Home (Garden) Economics - How Gardening can Save You Money
By Jude Emery, for Revive Your Life
Photo by Miss Mass
With the staggering rise in global food prices, Americans are taking a noticeable hit each week at the checkout counter. Many are cutting back on purchases, clipping coupons, and stocking up on sale items to reduce their monthly grocery bill. Others have joined the increasing ranks of individuals taking responsibility for growing some of their own food. If you have ever wondered whether gardening was a viable solution to trimming your food bill, the following analysis may be of interest to you.
Traditional Gardening vs. Intensive Methods
For most people, the term “vegetable garden” evokes images of the sprawling backyard plots tended by our parents or grandparents. Armed with this image and confronted by the reality of the limited space available to the average suburban homeowner, the notion of growing enough produce to have any significant impact on the family budget seems like a ridiculous proposition. In order to design a vegetable garden that is both practical and economically worthwhile, we must replace many of our traditional ways with the practices of intensive gardening. The goal of intensive gardening is to maximize the amount of produce harvested in a given space, making it well suited for small suburban plots.
The traditional garden typically consists of long, single rows of vegetables with wide, unplanted spaces in between each row. When you consider that these barren areas often take up more of the garden than the actual plants themselves, it becomes clear that it is not a very efficient way to raise vegetables. In intensive gardening, plants are spaced closer together and arranged in wide bands or blocks. This spacing provides each plant with just enough room to grow and thrive, and helps eliminate areas where weeds can sprout. Ordinarily, vining plants like cucumbers, tomatoes, and melons grow along the ground, rambling unchecked throughout the garden. Using intensive practices, these space hogs are supported by cages or trellises, and trained to grow vertically to conserve precious space. These techniques allow the intensive garden to yield more vegetables per square foot than the conventional garden.
At different times throughout the growing season, areas designated for crops in the traditional vegetable patch stand empty. During the cool days of early spring, the sections reserved for heat-loving vegetables like tomatoes and peppers sit vacant awaiting transplants. Once spring crops like spinach and peas are harvested, their spaces remain abandoned until they are replanted with the same crops when the temperature drops in late summer. By contrast, the intensive garden continuously evolves throughout the growing season to make use of available space and maximize yield. The spring planting of spinach provides a continuous supply until the plants are pulled up to make room for tomatoes as the weather warms. As the peas are harvested, they are replaced by pepper plants. Cold-tolerant vegetables then reappear in the garden as the dog days of summer wind down, replacing crops like cucumbers, beans, and zucchini. In the intensive garden, empty space is wasted space which cuts into the economic bottom line.
The Hypothetical Garden
To calculate the financial benefits associated with planting a garden, we start with a hypothetical garden. Our garden will be limited to an 8×10 area to make it feasible for the majority of suburban backyards. A single two foot wide path will bisect the garden, effectively creating two 4×8 beds providing a total of 64 square feet of plantable space. By utilizing the path and moving around the perimeter of the garden area, the gardener should be able to access all parts of the beds to fertilize, harvest and plant crops as needed.
We will assume that the hypothetical garden is situated in a moderate climate that remains frost free from late May through late September. The garden will use an intensive planting scheme and new crops will be added as space becomes available and weather permits. For planning purposes, we will divide the growing season into three periods to determine what to plant. The Spring (mid March-May) and Fall (September - mid October) gardens will be dominated by fast-growing, frost-tolerant crops like spinach, greens, broccoli and peas. The Summer (June-August) garden will feature vegetables which require long periods of heat and sun such as peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplant. Click on the links below for a graphical representation of each garden.
Explanation of the Table Values
The number of plants of each crop was chosen to provide a steady supply of vegetables for fresh eating as well as a small surplus for storage. This number will likely differ from household to household based on personal preferences and is only meant to serve as a starting point for analysis. The square footage is based on intensive spacing guidelines for each particular crop. For example, onions are spaced 4 inches apart, so you can fit 9 onion plants per square foot. By contrast, peppers require at least 12 inches between plants, so you can only grow one pepper per square foot. The total yield is a reasonable estimation of how much you can expect to harvest and is given in pounds. Yield will vary from garden to garden, and season to season, based on factors such as soil quality, weather, and losses due to disease or pests. Cost per pound is how much a typical supermarket might charge per pound of organically grown produce. This cost will fluctuate based variables such as location, time of year, and the variety of a particular crop that is purchased. Potential income is calculated by multiplying the total yield by the cost per pound.
Costs to Start and Maintain a Home Garden
If this is your first foray into gardening, you may have to purchase some basic tools like a hoe, cultivator, shovel and garden trowel. Based on your needs, these supplies may require an initial investment of up to $100 but should last many years if properly cared for. You may also need to improve the quality of your soil by adding compost, manure, or other amendments. Depending on the starting condition of your soil, an area the size of our hypothetical garden should cost between $20-40 the first year. As your garden soil improves over time, you will need to add less of these materials each year. Your crops will also need a good organic fertilizer to meet their nutritional needs as they grow. About $20 worth should last you the entire gardening season.
Obviously you will need seeds or plants to grow your garden from. Most vegetables are grown by directly sowing seed into the ground, while others like tomatoes and peppers are usually started by transplanting 6-8 week old seedlings. You can buy a packet of seeds for about $1-2, and can expect to pay $2-4 dollars per seedling. It would cost about $90 to purchase the seeds and transplants required for the hypothetical garden. You can reduce this cost by growing your own transplants from seed instead of purchasing seedlings from a store. It is relatively easy to do, and would save you about $50-60 in up-front costs. Since most packets contain hundreds of seeds which remain viable for 2-3 years if properly stored, this initial investment should provide you with several years worth of seeds.
Final Analysis
If we use the highest estimates for our up-front costs, we will spend around $250 on tools, soil amendments, fertilizer, seeds and transplants. Since our hypothetical garden provides us with about $725 worth of vegetables, we still bring in a profit of about $475 in our first year. Since most of our initial costs are non-recurring, our return rises to approximately $625 in subsequent years. Considering that the typical family of four spends about $8500 a year on groceries, the proceeds from our garden represents a modest, but significant, 7% savings.
By utilizing space efficiently, almost anyone can reap the financial benefits of gardening. Many crops can be grown in containers, allowing patios and rooftops to support a small harvest. Vegetables can be incorporated into the existing landscape and serve a functional purpose in addition to providing aesthetic appeal. Beans, peas, and even tomatoes can be trained to climb a decorative trellis or obelisk. A colorful planting of lettuces and greens arranged in a simple pattern can transform an otherwise ordinary corner of the yard. With a little planning and creativity, the possibilities are endless.
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I never seen gardening broken down like this before. I admit to having a black thumb = everything dies, but Ill get it right one day. In the meantime, I have to stick to buying local, organic produce.
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