I went $88 over last year's garden budget, and I would like to blame the whole thing on Gus. That's not quite fair. The groundhog cost us $138 in hardware cloth in June, but I also bought a flat of native plugs, extra grow bags and sixty daffodils, and none of that was his fault. The final number for 2025 was $538 against a $450 budget, which I wrote up in November along with the harvest: 148 pounds of food worth about $963 at grocery store prices.
This morning, with the tree still up and the last of the holiday cookies on the counter, I sat down with the notebook and set the 2026 number. It's $500.
Why $500 and not $450 again
Honestly, $450 was a wish. I picked it in early 2025 because it sounded responsible after 2024, when we had no budget at all and spent $612. Then the year happened. If I take out the one-time hardware cloth job, our 2025 spending was right around $400, which means the $450 had about $50 of room for everything that goes wrong in a garden. Something always goes wrong in a garden.
For 2026 I'm also planning a few deliberate things I didn't do last year: a soil test for both raised beds, a third shop light for the seedling shelf, a thermostat for the heat mat, and a small test of self-watering planters on the hottest end of the porch. Adding those up, a $450 budget would have been broken by March. $500 is a number I think I can actually hit.
How the $500 breaks down
Here's the plan, line by line, written into the front of this year's notebook in green pencil.
- Seeds: $85. Last year was $98. I saved tomato and pepper seed in September, so this should come down.
- Seed-starting gear: $50, for one more 4-foot LED shop light and a thermostat for the heat mat.
- Soil test: $36, for two samples through Cornell Cooperative Extension at $18 each.
- Soil, compost and fertilizer: $100. The spring refill was $115 last year, and I'm hoping the test tells me the beds need less than I've been giving them.
- Flowers: $80. About $20 for pansies and violas for the rail boxes, and about $60 for native plugs for the bare border beside the porch.
- Containers: $65 for two self-watering planters to test against terra cotta.
- Garden pest control: $60. Bobbex is $26 a quart, and the deer don't take a year off. The rest covers neem oil and some insect netting.
- Cushion: $24.
That cushion is small on purpose. Last year I didn't have a pest line at all, so when Gus ate every bean seedling, the fix came out of nowhere and broke the whole plan. This year the deer spray and netting have their own line, and the cushion is for real surprises, not for a September clearance aisle. (The clearance aisle will be tempting. It always is.)
What stays out of the garden budget
Deciding what counts was the most useful part of the morning. These stay out, the same as last year.
Tick tubes go in the household budget, because they're about our family, not the tomatoes. Water bills are household too. So are house repairs, porch furniture and anything we cook with, like the pumpkins I bought in October.
The big one this year is the rain barrel project. After last summer's $214 water bill, Nate and I want two rain barrels on the back downspouts, diverter kits and a drip line on a timer for the raised beds. I priced it all at around $300, which would swallow more than half the garden budget by itself. So it gets its own line, paid out of the house fund, and I'll track it separately along with whatever it saves on water. If I folded it into the $500, I'd either skip things the garden really needs or pretend I hadn't spent it, and neither feels honest.
Receipts go in a big envelope taped inside the pantry door, same as last year. On the first Sunday of each month I add them up in the notebook and compare them against each line. It takes about ten minutes, and it's the only reason I know any of these numbers.
Right now the envelope says GARDEN 2026 in black marker, and it's empty. That should last until about Friday, when the seed orders go in.
