Welcome to the GRS Garden Project. Every month, my wife and I track how much time and money we spend growing food. This is the report for October 2011. (Here are the results for 2008 and the results for 2009. We rested in 2010.) This installment was written by Kris while J.D. is traveling in Peru.
Our gardening season is complete for 2011. After an initial burst of cold and rain, our October weather was surprisingly pleasant. The garden plot has been cleared and is ready for us to rake leaves over it for the winter. The birds are enjoying the dried sunflower heads, and I’m waiting for a hard frost to cut back the asparagus ferns.
Habaneros and jalapenos—made a garlic chili relish for the people who like things HOT!
October means grapes around here, as well as the end of the apples and tomatoes. I made final harvests of our chili peppers and potatoes, and I’ve been carefully meting out my precious remaining plums and last batch of fresh salsa from the fridge. It will be many long months before we have any fresh produce from our own yard.
Final tally for food put-up to date: 333.5 pints! That’s a lot of jars, and the pantry under the stairs is stacked high — more boxes are stored in the basement. That also includes the preserves that will be part of this year’s holiday gifts to our friends — we love our tradition of exchanging homemade treasures. I look forward each year to planning what I will make to share. As my friends are increasingly good at humoring me by returning my jars, and the fruits/vegetables are generally free, the cost of these gifts “boil down” to sugar and pectin! (Ha — that’s a canning pun!)
The pantry under the stairs
Oregon’s many wineries are worried about a poor harvest this year, but our grapes had their best year ever. In addition to harvesting from our own vines, I was able to pick about 30 pounds of Concord grapes from our neighbor (the millionaire next door) and made J.D.’s favorite juice and jelly to welcome him home.
One part of the grape harvest—that’s about 10 pounds
Garden clean-up and harvesting totaled about six hours of labor for the month. Here are the numbers:
- Tomatoes: 4726 grams (10.41 pounds) @ $1.99/pound = $20.72
- Seedless and seeded grapes: 24 pounds @ $2.49/pound = $59.76
- Jalapeno and habanero peppers: 1151 grams (2.54 pounds) @ $1.99/pound = $5.05
- Zucchini: one! = $0.50
- Apples: 7.7 pounds @ $1.49/pound = $11.47
- Potatoes: 9.5 pounds @ $1.49/pound = $14.16
- Herbs (all summer’s worth: rosemary, basil, thyme, sage, & chives): $50
That’s a total harvest worth $161.66 in October with no out-of-pocket expenses.
Lessons for the year
Some of our crops this year were small (currants, blackberries), bringing our annual harvest value down. But despite that, this year’s overall profit is higher than for the other years we’ve tracked our progress. Why? First of all, our costs were very low this year — we’ve got the main garden infrastructure established and didn’t need to purchase many items. In addition, I was very selective in my choice of seeds and plant starts this spring. And perhaps even more importantly, our maturing plants are producing substantial crops of asparagus, apples, plums, and grapes.
I look forward to next year’s crops from these perennial plants, as J.D. and I have been discussing taking a year off from the vegetable garden of annuals in 2012. I’ll turn my attention to the somewhat neglected flower beds instead and we’ll enjoy eating the pantry down. I think I may have enough jam to last us until 2018!
Yearly Totals
Here are this year’s totals through the end of October.
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 more than 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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Kris- I’ve really enjoyed reading the Garden Project posts this year. I hope you continue to write them in 2012. You’ve inspired this black thumb to try her hand at a small container garden of lettuce and fresh herbs (got to start somewhere, right?). We haven’t had to buy lettuce since May!!! Where did you learn to can jams, jellies and pickles? And do you also can thinks like soups, stock and stew?
I would love to start canning, particularly soups, stews, stock and tomato sauce. Please recommend some books and websites, Kris and GRS Readers!
Thank you!
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One great canning blog is foodinjars dot com
Check archives for her “canning 101″ posts which tackle a lot of questions and basics. Her recipes are great also. I know Kris reads that one becuase I found it when she made reference to it in a previous post.
The Ball canning books are a great resource.
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Canning jam, fruit and tomato sauce is easy; canning low-acid food like meat, vegetables, soup or stock is more challenging and requires a pressure canner to do safely. Check out the Ball or Bernardin sites for details.
Consider a dehydrator for stews & sauces — works like a charm and takes up a lot less space!
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Excellent article.
You have inspired me to go to the library and find some books on home gardening. I want to give this a try!
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How on earth do you get just ONE zucchini? Whenever I’ve grown them, you can’t give them all away. They’re prolific!
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Kris at GRS says: Ha! That’s one zucchini for October, before I ripped the plants out because I was sick of zucchini! Check out the previous months’ summaries for the season total.
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Well that makes MUCH more sense!
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I love that you post about this. I miss my garden so much! Even just having a few pots on the fire escape though has saved me a lot in herbs and greens.
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I really enjoy reading these updates. This year I canned tomatoes and applesauce and also froze tomatoes, tomato sauce, green peppers, green beans, strawberries and way too much pesto. I prefer freezing just because it’s so easy, but it’s much nicer seeing the rows of jars sitting in the pantry. We’re still eating fresh onions, green peppers and jalapenos. When emptying my large pots, I found three small blue potatoes, too. It’s always fun to find something unexpected like that.
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Seeing your spreadsheet is so inspiring! We have been thinking about starting a backyard garden next year, as while my fiance and I are in law and medical school, respectively, $ is understandably tight.
Any recommendations on books or blogs as a starting point for a total beginner wanting to put in a reasonably sized backyard plot? Thanks much and for posting all those helpful comparative figures. It really pays to grow your own food and yours always looks mouth-watering.
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I love your harvest tallying. I keep a garden, but I don’t keep meticulous records and so I have no idea how much it’s costing me vs. how much it’s providing. I also am (for some nonsense reason) intimidated by the idea of canning, so we either eat our produce or give it away as we pick it. I will have to get over this.
Also, I am shocked that anyone would turn down your gifts of homegrown canned vegetables. I’d snap those suckers up in a heartbeat! Thanks for sharing your progress.
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I have been gardening for about 20 years but this last year was far and away the best for me for vegetable gardening.
My husband bought 2 4×8 raised cedar beds (www.minifarmbox.com but there are others out there too. These put together like a puzzle with no tools needed, took me about 15 mins) and I couldn’t believe the yield!
I filled with a mixture of 1/4 peat, 1/4 vermiculite, 1/4 good potting soil and 1/4 compost. Used no pesticides of any kind and had no bugs, no snails, etc.
and that seems to have prevented bugs and pests of all kinds.
The raised beds were placed on top of a patio of crushed limestone (I’m going for a Provence look in the garden
I’m still getting tomatoes every day (Zone 9/Sunset 16).
I’m going to order two more for next year and we should be able to grow almost all of our produce, I’m so excited.
I’ve also purchased very large terra cotta pots (about 3-4 feet tall) and planted lime, lemon, grapefruit and blood orange trees which attract the bees and hummers, which help the garden immensely.
Love these posts, keep them coming! If I had time I’d love to start a garden blog…maybe next year
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Wow… This is a very interesting information on gardening. Looks like you had a great year! I look forward to read next year’s success. Good luck.
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this column has seriously made me consider a roof garden. i’m not kidding. my column-inspired basil plant survived the change of season and was moved indoors, but now i want something more like *a project*.
as it turns out i have a nice sunny roof and am thinking of setting up a resin box that’s i think 4×4 ft., with summer/winter domes, hose hookups, drainage, etc. add a ladder, a soaking hose, and a timer, and i’d be good to go.
is this worth it or am i nuts? (just thinking outloud)
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I always love these updates!
Amazingly, I still have one grape tomato plant that’s producing 5 or 6 tomatoes a week (I’m in Alabama). My 2 bell pepper plants gave me 6 red bell peppers in October. I planted radishes and carrots as soon as the heat backed off, and I harvested my very first (ever) radishes today.
I also planted strawberries for the first time this year and they grew like mad this summer – I can’t wait to see what I get from them next year.
I got enough basil this summer off of one plant to get a year’s worth of dried and freeze-dried basil, as well as 4 ice cube trays full of pesto (which we are going through at an alarming rate). Thyme, oregano and rosemary rounded out my herbs for the year. Next year I’m thinking of getting sage.
Over the past couple of years I have fallen in love with my dehydrator, too. It really helps me preserve things and it’s fun to experiment with it.
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inspiring!
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These are some of my favorite posts! I was noticing, we have the exact same restaurant-style shelving unit in our pantry as you guys. Someone gave us a pair a decade or so ago, and we’ve carried them with us through 3 moves.
I’m building a small “greenhouse, planting hoop” to get things through the winter. Never done this, but excited.
-NCN
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Thanks for the update, Kris. I love to read about others doing this very satisfying activity.
I garden on the south coast of Maine and have long experience as an organic gardener. For new gardeners I would recommend Edward C Smith’s The Vegetable Gardeners Bible ( Storey), anything by Eliot Coleman, or Barbara Damrosch’s Garden Primer. I think getting starting with a raised bed is the most efficient, least back-breaking way to go. I have 6 granite scrap beds DH built that warm quickly in the spring and are incredibly productive– lettuce and greens in the spring, onions,French beans, leeks kale , chard– there are still bearing as we have not had a hard frost yet(!) OUr asparagus bed is now in its 4th season and harvested almost daily for about 8 weeks. Like Kris, I limit zucchini to 2 plants and am still occasionally overwhelmed. We grow over a dozen types of tomatoes, but I would get ” Sungold” cherry tomatoes if you’re a beginner– very sweet, easy, and productive. I didnot have a good winter squash year, but lots of local farmers did so I can benefit them when I have a failure. Not every crop will do well every year, and to be a happy gardener you have to be OK with that. I did have a great pepper and eggplant year so hot sauce will be homemade and the freezer has lots of prebaked eggplant,bags of fresh sweet pepper slices and bags of whole hot peppers. I do have a small hoop for the winter– just 5 lengths of 1/2″electrical conduit bent and planted about 2 feet apart,covered with Agribon ( like Reemay) and 6ml plastic. This will be filled with spinach in March-April as well as arugula and cilantro ( planted in October). We have 3 peach trees, plum trees, blueberry bushes etc. We have apples but don’t do well with them as it’s never good enough weather in the apring to do the right organic sprays. And 2 beehives, a few hens for eggs. All on less than an acre and all managed by us– 2 busy professionals. It’s fine not to like doing this,though, and frequent local farmers markets instead. But, you may find it is one of your joys in like. I have no economic need to garden at all, but it surely provides us with a lot of nearly free food. We then make an effort to eat out about once a week at one of our great local restaurants to support them ( never ever fast food or frozen dinners from the market).
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Ha! That photo looks like my Nonno’s cantina. Especially with the San Pellegrino box. It rivals any Southern Italian’s autumn hoard
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I love these posts, thank you for the pantry photo!
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Those grapes look amazing. Always taste better when you grow them yourself as well. If you have the space and time to have a garden I would highly recommend it. Not only will you save money on buying the veggies you grow, but you will enjoy them that much more knowing that you grew them yourself.
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Just found your site and looking back at some posts. What I like is rotate my crops. I will plant gr. beans and tomatoes one year and can to last for a 1-2 years. So next summer I will plant peas and carrots the following year. I do have a salad garden for the summer. I am going to try it grow a salad garden in the house for the winter. MN winters are pretty harsh too. But this method of gardening is less stressful and just as productive.
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