Putting a Price on Home-Grown Vegetables

I already know I reap big dividends from enjoying the superior flavor, freshness and lack of synthetic fertilizers or pesticides in my home vegetable garden. But just for fun, I like to track and weigh my harvest all season long and then calculate the value of the same produce if I were to buy it in the supermarket. When possible, I'll use current organic produce prices in the store, but if an organic equivalent isn't available, I'll use the going price for non-organic produce to establish the value of my own vegetables.

Here, without further ado, is the haul from this year's garden, ranked in order of monetary value:

Tomatoes:148 tomatoes harvested, or 63 pounds! This came from 5 plants that eventually exceeded my height. I have frozen enough to last all winter in delicious soups and stews. I also gave away quite a few to my mother and my auto mechanic. Their non-organic value I calculated at $62 (at .99/lb); I couldn't find organic tomatoes in the store on the day I checked prices, but I imagine they'd cost substantially more.

Stringbeans 25.6 lbs. I overplanted these and was rewarded with more green and yellow beans than I could pick, but I did enjoy them in lots of three-bean salads. Just tonight I enjoyed them in a curry sauce over rice. The non-organic price for stringbeans was $1.49/lb, so the value of my 25 pounds would be at least $38.11.

Lettuce: @14 servings. I have quite a bit of late-summer planted lettuce growing now, but I don't care for this variety and am not eating much of it. The 14 servings came from spring greens that I planted.

Cucumbers: 12. I only had three vines this year and one by one they were hit by wilt and kicked the bucket mid-season.

Wineberries: 4.25 cups. This is just a drop in the bucket compared to previous years, when I picked daily throughout the month of July and froze for winter use, but I was sidelined by a fear of tick encounters, and in fact, I just started on a course of antibiotics after contracting Lyme Disease for the 4th time. I'm angry with myself for letting that happen, as I really do try to be careful, but it appears I'd need to practically chain myself indoors to be assured I wouldn't be bitten.

Zucchini: 9, or 6.78 lbs. Due to space limitations and the desire to try a few new vegetables like cauliflower, collards and soybeans, I only had a single plant, which, like the cucumber vines, met a somewhat early demise.

Cherry tomatoes: 163. I had just two plants and they rewarded me with plenty of perfect little red globes I snacked on like candy. I almost prefer these to the big ones.

Snow peas: Lost my tally but estimate around 2 pounds.

Green pepper 15 (48 oz)

Cauliflower: A single 14 oz. head. These were fun to try growing, but aside from that first head, they got too buggy to consider actually eating.

Broccoli 14.5 oz. I recall only harvesting a single head of broccoli and the rest of the time I picked quite a few of those little side shoots, which worked great in stir fries, although these, too, got so full of tiny green worms that it became more work to pick them out than it was worth. They were so hard to pick out I started getting a little paranoid that I would miss one or two and end up eating them.

Collards: 16 oz. I should have been more on top of the little green worm situation before they got out of hand and riddled the collard leaves with holes.

Basil: 20 servings. I used the basil exclusively to make my own pesto sauce with olive oil, walnuts and parmesan cheese. It's addictive.

Yellow squash: 3 (31 oz). Also a mid-summer victim.

Edamame: 17 oz (unshelled). This was another of my "experiments." I enjoyed eating the bright lime green beans, but realized rather late that I would need to plant many, many more soybeans to really get a decent harvest, and that's unlikely now because I also realized they take up valuable real estate. Unlike regular beans, you have to wait til the end of the season, practically, to harvest them. So their longer growing season would seem to make them somewhat unsuitable for my smaller garden. I'd like to tell you its size, but it's irregularly shaped; it's roughly 150 square feet.

All told, my very conservative estimate of the total value of my produce is $224.39. I say conservative because I used non-organic prices for about half the vegetables, including the tomatoes, which represented the largest harvest.

After deducting for expenses (mainly seeds and seedlings), I figure I netted $170.93.

Then again, I gave away quite a bit of food to my mother, father, mechanic and a neighbor. But that's what growing vegetables is all about, I think. Sharing the bounty.

Can't wait til next year!

The Year of the Bean

Each summer's vegetable garden produces a surplus of some vegetables and a shortage of others, usually due to the vagaries of weather, insect pests and my own random planting patterns.

This year is definitely the Year of the Bean.

I planted four long rows of yellow wax beans and green string beans and I just can't keep up with picking them.

I also tried edamame for the first time this year.

I made this beautiful and delicious summer salad with the edamame I grew, along with my tomatoes:

I pictured myself eating this salad all summer long, but in truth I've only had it twice, mainly because the edamame takes so long to mature. And that's its main drawback, as far as I can see. I also failed to plant anywheres near a sufficient number of them to really enjoy them en masse. Mine are a little tiny; I may have harvested a tad early, but I read so many warnings that there's just a narrow window of time, about 10 days, to harvest the pods before they become inedible. So I watched them closely once they appeared, trying to determine if they were "bright green" (when they should be picked) or "yellowish green, when it was supposedly too late.

Unlike the yellow and green beans, which mature rapidly and can be picked for quite some time, the edamame takes up valuable real estate in the garden but is only harvestable right about now.

They're said to ripen all at the same time and so you're supposed to pull up the whole plant by the roots, as I did, and then boil the whole pods for five minutes. After that, you can easily push the beans out of the pods.

I have only so much space in the garden, so I don't know whether I'd want to plant them again next year. It was a novelty growing them, but perhaps it would be easier to buy them frozen and save space in the garden for faster growers.

In other garden news...

My single zucchini plant and single yellow squash plant bit the dust a few weeks ago, victims of the squash vine borer. I did manage to get 9 zucchinis and 3 yellow squashes, though.

My three cucumber vines also are gone due to wilt. Enjoyed 12 English cucumbers beforehand.

I'll have a complete wrapup of the season's total harvest and its monetary value, based on the organic equivalent found in the supermarket.

Right now, it's Tomato Time and I've been freezing them every other day now.