Tweet
I recently read this article on Growveg.com and thought the other grapes would like to read it.
"Every now and again I get asked how much money you can save by growing your own fruit and vegetables. Of course this is a very narrow way of looking at the benefits of gardening. The exercise and fresh air, the sense of working with nature and the health benefits of freshly grown produce are all very important factors and for many people this will outweigh the economic benefits. Yet the question of monetary value is still a valid one - increasingly important as food prices continue to rise and new building developments have to balance the desirability of garden space against extra houses. So just how cost-effective is a productive fruit and vegetable garden...?
It is not easy to put a monetary value to your garden or allotment, because there are so many variants, the size of the plot, condition of soil, seasonal weather patterns etc.
However, it is possible to quantify what is produced and that’s exactly what Roger Doiron (founder of Kitchen Gardeners International) and his family set out to do over the past twelve months. Every time they harvested anything from their modest 1600 square foot (150 square metre) garden, they recorded it (I can certainly empathise with how tedious that must have been!) Then they compiled these figures into a spreadsheet and came up with an amazing 834 lb (380kg) of total harvest. From this they computed three sets of prices, comparing what the produce would have cost if bought:
A regular grocery store would have charged £1500
Their farmers’ market would have charged £1760
An organic grocery store would have charged £1850
Put like this these figures are rather impressive. OK, so Roger is a pretty good gardener and he doesn’t include any charge for the amount of time he and his family spent in the garden. On the other hand, seeds and materials cost him just £200 and they didn’t include the produce eaten while in the garden in their calculations (always a considerable amount in my experience!) or the money saved from not having to drive to a store so regularly (and the associated items that mysteriously make it into the basket!) Moreover, they were growing a range of crops many of which, such as potatoes, are considered ‘low value’. As mentioned in my previous blog article on Value to Space Rating, many people prefer to concentrate on growing what is expensive or tastes much better and this would have led to even higher returns.
Even more impressive though is this fact: If you extended Roger’s garden to a larger area of an acre you would find that it yielded £43,000 of consumer-sold crop per acre. By any standards that is very high and it serves to highlight just how efficient home gardening is. We hear a lot in the news at the moment about looming world food problems, yet few people link this to the vast patchwork of land in homes and cities. When these are mentioned there is often an assumption that they would be less productive than farm land, yet this is clearly not the case. Intensive urban gardening is high-yield, high-value and highly good for the environment!"
--------------------------------------------------
The article infers that a 1600 sq ft plot is a modest size,well I wish I had that much growing space, but you can scale down the amounts, so even with half that space it should be possible to grow about 400lb of harvestable crops.
What do you think is achievable on your plot??
"Every now and again I get asked how much money you can save by growing your own fruit and vegetables. Of course this is a very narrow way of looking at the benefits of gardening. The exercise and fresh air, the sense of working with nature and the health benefits of freshly grown produce are all very important factors and for many people this will outweigh the economic benefits. Yet the question of monetary value is still a valid one - increasingly important as food prices continue to rise and new building developments have to balance the desirability of garden space against extra houses. So just how cost-effective is a productive fruit and vegetable garden...?
It is not easy to put a monetary value to your garden or allotment, because there are so many variants, the size of the plot, condition of soil, seasonal weather patterns etc.
However, it is possible to quantify what is produced and that’s exactly what Roger Doiron (founder of Kitchen Gardeners International) and his family set out to do over the past twelve months. Every time they harvested anything from their modest 1600 square foot (150 square metre) garden, they recorded it (I can certainly empathise with how tedious that must have been!) Then they compiled these figures into a spreadsheet and came up with an amazing 834 lb (380kg) of total harvest. From this they computed three sets of prices, comparing what the produce would have cost if bought:
A regular grocery store would have charged £1500
Their farmers’ market would have charged £1760
An organic grocery store would have charged £1850
Put like this these figures are rather impressive. OK, so Roger is a pretty good gardener and he doesn’t include any charge for the amount of time he and his family spent in the garden. On the other hand, seeds and materials cost him just £200 and they didn’t include the produce eaten while in the garden in their calculations (always a considerable amount in my experience!) or the money saved from not having to drive to a store so regularly (and the associated items that mysteriously make it into the basket!) Moreover, they were growing a range of crops many of which, such as potatoes, are considered ‘low value’. As mentioned in my previous blog article on Value to Space Rating, many people prefer to concentrate on growing what is expensive or tastes much better and this would have led to even higher returns.
Even more impressive though is this fact: If you extended Roger’s garden to a larger area of an acre you would find that it yielded £43,000 of consumer-sold crop per acre. By any standards that is very high and it serves to highlight just how efficient home gardening is. We hear a lot in the news at the moment about looming world food problems, yet few people link this to the vast patchwork of land in homes and cities. When these are mentioned there is often an assumption that they would be less productive than farm land, yet this is clearly not the case. Intensive urban gardening is high-yield, high-value and highly good for the environment!"
--------------------------------------------------
The article infers that a 1600 sq ft plot is a modest size,well I wish I had that much growing space, but you can scale down the amounts, so even with half that space it should be possible to grow about 400lb of harvestable crops.
What do you think is achievable on your plot??
Comment