The receipts lived in a gallon freezer bag in the kitchen junk drawer all of last year, along with twist ties, a dead AA battery and the warranty card for a toaster we no longer own. Yesterday I dumped the bag onto the kitchen table, poured a second coffee and added up every garden purchase from 2024. A few of the April receipts had faded to a ghostly lavender gray, and I had to tilt them under the kitchen light like old letters. The total was $612.
I've kept a garden notebook since 2020, the spring this whole thing started with four pots of basil on the front porch. I log what I sow, what comes up and what we pick, and every harvest gets weighed on the kitchen scale. What I never did was put the spending on the same page as the harvest. This winter I finally did, partly out of curiosity and partly because I teach elementary art for a living, and "it's probably fine" is not a budget.
Where the $612 went
Here is 2024, grouped the way I wish I had tracked it from the start:
- Seeds: $104. One catalog order in winter, then far too many packets off the hardware store rack in April.
- Soil and compost: $188. Potting mix for roughly 28 containers, plus compost to top up the two raised beds.
- Pots and grow bags: $96. The container count kept creeping up all season.
- Tomato cages: $64. For ten tomato plants, a few of which flattened their cages by August anyway.
- Nursery plants: $92. Herbs, window box annuals and my one splurge trip of the year to Rosedale Nurseries in Hawthorne.
- Fence repair: $68. Parts for a sagging stretch of the chain-link fence on the north side of the yard.
The fence is the line people might argue with. That chain-link, which we share with our neighbors Sal and Joanne, is my snap pea trellis every spring, and the top rail had pulled loose right where the peas grow. Nate fixed it one Saturday with a new length of rail and some tension wire. If the peas didn't depend on it, it would have gone in the house column. They do, so it's garden money.
What came back
We picked 122 pounds of food last year from a covered porch and a backyard you can cross in a dozen steps. Tomatoes were the biggest share by a mile, followed by a long tail of peppers, greens, snap peas, cucumbers, beans and herbs.
To put a dollar figure on it, I took the notebook to Stop & Shop in January and wrote down shelf prices: $3.99 a pound for slicing and heirloom tomatoes, $2.49 for paste tomatoes, $4.99 for a pint of cherry tomatoes, $5.99 a pound for snap peas and salad greens, $1.49 for a single sweet pepper. Then I went down the harvest log line by line. It came to roughly $790.
I used supermarket prices on purpose. At the Pleasantville Farmers Market on an August Saturday, an heirloom tomato costs a good deal more than $3.99 a pound, and with those numbers I could make the garden look like a gold mine. I'd rather undercount. The honest version is that the garden came out about $178 ahead, before counting my time, the summer water bill or the electricity for the seed shelf in the basement.
What I'd do differently
Seeing it all on one page was a little humbling. Seeds were the worst line. $104 is a lot for two 4-by-8 beds and a porch, and I know exactly how it happened: I ordered in winter, then stood in front of the seed rack in April with no list and a good mood. Half of those April packets are still sealed in the shoebox on the basement shelf.
Soil was the other surprise. Spending $188 means I bought a new bag every time a pot looked tired instead of refreshing the old mix with compost. I knew better. I just didn't plan for it, and the Subaru made a lot of short trips to the store.
The cone-shaped tomato cages were partly a mistake too. They fold over by August under a big heirloom, and I spent half of last summer propping them up with bamboo. I'm not buying more of them, and this year the porch buckets get tall stakes tied to the railing instead.
A number for 2025
This year I'm setting an actual budget for the first time: $450 for everything that goes into the garden, from seeds and soil to whatever surprise the deer hand me. Water bills and the electricity for the seed lights stay out of it, the same way the kitchen scale and my canvas apron do. If I come in under, good. If I go over, at least I'll know which line did it.
The receipts went back into a fresh freezer bag, and the bag went back in the drawer. This time it has a label on it, written in permanent marker in my best whiteboard handwriting.
