Boy are we glad to be at this point! We’re down to having our plants under one, single grow light and our power usage is finally going to fall off a cliff!
We always feel the indoor growing season on our pocket books. People tend to gloss over the actual expenses of growing from seed indoors. But for us, it’s painfully obvious. Our electric bill easily runs a hundred dollars over normal during the three months where we are raising our plants indoors.
We probably pay close to $300 in just electricity to start our garden each year. Add in soil, amendments, fertilizer, water and other consumables and we’re easily up to $500.
That might seem like a lot, but just the plants in this image alone are worth that! There’s over a thousand more plants that we raised in our greenhouse. We’ve never done the actual math at our current scale, but it would probably cost us over $2,000 if we were to buy all the plants that we grow. So, growing from seed is definitely a cost savings for us.
In this age of inflation, where everything costs more, the cost benefit of growing your own has never been better. We do think a lot of gardens are “upside down” in that they cost more to produce than what you get out of them. But, those scales are definitely different than they were even a few short years ago.
But, even if your garden is upside down, there’s a ton of benefits to gardening. It keeps you active and offers many opportunities to exercise. The nutrition you get from home grown food will be much better. A lot of folks don’t know this, but fresh food loses nearly 50% of its nutritional value in the first week after harvest. We also believe it helps a ton with mental health, it just feels good to get outside and grow plants. We could go on and on.
In our opinion, all those benefits are totally worth it, regardless of what gardening actually costs. It’s clear a lot of you feel the same!
