Comments on: Is a vegetable garden cost-effective?

By: Revanche

Revanche — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:06:24 +0000

Exactly like that! Only maybe it’ll take a little more bribery in the way of food treats or compensation than the complete snow job that Tom pulled.

By: funny

funny — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:00:15 +0000

@ Revanche: LOL! Sorta like Tom Sawyer convincing Huck that painting fences is great fun?

By: Revanche

Revanche — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:21:19 +0000

Regarding the rocks: perhaps some small neighborhood children would do the trick?

By: funny

funny — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:21:31 +0000

Yes, I’ve done the food scrap thing in the past, and it led to the most successful garden I’ve ever had. We’ve done a seed exchange in the neighborhood, which was fun. Really, though, packages of seeds are very cheap…what runs up the cost of plants is going out and buying plant sets.

I’d love to be able to harvest rainwater. The other day I saw a story about a guy who had hooked up his rainwater barrel to his drip watering system! Hot diggety.

But what I’d most like to know is how to get all those darn rocks out of the poolside planting bed. Every growing season I pull out all the spent plants and cultivate the ground there, pulling out a couple of containers of old gravel. Within a few months, more of the stuff has worked its way to the surface. Leafy plants such as chard and lettuce don’t seem to mind the stoney soil. But root veggies like carrots and the beloved beets don’t thrive in it.

By: Mike the Gardener

Mike the Gardener — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:10:57 +0000

There are a number of ways to make home vegetable gardening very affordable. For starters you can join a local seed exchange to save money on seeds, you can split costs of tools you might need. As for making your soil more fertile, you don't have to buy anything, simply bury food scraps and organic material all year long and let the ecosystem do the work for you. You can even save money on water by harvesting rain water with rain barrels that you can make out of any type of container (which you can probably get free on Craigslist). Regards, Mike the Gardener

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:11:24 +0000

Glad to see you concede . It’s never going to be worth it on a small scale. Actually, if you look at the government subsidies applied to farmers, it’s not really profitable on a big scale.

I see gardening as a way to relax and unwind from a high stress day of managing a large banking website. (see my link)

As you mention in your post, your math only includes raw costs, but if you include opportunity costs lost to not working, you’ll come out with much lower numbers.