I missed the chance to write last week because of holiday plans, but in truth there wasn’t much to report on. At this stage of the year—after several hard frosts—the beds are what they are. The brassica which are still going will keep going, the peas and beans which were holding on in spite of it all have finally died, and the pear trees and grape vines have dropped their leaves.
That means I am spending very little time out in the garden, and am only heading down every few days or so to collect greens for the table or to think through plans for next year.
Last weekend I had our first taste of the kale and beans we’d grown this year in a lovely winter soup. The caterpillar damage isn’t ideal for photo staging, but it doesn’t make any difference on how good the greens taste once cooked!
This week, after a fair bit of hemming and hawing, I put in an order with Baker Creek Seeds for next year’s garden. The process for picking varieties was longer than I expected, and was actually a really clarifying exercise in reflecting on what I had learned about my garden in the past year, and what kind of work and produce I found most rewarding. There is a longer stand-alone post on that topic in the future I imagine, but I’ll say briefly that I bought 32 packs of seeds for a total of $108 and I am going to keep track of how much I spend on garden inputs this year as a way of gauging how ‘productive’ my garden is relative to monatary investment. I’ll think on this a bit more, but as a rough goal I think it would make sense to aim to produce 250lbs of fresh produce from my garden over the course of the year, and to spend $1.50-$2.00 per pound produced.
I will have to do a bit more noodling on how feasible this is, but I came up with these rough numbers (1) based on the assumption that each square foot of garden can produce once pound of fresh produce over the course of the year. For tomatoes this is easy, I reckon this past year my tomato bed yielded at least 2 pounds per sqft and tomatoes were the only crop I planted on it. For leafy greens I am less sure. (2) I don’t want to spend much more than $500 on the garden this year. I reckon this is doable since I spent about $1,000 setting up my garden and various indoor plants last year, and most of those costs will not come up again (the biggest spend was $300 on a compost bin). What’s more keeping to a spend of $500 would—along with my production goal—get my produce to be just below half the average price of organic produce for sale in local farmers market—which would be a nice value win.
But at the end of the day I didn’t get into home vegetable gardening for the money—just for the green!
See you next week,
George
