The Year-Long GRS Project: How Much Does a Garden Really Save?
Published on - January 6th, 2008 (Modified on - August 20th, 2010) (by J.D. Roth) Kris and I are huge fans of gardening. We grow our own flowers, herbs, fruit, berries, and vegetables. We’re not able to supply all of our needs, but we do what we can. For the past two years, I’ve argued that this is an excellent way to save money if you have the time and the space. But is it really?
An actual weekend harvest from August 2006.
During the next year, Kris and I plan to track all of our work and expenses in the yard. I’m not going to tabulate how long it takes to trim the laurel or the boxwood, but I will track the following:
- The cost of seeds and fertilizer.
- Our approximate water usage.
- The time we spend planting, weeding, and harvesting.
- The amount of food we harvest.
- The cost-equivalent from the local grocery store.
For example, when Kris places her seed order in the next week or two, I’ll note how much she spends for a packet of tomato seeds. I’ll keep track of how much she uses her grow lights (using my handy Kill-a-Watt electricity usage monitor), how much water and fertilizer we consume, how many tomatoes we harvest, and how much that would have cost us at the store.
I’m going to compile a whole lot of data.
On the last Saturday of each month, I hope to provide an update of our progress. At the end of the year, we’ll see our savings, and how much it cost us to save it. This isn’t going to be a precise experiment — there are too many variables involved. But our results should be able to tell us just how worthwhile our gardening hobby is.
Past entries on gardening include:
- Gardening 101: Plan Today for Summer Success (a guest post from my wife)
- Frugality in Practice: The Garden in Spring
- An Introduction to Square-Foot Gardening
Our first step? Browsing the seed catalogs to decide what we want to grow this year!
Update! You can see our progress in the following posts:
- January garden update
- February garden update
- March garden update
- April garden update
- May garden update
- June garden update
- July garden update
- August garden update
- September garden update
- October garden update
- November garden update
- December garden update
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This article is about Choices, Food, Frugality, House and Home, The Best of Get Rich Slowly
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I think a garden is a great hobby. If you enjoy it you should do it but I think you’re right – there are lots of variable that might not make it cost effective.
Farms are efficient and can produce goods much less expensively than we can at home.
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I think where gardening really saves is in hidden costs that eventually trickle down.
1. You reduce the cost of transporting your food to your house, whether done commercially (farm to grocery store) or on a personal level (grocery store to home).
2. You reduce (eliminate) the amount of chemicals used to create your food. Depending on what you believe, this could have health benefits in the future that would otherwise be paid in high insurance premiums. One could argue that if enough people avoided items with pesticides, preservatives, etc. the general health of Americans would rise and insurance premiums would lower nationally.
3. You reduce the amount of fuel put into food production, including the machinery to move, grow, harvest, and the machinery to make the chemicals put into that food, as well as the machinery that makes all that farming equipment. This also burns less fuel, and means better things for the environment.
I think even if you break even on gardening, you will have improved your quality of life because you’ll have better tasting food that hasn’t used as much fossil fuel or chemicals, and you’ve done something you enjoy that’s out of doors and provides for your family.
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This is one of those areas where I’d rather cut back somewhere else so I don’t have to garden. I think a lot of money can be saved, and a lot of great food had for cheap, but it’s simply not something I enjoy. I always have good intentions and enjoy the planning and planting, but when it comes to caring for the garden and harvesting, I fail miserably. To the point I’ve vowed not to try again.
I am, however, thinking of signing up for shares from a CSA grower this year. And I’m looking forward to reading about your progress.
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That photo is making my mouth water. One of the only reasons we garden is for the amazing taste of fresh tomatoes. You simply can’t get good tomatoes in the supermarket, and the ones that occasionally are good during the late summer cost a fortune.
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It will be interesting to see the results but even if it costs more if you like gardening who cares? The connection to food you grow is worth any extra cost there might be. There is nothing better than eating a veggie that you just picked! Man I wish it was summer right now!
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For what it’s worth, to negate any potential health costs that might be avoided by growing your own food (avoiding dangerous chemicals, etc.), perhaps you should compare the cost of gardening to the cost of buying organic food and versus non-organic food (just in case you have too much time on your hands!).
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You should also track how much you actually consume, because harvested food doesn’t save you money if it rots on the shelf. I find this is an issue when 100 tomatoes all become ripe at the same time. Also harvested food that is given away can only be counted as a cost saver if it replaces a gift you would have bought. Plus you don’t know how much of what you gave away rots on the shelf (and I have often failed to consume all of the giant bag of vegetables my neighbor brings by each year). Of course you should track total harvest, but you should also track total consumed and total given away and report the three different numbers.
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Compost, recycle nutrients.
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Great Post! I will enjoy seeing how it comes out. I imagine there will be ebbs and flows. Winter not being cost effective but summer exceeding. Although it sounds like you grow indoors as well so it will be neat to see a month to month.
I dont think that gardening is anything that someone can be made to do. You end up failing. Personally I love it. Cant wait to do more and although I am a novice I am learning every season.
I have the same reasons to garden as the above posts, but also would like to include one other. I garden because I want to teach my children(a two year and 4month old twins) where their food comes. How do you put a value on that?
Anyway, great post I will continue to read it.
Thank You…Good Luck !
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I would just say that not all of the value of gardening can be quantified in saving money, much of the value of doing things on your own comes from a much less quantifiable “rich” quality of life.
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Take a look at what can be accomplished on 1/10 of an acre if you try. The Path To Freedom journal is about a family homestead in Pasadena: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/journal/
This family of 5 just posted their year’s veggie tally–over 5700 lbs!
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I know what I get out of my garden. A few years ago I ‘did the math’ for a couple years and the garden was worth roughly $14.50 per square foot to me. I make extensive use of [TALL] trellises and trellising varieties (climbing beans, indeterminate tomatoes, vine-forming [as opposed to bush-forming] versions of cucurbits. Each is planted directly beneath the trellis with companion plants surrounding them. (PS, for a great slicer tomato, try “Mortgage Lifter” … but only if you have an outlet for the excess!)
There are, as others are noting, just a ton of things to consider. I’ve done enough math to convince myself that my time in the garden is actually worth more per hour than my time at my former job.
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I’ve always found herbs to be the best bang for buck and time invested. Most store bought cut herbs also have a very short shelf-life, especially when compared to just leaving them in the ground and snipping when needed.
With other foods, some of the not-so-great savings growing your own is mitigated by the value that comes from fresh taste, lack of pesticides, gardener satisfaction and the convenience of proximity. It’s much more difficult to attribute a dollar value to that mix of variables.
For example, my garden grown peas never beat the prices at the markets, but when I grow them myself, there are a few weeks of backyard grazing that I can’t get at any store.
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Just wanted to comment on one variable
¨The cost-equivalent from the local grocery store.¨
Like the comment about organic food, i think it would be hard to get the same quality from the store as you can from your garden, the tomatoes that are picked green and then rail roaded across the country to your house in new york are not nearly as good for you or as good tasting as what you can grow.
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I’ve had a garden for many years. I’m so “spoiled” that I refuse to eat tomatoes when they are not in season. The taste of store bought tomatoes and other vegetables isn’t even close to what I can grow. Every Fall I enhance the soil with manure so don’t forget to include that in your costs if you do that. The initial set up costs makes the first yr costs higher, but the following years the cost declines. When I include reusable canning supplies and time the costs rise, but I know definitely that the strawberries or peppers (store bought food that has a high pesticide content) I feed my kids is definitely pesticide free and not just labeled that way.
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I’m another person happy to live vicariously through your gardening and enjoy the indoors for the rest of the year. It’ll be interesting to see how you get on.
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One thing to remember.
Don’t compare apples to oranges, so to speak.
Don’t compare your average Wal-mart tomato (or what ever else you grow) to your home-grown tomatoes. Their tomatoes are grown with who knows what pesticides and fertilizers. You need to compare your tomatoes to certified organic tomatoes to gain an true equivalent comparison.
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I just remember the price I paid to get heirloom tomatoes at a farmer’s market for a recipe, then not having enough, so I had to make an additional trip to Whole Foods and boy were they expensive, too!
One of my goals this year is to cook from my currently non-existant garden, so keep up the gardening posts! I would love to see a monthly tally.
In a class I took last summer, it was a delight to get fresh vegetables from a classmate who is determined to primarily eat food raised on his land. He raises and eats a lot of rabbit, and has a huge garden. He was such an impressive role model!
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Ooooh, fun. Are you also going to calculate the improved taste from home grown and the calories burned from doing your own gardening?
I look forward to the upcoming posts.
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What a great idea! I look forward to hearing the progress. One thing to consider is the added quality you will get with your garden. Even if there isn’t much cost saving compared to a supermarket there might be compared to equivalent organic, fresh food. I’m actually in the process of starting a “Gardening with Kids” series on my parenting blog in the coming weeks. That’s another area where it’s not just about cost savings. It’s about teaching kids a lesson about what’s actually involved on getting food on their plate and giving them a life skill. Everyone should know how to feed them self from start to finish.. even if they choose not to use the skill.
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“Time? Time?” Kris said when she saw this post. “We never discussed time. We only talked about money. You have no idea how difficult it’s going to be to track time.”
Hm. She may be right. Still, I’m going to give it a shot. I mean, there’s 4-5 months of the year in which we do and spend nothing on the garden, right? Right?
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another way to check out is square foot gardening. The website is pretty much to just get you to buy the book but the book itself was an interesting and informative read. Try the library for it.
While I haven’t tried it in practice (or any gardening since I was a kid), I’ve heard good things about it from quite a few people and intend to try it on a small scale this year.
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You know, JD, there are only two things that money can’t buy, and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.
I have heard it argued that it doesn’t make financial sense to garden, because when your produce is ripe and ready, the same crop is available at the lowest price of the season at the store, because it’s harvest time for professional growers, too. There’s some merit in that argument.
But for people who’re really into gardening as a hobby, it’s not just about how many pounds of produce (or, forget-we-not, bouquets of flowers) that are harvested.
I get so much pleasure over the course of the year in watching stuff grow, and in watching my kids learn about plants and bugs and food fresh out of the garden. Carrots and radishes are *absolute magic* to toddlers and preschoolers–poof! food! right outta the ground! Oh, and what great pride for a mama when my oldest declared she wanted her *own* garden last summer. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree after all…
In the past decade I’ve carved a few gardens out of derelict and neglected dirt, and that gives me a huge sense of accomplishment and positive change in the world. For those inclined solely to the bottom line, the major improvements in landscaping I put in around my old house–a little at a time and at little cumulative cost over several years–are a big part of its attractiveness as a rental property. Worth it!
Finally, it does my pagan heart good to have a direct engagement with the turning of the seasons, above and beyond picking my wardrobe and paying my heating bill. *Now’s* the time to plant, *now’s* the time to harvest, *now’s* the time to put the garden to bed, *now’s* the time to rest and plan for the next season. It’s a big part of my spiritual grounding and practice… I can’t put a dollar value on that.
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Any ideas on keeping dogs out of the garden? My wife and I would love to start a little vegetable garden, but unfortunately our dog refuses to stay out of the area and would trample/eat anything that managed to survive.
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NOW don’t forget to include the cost of record keeping in the calculation (i.e., hours spent tracking times an hourly opportunity wage).
Sometimes it is not about how much you save; there are intangibles.
imho,
“gardenless”
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Great idea.
I’d say forget the time. On materials alone the “savings” are not going to be overly impressive. If you add in time as well then it won’t be worth it.
Look at it as an enjoyable hobby that pays you a little bit of money (like my blog).
Mike
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JD — you are an inspiration! I am an apartment dweller, which is mostly alright. Except I really want a patch of earth to call my own and grow some flowers and veggies (no, going to a community garden wouldn’t work)
My parents garden every year — this year they had bumper crops of squash and carrots — they have been giving away carrots for months and practically had to buy a new freezer for all the carrots they put aside. Not to mention eating their carrots daily. I keep telling them they are starting to turn orange.
I think you’re not only engaging in a great garden but keeping alive a valuable skill. Fresh produce just keeps getting more expensive.
P.S. — I’ve tinkered off and on with container/patio/indoor gardening. I’m getting organized to give it another go with herbs and tomatoes for the spring. And I keep improving my indoor plant green-thumbness. It really helps me connect with nature to be around plants.
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@Frugal Dad
When my parents and their neighbors did to keep the dogs out of the garden area was they enclosed it with wire fencing (the normal 4″ heighth of backyard fencing) and a gate. Both of their garden plots already were bounded by the yard’s perimeter fencing on two sides so it just meant putting up the other two remaining sides.
It was worth it to know the garden produce wasn’t accidentally “watered” with something less desireable than water.
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Remember to convert your kitchen waste into Compost … and believe it or not, you can put the “leavings” you pet may leave on your lawn too … the composting process leaves that fine – what do you think manure is?
This saves money (waste disposal is typically on a “per-bin” charge, at least where I live), and reduces cost (less requirement to buy in manure/compost).
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Remember to convert your kitchen waste into Compost … and believe it or not, you can put the “leavings” you pet may leave on your lawn too … the composting process leaves that fine – what do you think manure is?
This saves money (waste disposal is typically on a “per-bin” charge, at least where I live), and reduces cost (less requirement to buy in manure/compost).
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1. Great idea. There is more than just cost benefits as others have said.
2. If you plan on NOT keeping track of the time you put into it, multiplied by what your time is worth per hour (gross salary/12/160), and do not include that as a cost, then you may as well not make the comparison at all between what you would have spent at the grocery store as time is likely to be your biggest expense. Not saying a garden is not a worthwhile investment of your time, just that you can’t tell us that you’re comparing costs unless you include the cost of your time, which is a very real expense.
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Fantastic idea! I can’t wait to see how it goes. A veggie garden is something I’ve thought about starting off and on for a while now.
Good luck!
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Great idea, I look forward to reading future posts about this topic. This past summer we grew vegetables in a community garden plot within walking distance of our apartment. It was a great experience, it encouraged us to be physically active (in both walking to and from the garden daily as well as the actual garden work) and enjoy the outdoors. Although I didn’t keep detailed records of expenses, we did decrease our monthly grocery bills by 50-75% in July-September.
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JD,
Realizing this is WAY premature, I just wanted to pose this question…
Is there a point at which you would determine your efforts are not worth it to you?
Obviously, if you break even or come out ahead you will probably be THRILLED. But, if you find out this is costing considerably more than you save, will you instead put your money into local farmers’ pockets? You know, the whole “frugal thing” you write about so much. =)
Good luck to you and yours. I will be watching avidly.
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Oh my gosh, you can’t even GET food like what you show in the photo here (our vegetables are awful, and even the organic stuff that’s shipped in is only so-so) so if I were doing this, gardening would win hands down. (Since I’d have to factor in the cost of plane tickets to places where things actually grow…)
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I didn’t see this posted in the replies… but you should consider installing / using a rain barrel to collect water for the garden. A quick google search yielded 50-60 gallon buckets for around $100 – I’m sure you can get them cheaper locally or modify something to fit your needs. While that $100 may cost more than this year’s water bill allocation for the garden, the bucket should last more than 10 years and will, in the long run pay off – and it’s a very “green” thing to do.
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I love gardening and think this is a fabulous idea. I hope the fertilizers you mention are organic. I recommend reading “Organic Gardening” magazine for lots of great tips and inspiration.
Composting is a must but I would disagree with Cormac about pet manure – unless your pets are rabbits, chickens, goats, horses or cows. Dog and cat waste is NOT safe for composting, nor that of tigers or hyenas. Rule of thumb is if the animal eats a plant-based diet, you’re safe composting their waste. If they are meat-eaters, don’t do it. If you have a fresh water aquarium, the waste water is Great for gardens, or even to pour it into your compost. All the beneficial bacteria will Love it!
Best of luck to you!
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This is the whole idea behind aquaponics!
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Tracking all of that data sounds like a lot of work, but I’m glad you’re doing it and I can just read the results!
Your veggies look fabulous, as always. Ripe tomatoes are the best. I miss Portland – everything seems to grow there.
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You and your readers might be interested in learning about winter sowing — the short explanation is that it’s the practice of sowing seeds outside in the winter, even in places like Minnesota, using free containers (like 64 oz soda bottles) and Mother Nature. It’s really easy to do, produces *much* hardier plants than any seeds I’ve sown indoors. And the folks at GardenWeb are wonderful sources of wisdom if you have questions.
http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/wtrsow/
A great way to save money too!
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This sounds very interesting. I have to agree with the others, though, who said that the best reason for gardening is homegrown tomatoes…even if growing your own turns out to be more expensive.
My dad grew TONS of tomatoes last season, so many that he had to start canning or they’d go bad. Now, in January, we’re eating pizzas with tomato sauce from his garden tomatoes, and last week I made a delicious Italian soup called papa al pomodoro–and the “pomodori” were all homegrown. Mmm…I’m making myself hungry.
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Rain barrels are for sale for $5 at the corner of Boones Ferry and Crosby Road in the Woodburn area. Or really, any large farm will have a lot of extra food-grade plastic barrels.
Also, there are a ton of seed-exchanges in Portland.
And, of course, canning. To insure nothing goes to waste.
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Thanks for keeping tabs on this! My wife and I are planning a garden this year, hopefully save a couple of bucks on veggies. We don’t have much space, so we’ll be using some alternate techniques, like growing as much as we can vertically, and hanging plants like tomatoes.
Hopefully our compost bin (only $20 – the rest local government subsidized) and rain barrel will cut back on fertilizer and watering costs. It only takes .16 inches of water to fill my 58-gallon barrel.
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Have you read “The $64 Tomato”? Its basically following the same idea. See: http://www.64dollartomato.com/
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@Anjjol … you are repeating myth about not composting pet waste. Even applying it directly (as a side-dressing) is a low-risk activity if done properly.
Simply put, there is nearly ZERO risk of getting a disease from diseased manure IF that manure was composted and aged properly, or even close to properly. (Not all that difficult.) It takes gross mis-handling of compost for diseases and parasites to survive. If the manure wasn’t diseased to begin with, the risk simply never existed to begin with.
Suggested reference is: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html
Simply put, the more manure of any sort in a pile, the healthier it is (up to a certain point, being roughly 15% to 30% by volume, depending on other variables such as the form of available carbon material and the amount of water and oxygen available).
@Adam Boettiger: That’s the wrong approach to accounting for a garden.
Time spent in a garden is not time removed from higher value income producing work, but occupies time not ordinarily scheduled for income-producing activities at all. Thus it cannot be expensed, having at the same time elements of healthy recreation, relationship building (with spouse, friends, family and neighbors), income production (food matter and writing matter) and health enhancement.
If he was taking time off from work to trim his bushes, that would be a different matter.
Additionally, home gardens are the most productive acres in America. Always have been, likely always will be. Organic management is frosting on that cake. Not only does it put tons of material back into use, it keeps those same tons OUT of municipal dumps and open waters. Have you ever considered how absurd it is to pee a few ounces into a toilet and rinse it away with gallons of potable water? That waste is then partially treated and dumped back into the public water supply.
The link I gave above is a good one. Joe Jenkins has got his head screwed on straight, it’s the rest of us who don’t.
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I agree that the time involved isn’t a cost but a kind of benefit (bound to be helpful in the “get fit slowly” direction).
Also want to second the person who suggested growing flowers as well as vegetables — easy to compare costs, and great to have as quick gifts and for your own enjoyment…
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JD … here in Michigan, gardening is roughly a 10 month operation. Harvest begins again in March with lettuces. Didn’t stop this year until mid-December (kale). I just went outside an hour ago and noticed that some of the kale is showing fresh vigor. If we can get global warming up another 5 degrees or so, I’ll have a 12-month garden (never ending tomatoes!!!!!!)
@ Frugal Dad — keep dogs out of the garden with a ring of mothballs around it. The fumes offend their sense of smell and they tend (short of electrified barbed wire nothing is certain) to give it a wide berth.
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@ db … I’ve seen gardens hanging from buckets at about the 30th floor level in Mew York. Tomatoes will grow upside down from suspended bags. Keep looking … you CAN grow something (and something is better than nothing!).
Lot of responses to this post … I’m wondering how many of the commenters can actually look out their window at last years garden?
Any regrets? I have one … I had to be out of state during a terribly hot & dry spell and my garden suffered because I got lazy and didn’t install my weep irrigation last year. I’ll have to be out of town at roughly the same time this year so I am determined to get the irrigation in place as soon as the plants & seeds are in this year.
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[...] the next year, Get Rich Slowly is tracking how much money a garden will save. The monthly reports should be worthwhile. Monday, January 7, 2008, 11:49pm. Money. Permalink. [...]
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You could probably do lettuces, tomatoes and herbs and potatoes really cheaply. And garlic too. They’re easy to grow, and they cost a lot in stores. But they don’t take up too much space. And if you have a surplus, you can make friends with your neighbors, or donate to the local food pantry.
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Since you mentioned tracking the energy spent with grow lights, i wondered what kind you are using? I found a lot of stuff online about using red/blue led grow lights that use a lot less power, don’t heat up and don’t used wasted spectrum of light for the plants, but i have yet to play with them.
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Great idea! I can’t wait to see the outcome.
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