Every month, my wife and I track how much time and money we spend growing food. This is the report for July 2009. (Here are the results for 2008.)
Welcome to Oregon, where for the past week it’s been hot. How hot? Here’s the temperature graph from the National Weather Service for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday:
The heat hasn’t prevented us from working in the garden. We’ve been watering the thirsty plants, and we’ve begun harvesting their fruit. It’s hard to believe that just three months ago, this was a bare patch of earth. Now it’s grown so lush that it’s difficult to photograph:
But how have our harvests been? Let’s find out.
Currently currants
Remember how last year Kris and I couldn’t find a price for our currants or gooseberries? They’re just not available here in Oregon, so we used the same figures for them as we did for our other berries. But earlier this month we stopped at an Asian supermarket, and they had both gooseberries ($2.99 for 6oz.) and red currants ($3.49 for 6oz.).
So what?
Well, in July we harvested 8.362kg of red currants from our two bushes, which is 18.42 pounds. That’s a lot of currants. Look again at that price in the last paragraph. $3.49 for 6oz. translates to about $9.30 per pound. In other words, we harvested $171.43 worth of red currants this year.
Holy cats!
I have new advice for how to make a garden profitable: Plant red currants — and lots of them!
But what can you do with eighteen pounds of red currants? Kris made two batches of red currant jelly with the most beautiful ruby red color you’ve ever seen. She’s going to enter some in the county fair in mid-August. We also had two friends come glean the extras. Plus there were currants left over to freeze!
More harvest
While the currants gave us a bumper crop, other plants were less productive. The gooseberries didn’t produce much. And for the second year, they fell victim to the gooseberry sawfly. Kris and I agree: Those things are out of here! I’m going to dig them up and we’ll replace them with more blueberries.
Speaking of blueberries, they weren’t very productive this year either. I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, but we’ve harvested less than half the blueberries we did last year. Our raspberries were pathetic for the second year running; they just can’t compete with the vigorous marionberry canes.
Still, harvest season is in full swing. Here’s the complete tally from our garden in July:
- 18.42 pounds (8.362kg) red currants @ $3.49 for six ounces = $171.43
- 0.95 pounds (0.430kg) gooseberries @ $2.99 for six ounces = $7.55
- 4.91 pounds (2.229kg) snow peas @ $2.99/pound = $14.58
- 1.09 pounds (0.494kg) green beans @ $1.29/pound = $1.41
- 5.91 pounds (2.681kg) caneberries (blackberries, etc.) @ 2.49/pint (~300g) = $22.25
- 79 cucumbers @ $1.29/pound (about 5 cukes) = $20.38
- 11 zucchini @ $0.50/each = $5.50
- 6 red onions (negligible value)
Our harvest totaled $243.10, but most of that was from the red currants. Without those to salvage our stats, we would have finished behind last July. That’s okay, though. The tomatoes are just about to come on, and we’re going to have a lot more of them than we did last year. The fruit trees will also give us bigger crops than last year since they’re a year more mature.
Summary
As we often do, we also picked fruit from friends this month. We picked cherries from the neighbor across the street, and on July 3rd we drove out to raid the cherries belonging to our friends Ron and Kara, coming home with thirty pounds of mixed Queen Annes, Bings and sour pie cherries. Yum! We also made use of some early apples for a juicing experiment. This “free” produce isn’t included in the numbers below.
Here are the running totals through the end of July:
| Month | Time | Cost | Harvest | Month | Time | Cost | Harvest | |
| Jan 09 | 3.0 hrs | $131.15 | — | Jan 08 | 4.0 hrs | $27.30 | — | |
| Feb 09 | 12.0 hrs | $36.67 | $10.00 | Feb 08 | 2.5 hrs | — | — | |
| Mar 09 | 4.0 hrs | $1.00 | $5.00 | Mar 08 | 3.5 hrs | $130.00 | — | |
| Apr 09 | 3.0 hrs | — | — | Apr 08 | 5.5 hrs | $28.51 | — | |
| May 09 | 15.0 hrs | $98.55 | $5.97 | May 08 | 5.5 hrs | $110.89 | — | |
| Jun 09 | 7.0 hrs | — | $78.37 | Jun 08 | 7.0 hrs | $0.79 | $50.83 | |
| Jul 09 | 7.0 hrs | — | $243.10 | Jul 08 | 11.0 hrs | $20.94 | $123.68 | |
| Total 09 | 46.0 hrs | $267.37 | $342.44 | Total 08 | 39.0 hrs | $318.43 | $174.51 |
Final word
This garden project is not a formal experiment. Kris and I are long-time hobby gardeners, and we have set ways that we do things. This year, we’re trying to incorporate some new ideas from GRS readers, but most of the time we’ll do things the way we have for nearly 15 years.
We’re not trying to be 100% organic (though we are mostly organic through our normal practices). Nor are we trying to be 100% frugal. Instead, we’re trying to see just what our garden costs and produces based on our normal habits. We hope the results of this experiment will help us find new ways to economize and to improve our crops.
You can read about my goals for this series in The year-long GRS project: How much does a garden really save?
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Blueberries! We would love to plant a blueberry bush next spring, but we hear they’re high maintenance. Do you have to do a lot to maintain them? I would also love to plant a mini apple orchard with 2-3 different types of apple trees. We just moved into our house last year with bare landscaping, so we have lots of options. We’re total novices and haven’t started anything yet (Been busy with wedding planning), but we daydream of homemade blueberry pancakes and apple pie.
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Your pictures are beautiful! I don’t know how to garden but this makes me want to!
Blessings
Mrs. White
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you may want to check the acid levels of the soil near your blueberries. From what I’ve read they should be planted in islands of soil that are more acidic. You may need to add something acidic to the soil around them.
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Unfortunately… our garden isn’t faring well. We’ve had so much rain, that many of the plants died. And with all the rain, the bees haven’t been around to pollinate.
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Yes, it’s been outrageously hot in PDX! Loving the garden posts… I’m harvesting on a much smaller scale: 10 cucumbers, tons of basil, 4 summer squash, lots of sweet peas, a few tomatoes and 1 beet. I think this weather has finally pushed the tomatoes into ripening though!
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My garden plans were severely curtailed by life this year so my efforts got pushed into new herbs, which I could start late with little prep work. I tried some new things this year – epazote and lovage. Epazote is the herb traditionally used in Mexican beans and though I’ll probably not use even 2% of what I planted my beans finally taste authentic. The lovage is still pretty immature, but it’s sort of celery like with hollow stems – the goal is to use the stems as straws in bloody marys.
The rest of the (smaller than expected) garden is limping along. We had some water interruption while on vacation and it’s been slow to recover from that. The tomatoes should be ripe in 2 to 3 weeks, basil, parsley, cilantro and mint have been contributing fabuslous flavors to our salads and pasta. The first corn will be eaten tonight – yum!
Thanks for sharing your garden travails – it’s always fun to learn what everyone else is doing.
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JD
Do you account for water usage in figuring the cost of your garden?
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Budgie-
Blueberry bushes are a great choice for edible landscaping. I consider them pretty low maintenance, but they do need an annual pruning and fertilizer, and to be kept well-watered because they have shallow root systems. It’s been a bit too hot here for ours this year. These 100+ degree days just dried the berries right on the bushes so they never really ripened.
You don’t say where you live, but I’d check to see if there are any blueberry farmers nearby. If so, your climate is sure to be suitable for them to grow in your yard as well.
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Hot for there. We had one day in July when it didn’t hit 100. Not doing any gardening since I got done harvesting the figs.
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I have a raised-bed garden in my friend’s back yard. We planted and sowed on May 30th, and now are reaping the rewards of our hard work. Our six beds probably cost us $65 apiece, including a complex soil mixture we put together, protective netting and various types of stakes. (We could have spent less money had we known then what we know now!)
We have been chronicling everything on our blog, from the first days of indoor sowing, to building the beds to harvesting and planning for next year. It was HARD work- exhausting in the early days. Deer and rabbits have cost us our tomatoes and a couple of other plants this summer. Still, we are thrilled with our harvests thus far. We don’t regret the hard work and expenses this year because we’ve learned so much from this experience. We know now how to make next year’s crop even more successful and economical. Next year my goal is to see how much of my vegetarian diet I can supply from my own organic backyard garden.
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Wow, that’s quite a garden and a project! Good stuff. I love to water my fruit trees, but that’s about it. Gardening is definitely not a profitable venture, but it sure is relaxing and fun!
Rgds,
RB
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My blueberry bushes are 30 years old. I never water them and I never do anything to the soil. I get approximately 100 pounds of berries off of five bushes every other year. This was that year. My entire land rotates like that. One good year, one bad. Of course the garden isnt included in that. That rotation happens in the orchard and the berries. I have nothing to do with it. I guess its just natures way.
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I was raised with blueberry bushes that we had to pick every day in the summer/fall. We lived in the Maple Ridge area of B.C., Canada and it’s all peat bog land. They love acidic soil so peat moss is a good dressing for the bushes. There are several varieties of blues as well. We used to call the early ones June berries and they were small. In late summer came the ones we called grape blues because they got so big and grew in clusters like grapes. I have many memories of blueberry fights, stained t-shirts, and blue hands. All in all they are my favourite berries to this day.
Now we live in the hot interior of B.C. and we get the most fantastic gardens! Our “saucy” roma style tomatoes are going crazy. We let them crawl instead of staking them and they do wonderfully. They tend to ripen all at once so we are preparing for a major salsa and picante saucing session in about a month. We use a propane turkey cooker stand outside to do our canning. It’s the best!
The beets have done extremely well. We’ve canned many and have many, many to go. Thankfully we discovered a tasty Turkish beet salad that is a staple now for summer grazing.
Love your garden posts J.D.
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You might want to factor into your balance sheet how much you may be saving in medical costs by eating freshly harvested fruit and vegetables. Additionally, you are keeping yourselves fit and healthy by engaging in the physical work required by gardening.
And any organic gardening project, however small, will reduce the demand for petro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
So, is there anything about your gardening project that’s not ‘win-win’?
I’m growing a number of things (in Southern Cal) this year, but I’m really excited about my tomatillos, which I’m growing for the first time. They are just blossoming now, and I’m envisioning home-grown Salsa Verde in about a month.
Salud,
Da-veed
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I have a question: What do you do with the currants you freeze?
In response to Richby30Retireby40: Gardening is not profitable?? Seriously?? I have 3 kids who eat like starving people. $4 worth of green bean seeds produces enough green beans for our family for a year. All I use to can them is water and a little tiny bit of table salt. The jars they are canned in paid for themselves the second year. A couple dollars worth of zucchini, summer squash, and butternut squash seeds produce tons of food for our family for the small price of blanching them in some water and freezing them. I use this for casseroles, soups, breads, even desserts all year. $10 worth of potato cuttings grow into $50 worth of potatoes. $4 worth of lettuce seeds grew more leafy lettuce than our family and our neighbors could eat this summer. All that saves me hundreds of dollars at the grocery store throughout the year. And this is not even getting into the tomatoes, pickles, and jelly my kids go through. My kids eat approx. 25 qt. of jelly a year. I can make it for less than half the price of the store’s brand jelly. Grapevine was free, started from another grapevine. Sorry to keep going on, but it can be very profitable, if you do it right.
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Love these garden posts. We recently moved to the country and are putting in our first garden. Would you include the costs of adding soil and fencing to the “cost of produce” or amortize it across a number of years or?? We’re planning on veggies, herbs, a few fruit trees and berry bushes. We’re starting relatively small to see if we can hang with it. I think it’s a good idea to track our expenses and estimate whether we’re breaking even, or actually saving money doing this. Thanks for your blog.
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I always get a little sad when I read the garden updates. I need a yard so badly.
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I do a *ton* of gardening — in fact, this year, I’m providing a mini-CSA! I can’t remember if you mentioned this, but if you’re not doing it, seed-saving can save you a lot of money. This works best if you grow heirloom varieties, as not all hybrids breed true. (That’s part of how seed companies keep getting your money!) The International Seed Saving Institute has directions for how to save seeds for a lot of common varieties on its website for free.
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Hi I live in Portland too. My husband and I have doubled the size our garden (in SW near Multnomah Village) for the last few years. Now we are trying to figure out how to buy a farm that we’ve fallen in love with in Western Yamhill county.
Anyway, you can use your currants to make your own pectin for making jams & jellies with fruits that don’t have much of their own pectin – like strawberries.
You can find more information about it on the following website: http://www.portlandpreserve.com.
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I’m in central Texas and it’s been in the hundreds for months. My garden hasn’t produced at all, save for a handful of tomatoes. Of those, the Sweet Million cherry tomato was the best producer. Mid-month I will amend my soil, and prepare for the fall garden. My fall garden last year did fantastic, and if it can cool off, I bet it will fare far better than my spring/summer garden has. Right now I’m buying from the local farmer’s market and trying to save as many seeds as I can. I also plan to purchase some fruit trees this fall, which I have never grown before. I’m looking forward to home-grown fruit!
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Sooo . . . what are you gonna do with all of those cucumbers?
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Love your gardening updates! The jellies look like jewelry, they’re so brilliantly colored.
Scorching heat here has pretty well killed off everything except basil, some chives, one squash plant, one melon plant. The latter two have to be covered every day…everything has to be watered every single day. Tomatoes turned to mush on the vine before they ripened…dunno if they had a disease or just cooked under the searing sun. The squash plant has made one fruit: since the whole lash-up cost about $65, I call it the $65 butternut squash!
LOL! That doesn’t count the $150 water bills.
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The wife and I tried our first garden this year. Unfortunately we have a few strikes against us, in that we live on a tiny lot in the city, with massive numbers of trees shading a large portion of the back yard. This leaves us with a roughly 10 ft x 50 ft patch of yard which gets sun for at least 1/2 the day.
Even so, we ended up planting snap peas, bush beans, okra, cucumbers, radishes, strawberries, green onions, two varieties of tomatoes, raspberries and thornless blackberries.
We also planted 3 cherry trees (two varieties) just inside our property at the side of our house, along with 2 pecan trees in the front. When they mature they will shade the house, helping with cooling bills in summer in addition to providing fruits and nuts.
Unfortunately, we have been having a cool and damp summer so far, and as a result have been fighting tomato spot and cherry spot.These are bacterial ailments that thrive in damp and cool, but luckily are surface blemishes. The tomatoes can still be eaten so long as you cut off the spots, but they don’t look so hot. The cherry trees have not matured enough to fruit, so it just makes the leaves look bad.
So far, the cucumbers, the okra and the bush beans have produced the best, but the best thing is we have been learning what NOT to do next year.
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For those interested in learning some of the ‘old’ skills, I’ve recently learned of this in the Vancouver/Portland area: http://urbanfarmschool.com/
I haven’t attended a class, but it looks like a great place to learn how to do all sorts of things our grandparents knew how to do, that didn’t get passed down to us!
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Here in New York we’ve had record rainfall (16 inches in the past 8 weeks) and alomost no sun.
So my Italian parsley and sage are growing well….but my basil is midget-sized, so is my rosemary, and my thyme never grew at all. Sigh.
For my farm share, there is a tomato blight here in New York so we likely won’t get ANY tomatoes.
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We just inherited a large volume of canning jars and I thought it would be fun to share a comment from grandma and great grandma. Some of the glass jars are antique and even light coloured glass. So cool! Apparently great grandma used to call her canning, her “jewels” as she looked at her shelves of full, colourful jars. Now that is a great definition of wealth. Seeing your pictures of currant jelly brought this to mind.
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J.D.,
The red currant jelly looks delicious. Brings back some really great memories. At our summer house a few moons ago we used make, or boil, out of black and red currants juice concentrate that was then bottled and enjoyed, cold or hot, back in the city throughout the fall and winter.
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JD –
I see gooseberries and currants at the Farmers Market all the time (I usually go to the Wednesday one) — so that’s an idea for your pricing in the future?
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Re: Sarah Post 15
You are forgetting to include your time in your calculations. You’ll notice that JD is up to 39 hours of labor. Figure $20/hr (which is very, very conservative) and that’s $780 he could have made working and not gardening. While it’s obviously true JD does gardening for pleasure and not income, when talking about profitability you have to include labor.
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Ben (post #29): you make a good point when you focus only on dollars, but I find it to be a problem when we reduce *everything* to personal profit. Sarah’s labor gets her food of higher nutritional quality because she picks it fresh. She controls whether she uses pesticides and chemicals, and she gets A LOT of yield for her labor.
The time we spend in our six-bed garden would only amount to an extremely part-time job. You see, most of our labor was at the beginning: building the garden beds and fencing. We take a half hour or so every few days to water the garden (if necessary) and to put down organic liquid “fencing.” We spend maybe 15 minutes or less every few days picking herbs and veggies for dinner. In the Fall we’ll compost plants and cover the beds, and later, we’ll have to add new compost and spend time sowing and planting. This still represents less time than we have spent watching movies or doing the household shopping every weekend. In fact, we can produce our corn, lettuce, strawberries, peas, green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, watermelon, fava beans, shell peas, yellow squash, herbs, carrots, celery and cucumbers and STILL host birthday parties and bonfires, go out with friends, take a class, work, catch some television, etc.
Sure, we could be working instead of enjoying our families or reading a great book, but most people don’t aspire to fill their free time with even more work if they don’t have to. I realize this blog is about money, but “getting rich,” in my book, is about quality of life (and food!) as well.
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Our garden is ROTTING. I have never seen so much rain in my life. We are five inches over the average for the year right now. My lettuce is brown mush. I am so aggravated to see all our work was for nothing.
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My time in my garden is my “me” time. No one bothers me when I am digging in the dirt. I forget about the daily stresses and enjoy my task. Gardening is not work to me. So I figure I am saving, conservatively, $75 an hour on a therapist.
Since I began gardening years ago I tracked my spending and saving and was surprised how well I did with little effort. I am also a big advocate of all natural products VS the preservative laden stuff on grocery store shelves, so canning and freezing the harvest is easy for me.
I wanted to make a suggestion in regards to growing it all VS a farmer’s market or pick-your-own field. Here where I live in Western PA, there are a lot of farms that raise all sorts of berries and fruits and they have pick-your-own prices and by the bushel prices. You can still save a ton and have fun with the family if you go there to pick rather than cultivate the bushes or trees on your own.
Also, I am lucky to work with several farmers. I have the opportunity to buy fresh picked corn for canning and freezing rather than taking up the garden space at home. The cost for a 20 dozen sack of corn ends up pennies per serving! I am buying fresh beef in the same manner, organically raised for only $2.60 a pound, vacuum packed ready for the freezer!
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Our garden (first year) has been fantastic lately! we’ve been eating tons of eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash and hybrid tomatoes. The winter squash, watermelon, tomatillos and heirloom tomatoes are almost ready too! We have learned a lot this first year and will do better next year.
Question: are you putting in a fall/winter garden? We want to this year as we are in mild Northern California zone 8 and can probably grow a lot of stuff, but don’t know when to do it! the books say August but our summer crop will still be growing throughout August! I know it will still be warm in September, but I don’t know how the hours of daylight will affect growth for the fall plants. I need to find myself a “garden coach”!
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I’ve been enjoying following your progress! We’re out in Eastern Oregon. It’s my first season in this zone – and it’s been a challenge. I also got a very late start for reasons I couldn’t control this year.
I also want to let folks know that you don’t have to own a yard to garden – I’ve built a site called hyperlocavore.com – and I am here to help you find people to start a yard share garden with. The site is free, and we do our best to match eager gardeners with people who have space for you to grow your own! It’s a win for everyone!
Please visit!
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