I’ve been meaning to start a series of posts documenting my own attempt to increase my local buying and how my garden impacts my expenses. I spent about $300 on the garden to get the tools I needed and some other one-time purchases as well as the actual soil components, boards, and seeds that I needed for each bed. For some reason, I can’t find my itemized receipts so that I can give a breakdown in expenses between one-time purchases and per-plot expenses, so that part will need to be on hold for a while. Almost all of the $300 was spent at Home Depot, a non-local, non-regional box store.
Part of my goal is to see if I can get enough food out of the garden to make up for the expense of putting it in. I can also see which plants give more value for the space they take. I suspect tomatoes and spaghetti squash will be more valuable than radishes. So far, I’ve harvested 168 grams of radishes and about 30 grams of arugula. At $2.00/lb (today’s price for squash and tomatoes at the farmers market), that works out to about $0.88 of food. Not much against the $300 I spent, but I still have quite a few things maturing.
Today on Salon, Siobhan Phillips posted a wonderful story about her adventures in organic, ethical eating: “Can we afford to eat ethically?” She and her partner try to get by on a monthly budget of $248, the government’s stated maximum amount required for two people to eat healthy, buying sustainable, organic, local, and ethical (SOLE) food. They managed, barely, with $1.20 left over.
We tend to flourish when we have constraints. A novelist who must tell her story in a single day will probably produce a much richer experience for the reader than if she had all the time in the world. Forcing a story to take place in a day makes the time of day essential to the plot. The colors of the clouds and the wetness of the grass become integral parts of the scene. The way to work is a journey rich with memories.
So it is when we constrain our food budgets for whatever reason. When we are forced to have pasta every day, we find new ways to spice it up. We explore other cultures to see how they work with common ingredients. What are the ten ways to cook cabbage? The five ways to fix eggplant? The three ways to can pears?
When we plant a garden, we are committing ourselves to having a lot of whatever we planted. If we get bored quickly by it, then it is worth nothing more than the little we eat and the time we spend tending the plants.
I put in two spaghetti squash plants knowing that one is probably more than enough to feed me through the summer, but I also want to feed my partner and have some left over to experiment with. I plan on using it in place of pasta for some meals. Since canning isn’t recommended, I’ll probably freeze quite a bit of it. I’ll be looking for a chest freezer at some point this summer, I’m sure.
Between my garden, the farmers market, and local stores such as Village Foods, I suspect I’ll be able to spend most of my grocery money locally, providing a much larger impact on the local economy than if I spent my money at the regional or national chains. The garden will have little to no impact on my personal contribution to the local economy beyond the expense of building it, but it will have the indirect benefit of allowing someone else to make local purchases instead of having to spending money at the chains because I bought the “last” of something.
Future posts in this category will detail how much I spent in each of the categories: garden (hypothetical based on harvest), farmers market, local, regional, and national. This will include both groceries and restaurants since each impacts the other.
Do you keep track of your food expenses to see how they impact the economy? What tools do you use? I’m looking at a few iPhone and desktop applications, but haven’t found the perfect tool yet.
Yeah! Go local!
I started tracking my personal food expenses (just writing them down in a spreadsheet). I was curious about how much I was spending on my food (vs Dave and I together) since I don't eat meat or dairy. The result? $77.29 for one month (and that includes splurging for local strawberries ($30 for the month) and the best olive oil EVER ($17/bottle when bought in bulk)).
Wow! That isn't much at all. There's no way I could even come close to that right now, and that's not counting the Sunday lunch and Monday dinner that is usually at a restaurant. I'm hoping the garden will help a bit. I expect I'll need to get a freezer sometime this summer as things begin piling up, though right now I'd be surprised if I got more than I need of anything other than some tomatoes and a few squash.