken over.

I'm not planning a big garden this year. Just half a dozen each of grape tomatoes and banana peppers, some lettuce and swiss chard and herbs (in containers), plus some yellow squash if the critters don't get to them, and maybe some butternuts (ditto on being subject to critters). I've also got, for the first year since planting 3 years ago, lush rhubarb plants. (Forgot to get a pic; will try to remember and edit tomorrow.) I'm also experimenting with some potatoes that sprouted in the kitchen. I remember reading that they're treated to prevent growing, so I'm about to find out if it's true. They're planted in a bucket, so I can keep topping it off as (if) they grow, and, in theory, have a whole bucket full of potatoes in the fall.

So, yesterday I got some dill seeds, since it's been a while since they self-seeded, and planted them in a bucket with some pre-existing thyme. Today I bought six-packs of grape tomatoes, banana peppers, and yellow squash, for a total of a little less than ten bucks.

I'm expecting rain over the next 24 hours (ridiculously humid weather since yesterday), so no watering yet. I'm hoping to plant the banana peppers (the only seedlings left) tomorrow in between showers.

It should be a cheap growing year, since I already had two bags of compost. I bought some potting soil for the outdoor containers, so that's another five bucks or so. I've already got copper fungicide for the tomatoes. Oh, but I bought a new lopper and a new rake, so that's another fifty bucks or so, but they need to be amortized for the next ten years or so. I may also decide to get some mulch, but I'm not sure I'll need it. There's a pile of grass clippings I can grab, and that may be enough for the small beds I've planted this year.

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.

Costs 2017

Local nursery $9
(6 each: banana peppers, cherry tomatoes, roma tomatoes)

Ventura Grain (composted manure) $19

Different local nursery $12
(16 New Ace peppers)

Seeds from Johnny's:

Costs 2016

It's probably going to be a light gardening year, in both expenses and harvest.

Planted onions today (April 18), and an eight-pack of assorted lettuces (over in the annex). Used up the left-over manure from last year to line the onion planting trenches.

• $6:   80 onions (half red, half "Candy" yellow)
• $3:   8 lettuce plants
• $13: Sage plant, 6 Sugary grape tomatoes, 6 banana peppers and 12 New Ace peppers
• $28: 10 butternut plants (yay! I'd almost given up on finding them) and 4 huge bags of composted manure

TOTAL: $50

ETA: It's fortunate I didn't spend much, because I doubt I got $50 worth of produce out of the garden, thanks to the drought. Might have broken even, but only if I assign some of the manure's cost to next year's garlic crop. 

Costs 2015

Johnny's seeds (onion plants, 27.25, Conservor shallot seeds 7.10, Sugar Ann pea seeds, shipping): $45.35

More seeds (dill, nasturtium): $2.83

Local nursery plants: $12.45
6 sugary grape tomatoes
6 JetStar tomatoes
12 Big Bertha peppers (no Ace available. Sigh.)
6 banana peppers

Different nursery:
4 purple beauty pepper plants: $2.99

Supplies
Manure: $18.46
Straw: $20 (estimate)


TOTAL: $99.25

Costs 2014

Breakdown of this year's expenses for the garden:

Johnny's seeds (seeds, onion plants): $56.40

Territorial Seeds (rhubarb plants): $28.50

2 bales of straw: $20.00

Plants from local nursery:  $24.00
Note: cherry tomatoes were the variety "Sugary"

Total: $128.90

Expenses yet to be incurred:

Composted manure:


(updated May 25, 2014)

Break even point

I think we've hit the break-even point for the financial costs and rewards of the garden.

We've spent a total of $85, and I expect to spend another $15 this fall for manure before I plant the garlic. So, let's say $100 in cash expenses.

Harvest to date (with extremely conservative FMV prices):

Summer squash (sells for $1.99 on sale): 17 pounds = $34

Garlic (3 heads for a dollar for main crop only) = $20

Onions (guesstimating at $1 a pound) = $10

Cucumbers (6 at $1 each) = $6

Banana peppers (32, probably 5 pounds, $1/lb) = $5

Ace peppers (40, but small, so let's say 4 for a buck) = $10

That's $95. Throw in the handfuls of cherry tomatoes I've eaten without counting, and the three Jetstar tomatoes, a few leaves of swiss chard, assorted lettuces and tatsoi, and the various herbs (chives, dill and catnip in particular), and factoring in the EXTREMELY conservative price estimates, I'd say we're at right around a hundred bucks in produce harvested. I'm not counting either the expenses (vinegar, pickling salt, spices) or the added value for the pickling I've done (pickled banana peppers, bread & butter pickles made out of zucchini, and pickled garlic to extend its storage life).

We've got (almost) all of August and September still to go, which will bring us the bulk of the peppers and tomatoes and swiss chard and a fall crop of tatsoi, and all of the winter squash, plus more summer squash. Except for the onions and garlic, which have all been harvested, and the cukes, which have developed the usual mid-summer wilt, the harvest so far is likely to be duplicated (and exceeded) in the remainder of the season. The winter squash will more than take the place of the onions and garlic (in terms of value of the harvest), so I'd expect to end up with well over $100 of produce in excess of what the out-of-pocket expenses were. Maybe more like $200, if the state of the plants right now is any indicator.

Oregano

Finally found an oregano plant. Add $3.50 to the total costs.

Never enough plants

I keep thinking I'm done buying stuff for this year's garden, and then I decide to get "one more thing," and come  home with three things. So -- sage plant, Aristotle basil plants (for my neighbor/co-gardener) and yellow squash plants (also for my neighbor/co-gardener). Total: $7.

I usually grow squash from seed, since it's so easy (and cheap) to do, but I got the wrong seeds (I think; I don't eat  yellow squash, so I don't know the varieties, and the person I grow it for doesn't have any preferences, except she doesn't like zucchini, and the squash seeds I got were yellow zucchini, which I think is different from regular yellow squash), and my usual sources for cheap seeds didn't have any yellow squash, so I went back to the local nursery and got a four-pack of plants. Variety: Park's creamy.

Now, I'm really done. Oh, except I need a Greek oregano plant. Mine died after a couple difficult years, and the local nursery didn't have any. May have to get it in a big box store. Or wait until next year.

In any event, if we have even a halfway decent growing season, we're going to be drowning in squash. Especially yellow-colored, whether zucchini-flavored or other.

Summer squash

Got seeds today: zucchini, yellow squash and a bush variety of butternut. Total cost (including donating the change to charity): $4.

Nightshades

Purchased 24 Ace peppers, 6 banana peppers, 6 cherry tomatoes (variety: Sweet Baby Girl; decided that while I love grape tomatoes, I don't like the only variety available locally -- Juliet) and 6 Jetstar tomatoes.

All but the Jetstars were planted today.

Total cost: $16. Even.

Corn gluten meal

I read about using corn gluten meal to prevent weeds from sprouting between the onion plants, and it sounded like a perfect thing for me. It's organic, and it helps reduce the weeds that grow right up close to the onion plants, where it's almost impossible to use a hoe on them, without also pulling up the onions. I get so frustrated trying to weed them, because I can't bend or kneel well enough to get up close and personal with the weeds, so I'm stuck with whatever I can do with the hoe alone. I'm pretty good with a hoe, but there are limits to its use.

I couldn't find it locally last year, but I managed to find it this year. The manufacturer put a fancy name on the package, that had nothing to do with corn or gluten or  meal, but I found it in the small print, "ingredients: 100% corn gluten meal." Bingo!

The onion plants arrived Thursday (April 18), and I'm hoping to get them planted before the rains are due on Wednesday. Their arrival took me by surprise. The spring is so late in arriving that I thought I had a couple more weeks before onion planting time.

Add another $15 (approximately) to this year's expenses.

Rhubarb!

I was driving past a nursery on the way home from an event in Vermont, and it's a place I'd always wanted to check out, but I'd always been on a deadline. This past weekend, though, I actually had some time to use up, so I didn't arrive at my destination too early.

I'm so glad I stopped in. I found Chipman's Canada Red rhubarb, which I can't get locally, and thought I'd have to wait until next year to order. Now we'll get it going this year, and perhaps be able to harvest some next year, instead of losing a whole growing season.

Plus, they had a patio-sized container with a Purple Passion pepper plant in it, complete with the passionately purple (sort of eggplant colored) fruits, nearing maturity. Sure, I had 30 sweet pepper plants already growing in the garden, but I needed this variety. So now we've got 34 sweet pepper plents growing. (Except one of the Aces was beheaded by some critter -- snapped the plant in half, presumably to eat the top half, and then apparently spit it out, because pepper plants are yukky. I'm hoping he's learned his lesson and won't check the others, in case they taste better. I'm not sure if that plant will recover, but I've seen peppers come back from worse damage.)

So, we've got $15 to add to this year's expenses.

2012 plants

I picked up this year's plants from the local nursery today. That's another $17 in expenses (plus my co-gardener got mulch last week, probably another $10).

This year's plants:

24 Ace peppers
6 banana peppers
6 Juliet tomatoes
6 Jetstar tomatoes
1 Aristotle basil (tiny-leaved variety, kinda' looks like a bonsai tree)

I've got some (very small) lettuce-leaf basil seedlings that will need at least a couple more weeks before they can even think about going outside.

A friend has some Jubilee tomatoes for me to pick up after the long weekend, and we may end up with other tomato plants (heirloom varieties, probably) from my co-gardener's boss.

It's a new year

I've been having trouble getting motivated to work in the garden. A little of the problem is some physical restrictions -- it's just not the same when you can't roll around in the dirt directly -- but most of it is the bizarrely extreme weather we've been having. The last few years have been extremely rainy and chilly. This year started out extremely hot (eighty degrees in March, IIRC) and dry (ominous warnings of a drought), and then reverted to wet and dreary and chilly.

Today brought a little sunshine, and it really was now-or-never for planting the last few onions and harvesting some asparagus. (I know I'm having an off year when I can't even get motivated to go harvest some asparagus!)

Here's what we've got so far:

Expenses: About $57 (most of it a gift certificate from my wonderful SIL) for a few packets of seeds, plus close to 200 onion plants and (eventually) some sweet potato slips. There was a minor glitch with the order, and we received celeriac instead of the basil we ordered (one digit off in the catalog), but Johnny's was great about fixing the problem quickly and without any fuss. I'm looking forward to trying Bridger, a type of onion that's started from seed, in the fall, even in the northeast! Maybe that's part of my lack of interest in the spring planting -- I'm not trying anything new.

From last fall's planting, we have growing:
56 German Extra-Hardy garlic
20-30 early garlic variety

From this spring's planting, we have somewhere around 200 red onion plants. It's supposed to be 180, and I haven't counted, but in past years, the plant count was always generous. And for once, I picked just the right day to plant -- the last day of our mini-drought, less than 24 hours before the rains began (with about 4" falling in the next 24 hours).

The rhubarb has gone to seed already. I never got around to making bluebarb jam last year. I am giong to do it this year, even if I have to buy both the blueberries and the rhubarb.

Brief bit of sunshine

We've had rain or heavy clouds almost non-stop since my last post. The broccoli has become leggy from lack of sun, even though it's in what should be the sunniest part of the garden. I cut back the main head on each of the plants, hoping to inspire some side shoots.

I'm a little worried that we're in for a repeat of the 2009 season -- rainy and wet, with tomato blight. I FINALLY picked up plants (another $18 spent) today, a couple weeks later than I would in a normal year. Decided to get kale (5 plants, one of which is a bit puny), since cool-weather crops may be the only ones that prosper this year!

Also got: 6 Corno di Toro sweet peppers (since the generic banana peppers were sold out), 24 Ace sweet peppers, 6 yellow pear tomatoes and 6 Jetstar tomatoes. And a thyme plant, because last year's plant is really thriving in a corner of a small whiskey barrel, and I like thyme a lot, so the plan is to fill that whiskey barrel completely with thyme.

I'd like perhaps 6 more tomatoes in a variety that's better for cooking, but I thought I'd experiment this year, perhaps with an oxheart, except I haven't found them. I've also got some Matt's Wild Cherry seedlings to add to the tomato collection.

Highest priority (except that I ran out of energy in the sudden heat) now is to prepare the bed for the sweet potatoes (dig up the weeds, lay down black plastic, heat up the soil) and get them planted by the end of the weekend.

April 2011 status check

Last year, we spent $125, and the year before that about $170. We still have some seeds and supplies left over from prior years, reducing the current year's expenses.

So far, we've spent about $66 on:

200 red onions
50 yellow onions
20 (?) sweet potato plants
basil seeds

We're likely to spend another $30 to $50 on plants and fencing (to go around the sugar snap peas, which I should have planted a week ago, but will do soon).

There are about 50 German Hardy garlic plants sprouted from good-sized cloves, another 20 or so from smaller bulbs, plus about 20 of the early garlic variety from good-sized clives and a few smaller plants. Plus at least three patches of small, one-two-clove garlic plants growing from the bulblets tossed into the garden in prior years.

We missed a few onions during last year's harvest, so we've been eating the second-year sprouts as scallions.

The rhubarb, puny as the stalks are, is looking a little fuller than in prior years.

Last week, we noticed that the lettuce on my neighbor's deck had self-seeded and sprouted. We transplanted some of them to give them some breathing room, and also tossed some tatsoi seeds into her other planters and a planter on my deck. My tatsoi has sprouted, so I'm assuming hers has too.

I'm planning to fill an old metal firepit with soil and then lettuce seeds for my deck this year. Might get the soil today, as a celebration of the end of tax-preparing season.

This morning, I planted some basil seeds (indoors, of course), along with a few wild-cherry tomatoes and a few hot pepper seeds. The plan is to have just one or two of the wild-cherry tomatoes (because they can take over the whole garden otherwise) and just one or two hot pepper plants, because only one of us even likes hot peppers, and they go to waste otherwise.

Harvest summary

I'm writing this some months after the actual harvest, but this is what I remember from last year:

Not much asparagus was harvested, but we planted some new plants, so we should see more in a couple years.

Tomatoes did well, especially the wild cherry, which seems to need truly hot weather to ripen properly, instead of simply setting more and more green tomatoes. The first frost was extremely late, but there were still enough green paste tomatoes to make into green tomato mincemeat -- my great-grandmother's recipe. I'd forgotten how much I like it.

Peppers also did well, in large part because of the late frost, which extended the growing season. I lost count of how many we harvested, or even how many pints of pickled peppers we consumed. The banana peppers were all consumed fresh or pickled. I dried some of the green peppers on trays in my car (using it as a solar collector), and they lasted through the winter. I also tried sauteeing some of them before freezing, for using in rice dishes. They were kind of mushy when re-cooked, but with fresh peppers at three bucks a pound, I can live with a little bit of mushy-ness, as long as I can get some pepper flavor into the rice.

Swiss chard did poorly; it was planted in a too-shady spot. Mini carrots did well in a planter, but we tended to forget they were there.

The onions were a little smaller than we'd become accustomed to. I don't know if it was because they were a different variety than the previous year or if it was due to a slight drought right when they needed water the most. Or, perhaps, to our less-than-stellar weeding. They lasted into spring of 2011 before sprouting.

Summer squash (yellow and zucchini) did fine. I finally managed to plant only one zucchini plant, so there was a reasonable amount. The butternut squash were a total loss. Many of the volunteers turned out to be some sort of weird hybrid of butternut plus spaghetti plus summer squash. And then the critters started eating them, and we let them.

Green beans were late but prolific. All the herbs did well.

The early variety of garlic didn't impress. The harvest was puny, and a lot of our wild-growing garlic was edible (albeit small) at about the same time the early garlic ripened, so it didn't really fill a particular need. We did save the largest heads (which were smaller than the average heads for the German Hardy variety) to replant for the coming year, just in case their less-than-stellar performance was a fluke of soil, weather, or non-weeding. They did get planted later than I'd have liked, in late October, when I would have preferred to get them in by the end of September. The pickled garlic did, indeed, last through the winter, with the bulbs remaining firm and un-sprouted after the fresh garlic had turned soft and sour. On the other hand, I pickled far more than I could possibly use before the next fresh crop comes along, so I'll make fewer this coming year.

Not bad, actually, for the investment of $125.

Investment

Here's this year's investment (rounded to whole dollars):

• $25 for new variety of garlic
• $78 for onions, asparagus and assorted seeds
• $22 for plants below

Total so far: $125

The plants we purchased were:

• 24: Ace peppers
• 6: banana peppers
• 6: hot peppers (not sure of variety)
• 6: San Marzano tomatoes
• 6: grape tomatoes (not sure of variety)
• 1: peppermint
• 1: lemon balm
• 1: thyme

The weather is still iffy, so we're waiting to plant the peppers and tomatoes until this weekend. Mint and lemon balm are in a whiskey barrel. Can't figure out where to put the thyme. I have some issues with bending, and I'd like the thyme to be raised off the ground for easy harvesting, but most of the raised areas are too shady.

So far, we've planted seeds for: cucumbers, swiss chard, spaghetti squash, yellow summer squash, butternut squash and green beans.

We're still trying to figure out where to plant the basil (seedlings growing on a windowsill now, but too tiny to plant outside), sunflowers and carrots. And I'm not sure the space allotted to the tomatoes is big enough.