One of our interests in gardening is understanding the economic side of it. We call this “gardening economics” and it’s the study of input costs, garden outputs and the general “profit and loss” the garden presents.
We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but almost all home gardens are “upside down” from a cost to output perspective. If you’re trying to get traction on the economic scale, you have to be growing at a pretty decent scale like we do.
The truth is, though, most gardeners don’t do it because it saves them money. For some, it’s based in nutrition or freshness. For others, exercise or a reason to be outside. And yet others, they’re just hopeless plant addicts that simply can’t help themselves.
But, it is interesting to know “where you stand” on that economic scale. For a few years now, we’ve been tracking and measuring all the input costs that we put into both growing our garden from seed and our actual gardening efforts. Our goal was to know just how much we spend on our gardening and growing from seed.
We finally have enough average data to finish the first of two articles on this subject. In this article, linked down in the comments, we performed a full fiscal analysis on our growing from seed efforts!
Now, obviously this is our situation and yours will be necessarily different. But, it does allow us to identify a rough “per plant” cost that would likely be fairly close to most indoor seed grown nurseries.
Honestly, what we found kind of surprised us. I suspect, when we complete the full analysis, we’ll be even further surprised. The gist? We’re not as ahead as we might have thought. When you put data to paper, the “facts” transcend “belief.”
