$538. That's what the garden cost us in 2025, every receipt from the seed order in February to the daffodil bulbs last Saturday. I set the budget at $450 last winter, so we ended up $88 over.
Before I get defensive, the reason is easy to spot on the list. Take out the hardware cloth we laid along the back fence in June, after Gus ate every bean seedling, and we'd have come in $50 under. A groundhog cost us $138 and a Saturday. I'd do it again, because it held.
Where the $538 went
- Seeds: $98 (our order from Hudson Valley Seed Company and Johnny's came to $86.40, plus $11.60 in hardware store rack packets)
- Spring soil refill: $115 (four bags of Pro-Mix, five bags of compost and one bag of Tomato-tone)
- Strawberries and grow bags: $42
- Native plugs for the back fence: $63 (18 plugs at $3.50)
- Hardware cloth groundhog apron: $138
- Deer repellent: $26
- Fall mums and ornamental kale: $22
- Daffodil bulbs: $34
A few things are left off on purpose. The $1,960 for the tree limb in July was a house repair. The tick tubes, the rocking chair, the $214 summer water bill and the electricity for the seedling lights (about $12 a month from February to May) are household spending, and so are the pumpkins. They're all in the notebook, just not in the garden column. I counted the same way last year, so the two years compare fairly.
What we picked
Everything we harvested went on the kitchen scale, and the total for the year is 148 pounds, up from 122 in 2024. Tomatoes were the biggest share by far at 71 pounds, even with one plant lost to the limb. After that came peppers at 14 pounds, greens and lettuce at 12, butternut at 9 (three squash off a single vine on the chain-link), beans at 9 (all from the second sowing, since the first went to Gus), cucumbers at 8, peas at 6, strawberries at 4 and herbs at 3. Onions, radishes and odds and ends added 10 more. The fig gave us 31 figs, which weighed all of 2 pounds and were worth every one.
The log closed with the hard freeze on November 2. A little kale, sage and thyme will still come in before Thanksgiving, and I'm leaving them off instead of reopening the page.
What it would have cost at the store
I value the harvest at Stop & Shop shelf prices that I wrote down this year: $4.99 a pint for cherry tomatoes, $3.99 a pound for slicers, $2.49 for paste tomatoes, $5.99 a pound for salad greens and snap peas, $2.99 for a clamshell of basil, and so on. I use supermarket prices on purpose. Farmers market prices would make the garden look better, and I'd rather undersell it.
At those prices, 148 pounds comes to about $963. Some of the math surprised me. The 12 pounds of greens alone were worth about $72, and the 6 pounds of peas about $36. Herbs are the sneakiest line. Three pounds doesn't sound like much, but at $2.99 for a tiny plastic clamshell of basil, the bench herbs add up faster than anything else we grow.
Side by side with last year: in 2024 we spent $612 and picked 122 pounds worth about $790, so the garden came out about $178 ahead on paper, at roughly $5.02 of spending per pound. This year we spent $538 and picked 148 pounds worth about $963, which is about $425 ahead, at roughly $3.64 a pound. We grew in 34 containers, up from about 28, with twelve tomato plants (eleven after July) and forty seedlings started in the basement, most of which went home with coworkers and neighbors.
What the numbers don't say
"Ahead on paper" is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. It doesn't count my time, the water or the electricity, and a pound of Cherokee Purple still warm from the east bed, shoulders the deep red-brown of an old barn, is not really the same thing as a pound of supermarket slicers. But the numbers tell me the money is going to the right places. Seeds and soil earn their keep. Surprises are what sink the budget.
Next year: a budget with a line for the groundhog, or whoever shows up next.
