The Real Costs Of Growing A Garden From Seed

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One of the topics we’ve heavily explored over recent years has been to try and quantify the “actual” costs of growing our garden from seed.

Most gardeners that grow from seed have the perception that growing your own garden starts is substantially less expensive than buying plants.

But, is it really?

Our attempt to quantify costs illustrates that this savings was not as dramatic as we had initially believed.  Growing from seed costs real money!

So, let’s explore the input costs and navigate the topic of what it takes financially to grow a garden from seed!

The Capital Costs Of Growing From Seed

Let’s start with those hard, equipment and gear related costs.

We’ve obviously purchased equipment over many years, sometimes even replacing older equipment with new stuff.  For this analysis, we’ll assume we’ve only purchased it once.

It’s also probably important to note that as long term growers, we tend to buy high quality equipment that will last.  That usually translates to higher costs.

These are the “real things” that we’ve spent “real money” on, as well as an approximation of what we spent on them:

• Grow Tent:  $120
• LED Lighting:  $1200
• Fans & Air Circulation:  $250
• Tables:  $250
• 1020 Trays:  $300
• Humidity Domes:  $100
• Seeding Trays:  $75
• Inserts & Pots:  $200
• System Controls (i.e. automation):  $100
• Miscellaneous (i.e light hangers, labels, etc.):  $100

Total:  $2695

It’s very possible we’ve missed some things.  If anything, I’d expect the “miscellaneous” category to be larger than estimated.

But, this gets us close enough to estimating our total capital costs.  We’ll discuss how we’ll analyze this, soon.

There are obviously a number of ways to reduce related capital costs, even significantly.

A Fair Way To Look At The Capital Costs Of Growing From Seed

When it comes to those up-front equipment costs, we obviously had to lay out the cash to acquire the gear.

But, compared to consumables, capital costs are a very different kind of expense.  One was an initial outlay, the other are operational costs for each season.

To fairly compare these two cost sources, we need to convert “one-time” costs into “per season” costs.

For this, we’ll borrow a very simple version of depreciation, typically used by most businesses to spread one-time cost accounting over time.

For the purposes of a simple analysis, we’ll assume the life span of our growing equipment is approximately 10 years across the board.  In reality it could be more or less, but we have to pick something.

So, if we divide those up front equipment costs ($2,695) by 10 years, we get an approximate annualized cost of $270 per growing season.

Comparing Our Costs To Nursery Bought Plants

Now, I can tell you “off the cuff” that we know these numbers pencil out in our favor.

However, this analysis would be incomplete without some form of a comparison.

Again, we’ll use 1,200 garden starts as our reference, categorizing our plants in two ways.

For a simple comparison, let’s say that 85% of the plants we grow could be purchased for $6 per 6-pack of plants.  The remaining 15% are single plants, such as tomatoes or peppers, purchased for $6 per plant.  (This is “close enough” to reality for us.)

This would translate to the following nursery based purchases:

• (170) 6-packs at $6/each, totaling $1020
• (180) Single plants at $6/each, totaling $1080

If we add that up, our rough costs for nursery bought plants would be about $2,100 per season!

Now, obviously reality is a bit more complicated.  We might find cheaper plants or make different decisions.

But, what’s interesting here is that our actual costs are only about half of what the nursery would charge!

Comparing Garden To Garden Costs

Perhaps obviously, we are running numbers for our specific nursery and circumstances.  They don’t apply to any other nursery operation.

As indicated above, some of our input costs are much higher than you might see elsewhere.  Our water costs are exceptionally high, as are energy costs.

If you live in a warmer climate or have appropriate infrastructure, you might be able to leverage the free energy of the sun much more than we can.

There’s also scale issues.  Obviously a grower that grows a few hundred garden starts will have less input costs than one growing two thousand.

Despite these differences, I’d expect that you could define a “reasonable range” of expected growing from seed costs.

Based on our calculations, I’d expect the average cost range is probably somewhere around 50 cents to a dollar per raised plant.