I cannot comment very much on this book as a recipe book (I haven't made anything from it yet), but as an analysis of the economics of making things at home, I find it very interesting. It plays nicely into the debate Gus and I are having about the value of homesteading. Gus points out that homesteading in its truest form is basically poverty. He is certainly right that none of us would likely enjoy the true homesteading of the pioneer days... but today it seems almost the opposite of poverty.
Consider lawns. Originally they were kept only by the rich, because poorer people could not afford to devote land to anything other than food production. As people got richer they all clamored to have lawns (and the status that came with them) and soon they were ubiquitous. Once everyone had one they no longer had status,unless you kept them weed free because that was hard to do. Not everyone could do it...you either had lots of time (a luxury) or enough money to hire a lawn care company. On the same note, vegetable gardening, once considered a low status drudgery, is rebounding. Only those of us rich enough to have someone tend a garden can afford to do it. Today's "homesteader" is someone with enough time or money to devote a lot of time to food production, while still enjoying the other amenities of modern society. So it seems that today homesteading is the exact opposite of poverty.
Here is the thing, though....I don't want to think about my homesteading as an expensive, status earning hobby for rich people. I want to think it is value producing....that somehow I am saving us money and improving the quality of our lives. Which is why a book that breaks down, economically, what items are worth making is so interesting to me. Unfortunately, while Reese covers chickens, cheese, goats and bees(things I lust over) in humorous detail, she pretty much utterly fails on things like gardening and canning.(the things I actually do). So I've decided to add a few of my own items (Reese style) to these sections.
I think canning might just be a loss. Canned goods are cheap in the stores and really benefit from economies of scale. If you have lots of "free" abundance from your garden then perhaps it is worth it. Otherwise it is almost certainly as expensive as buying it...though in my humble opinion the quality of home canning is often superior.
Where I really want to focus is where you get the most bang for your buck in the garden. I don't have the time to do a full Reese style break down, so I'm choosing my top five grow it yourself picks and my top 5 buy picks. Of course there is a lot of stuff in the middle...and I still grow many of my buy picks.
Greta's top GROW picks:
Rhubarb
Rhubarb is one of my kids favorite snacking foods. They love to wander into the garden and grab a stalk which they dip in sugar. I would grow it for this alone, but it also makes excellent deserts.
Cost: A small bunch of rhubarb at the market costs me $3. Conservatively, I will harvest roughly 20 bunches of rhubarb (this year I will try to keep track) in a season. That is roughly $60 in rhubarb in a single year. I have four plants that cost me $5 each at the market for a total of $20. The first year after they were planted I did not harvest from them so that they could establish. The second year I paid off my investment in full and then some. Every year after that I have gotten farther into the black.
Care: Rhubarb requires next to no care. You plant it once and it comes up every year after that. It is dead easy to harvest and only needs to be watered after many days of no rain. It shades everything near it so weeding isn't really necessary, and it grows in part shade, which is great for those of us that decided to garden on a wooded lot (oops).
Disease: Rhubarb is supposed to be very hardy. My rhubarb has a fungal root rot. My rhubarb is always dead by the end of July. This does not seem to keep it from coming back in force the next year and providing us with $60 of rhubarb. I probably should see if I can do something about the rot though.
Asparagus
Asparagus is prized in our garden (by me, the kids don't like it) because it is the first vegetable ready in the spring. The big down side of asparagus is that you need to wait a few years for the bed to mature before you can start harvesting.
Cost: A bunch of Asparagus in peak season usually costs me about $1.50. This year we got roughly 6 bunches from our garden...but some of our asparagus is not yet fully mature and I was conservative in my harvest. Still that is $9 in asparagus. Last year I harvested $6 in asparagus. I have spent about $15 on roots and seeds, so I have only now paid off my investment. If you plant exclusively from seeds you could get an asparagus patch the size of mine out of one seed packet (roughly $2-$3), but you'd wait a long time for your first harvest.
Care:Asparagus requires next to no care and is a beautiful decorative fern. Asparagus must be planted once and watered during extreme drought. In the fall I add manure or compost to my asparagus bed. I weed it only irregularly and pull out only large weeds. Sometimes some of my ferns flop over and need to be staked. Harvest is dead easy and asparagus is the first vegetable ready in the spring.
Disease: I haven't had any. but apparently they can get rust and fungal infections.
Alfalfa Sprouts
Strictly speaking we do not grown these in the garden. We grow them indoors in a jar through most of the winter....but they are SO worth it that I needed to include them. They have two really major advantages. (1) You can grown them indoors in the winter when you are devoid of fresh vegetables and (2) they are dead easy.
Cost: A package of sprouts at the grocery store costs $1.50. We paid $5.00 for a package of organic sprout seeds which has made us many many jars of sprouts ( I can't even estimate how many). Before we went the organic route we bought the sprout seeds at a farm supply store for only a dollar or two and the seeds lasted us years. The return on investment here is so ridiculously good that sprouts are pretty much a no-brainer.
Care: We put roughly three tablespoons of sprout seeds in a jar and soak them for 8 hours. After that we rinse and drain them once or twice a day when we are at the sink (a process that takes less than a minute). We continue this for 5 or 6 days until they are ready to eat. That's it.
Disease: People worry about e-coli...but I have yet to encounter any problem. Once our twice we have not rinsed our sprouts enough and they have gone funky...but we could smell it and didn't eat them.
Herbs
Herbs are the part-shade gardeners best friend. They also look great in front yard gardens and they are very versatile. It doesn't get easier than looking after herbs and they are a great addition to a lot of different foods. My favorite uses are adding them to soup broths, stuffing chickens with them and making herb butters. My daughter LOVES to harvest her own lemon balm for tea.
Cost: Herbs at the grocery store cost about $1.50 for a couple of sprigs of herbs, depending on exactly what you are buying. If you are like me, you need only half of what you buy and the other half goes bad in your fridge. I usually buy herb seedlings to plant in the garden that cost around $2. If you harvest that herb twice all summer you have paid back your investment. Plus, most of my herbs are perennials (sage, thyme, tarragon, chives, mint, lemon balm, oregano, dill and cilantro - the although technically the latter to actually just replant themselves each year) so I only need to buy a seedling once.
Care: I plant my herbs and water them in droughts. If you want leafier more flavourful herbs you can pinch off the flowers. Harvest is easy.
Disease: I haven't had any diseases that did anything worse then add a few spots to some leaves.
Zuchinni
Zuchinni has the reputation of being the vegetable everyone is trying to get rid of, largely because it is such a prolific producer. It is also easy to harvest and incredibly versatile, which makes it a great candidate for the "grow" list.
Cost: You can start zucchini from seed, in which case a single plant costs only a few cents. I tend to buy seedlings because I like the heads start (and I don't have great resources for starting them myself). My seedling cost $1.50 for four plants. Warning: If you plant all four plants you will be eating zucchini every day until you die (of zucchini overdose). A single zucchini at the market costs about $1, so I pay back the cost of my plant as soon as I pick my second zucchini.
Care: Plant them. Water them. Pick them (which is easy). Zucchini are aggressive and easy to care for.
Disease: Mine died the past two years...something fungal I think. It was sad. I still harvest enough zucchini of them to more than pay back my investment.
Runner ups:
There are a couple other things in the garden that really struggled for a spot on this list. The one that comes most quickly to mind is our raspberries. We love them and they are our kids favorite snack stop in the garden... but the problem with most berries is that they are time consuming to harvest (and the birds will do it for you if you aren't careful). If you count your labor to pick them most economic gains of growing them yourselves are lost. Add to that that my raspberries are so veracious that I need to spend much of my summer pulling them out of the rest of the garden and...well they got cut from the list.
Garden cucumber almost made it too. The cucumbers I've planted have produced year after year nearly as well as the zucchini and probably with a little less disease. But cucumber is not nearly as versatile in cooking as zucchini, so the abundance is a little less useful. Cucumber is a great pick if you like to make pickles. Green and yellow beans have basically all the same pros and cons as cucumber, although they are a little more work to pick.
Top BUY picks:
Tomatoes
Tomatoes are the signature garden plant that even non-gardeners tend to have in a pot on their balcony. It is a little strange, then, that they are on my buy list. While I love home grown tomatoes and attempt growing them every year, they made the buy list because they are so disease susceptible. I`ve grown tomatoes every year for the last 7 years or so and only once did they get through the summer without succumbing to something. That year the chipmunks really enjoyed the ripe fruit....
Cost: These should be cost effective. I can buy a four pack of tomato seedlings for $1.50 and the internet things each of these plants should produce about 25lbs per plant. At the 99 cents/lbs you pay in the grocery store, that is a substantial savings. But I almost never seen that kind of harvest from my tomato plants. Although, I suppose that the one year I did get a good harvest made up economically for the 5 years that I didn't.
Care: Tomato plants need to be pruned and staked, which all ready means they require more care than many of the vegetables in my garden. Usually my tomatoes are growing crazy and wild by mid July. To avoid disease I need to mulch and cover the soil with black plastic, I also plant them with ground egg shells and chicken manure to avoid nutrient deficiencies...in other words, they require some babying.
Disease: My tomatoes has gotten sick and died ALOT. I usually get some tomatoes off them, but not many. Their remarkable disease susceptibility is the main reason I am putting tomatoes in my buy list. The good news is that I recently stumbled on some more disease resistant tomatoes that have improved my yields.
Broccoli/cauliflower
I grew broccoli once. It tasted like tires. Maybe I didn`t water it enough. I`ve grown cauliflower successfully a few different times, and except for the worms inside it, it tasted great. But both broccoli and cauliflower are really space inefficient. You need an entire plant in order to get one head of cauliflower or broccoli.
Cost: A pack of 4 broccoli or cauliflower seedlings costs $1.50. They produce 1 head per plant. Broccoli from the market in the summer usually costs between $1-$2 a head. That isn't a substantial savings. Obviously I could save more if I started the plants myself, but they require so much space for so little vegetable that they usually don't get a spot in my space restricted garden.
Care: I have found them easy to care for, although broccoli does require frequent watering to avoid the tire taste.
Disease: Cabbage moths! But they can be avoided by covering your plants. Much less beautiful but more appetizing to eat without the green little worms.
Melons
I keep trying to grow Melons. They might be a great choice for people in tropical climates, but I find I just do not have a long enough and warm enough season to grow them. To work, they require babying. Start them early, and cover them in the fall to extend their season. Give them very rich soil, lots of sun and lots of space for the spreading vines. At the end of all that work, they are usually very tiny and not ripe. They just can`t compare to the huge juicy melons I buy at the local farmer`s market for $3.
Cost: Again, a 4 pack of seedlings costs around $1.50. I've never really gotten any melons worth the name so I consider that all money that is lost.
Care: They need lots of warmth, lots of sun and lots of nutrients, plus a long growing season....which basically explains why I haven't been a successful melon grower.
Disease: Malnutrition always killed my plants before disease had a chance.
Fruit Trees
Our neighbors have a giant Macintosh apple tree in their backyard. Every fall we harvest from it and make delicious apple sauce and cider. I definitely covet their apple tree, but even this successful tree is a lot of maintenance. It requires pruning in often hard to reach places and attracts many wasps through out the fall season. They spend a great deal of effort picking up rotten apples and dodging wasp stings (which is never completely successful). I should caution, though, that some of these issues would be alleviated if they had planted a dwarf tree.
Cost: I only ever bought one fruit tree. A peach tree. It cost me roughly $70 to buy. You could probably get them cheaper, but I wanted one that would produce fruit right away the following year. I also bought $30 spray. I was told peach trees absolutely needed to be sprayed as they were very disease prone. My tree died before the next year and I never harvested a single peach, so that is $100 in the red.
Care: Fruit trees need a lot of space and all require spring pruning. Most require protection from pests especially the fruit. If you want, you can fit some fruit trees into small areas by pruning them into fans or cordons but that requires more money spent on trellis materials and labor intensive pruning.
Disease: This varies a lot with the tree. Most people I know with fruit trees. though, need to spray them if they want to avoid worms and pests.
Berries
It really bothers me to include berries in this list. As mentioned above I almost put Raspberries on my top plant list. My yard has 8 different types of berries planted (if you could cherries and grapes). My kids love eating berries and they are expensive to buy. But, with the possible exception of raspberries, our berries haven`t been very economical. I`ve spent a lot of money and effort protecting them from pests and somehow the pests still seem to get most of the fruit. Add to that that berries are very time consuming to pick and the initial plants are expensive to buy. If your time is valued very highly than you won`t find they are particularly economical. That said, I have no plans to remove my berry bushes and I`ve sunk yet more money into protecting them :)
Cost: I got my raspberry plants for free. Most of my berry bushes cost around $15-$20 a bush. A pint of berries at the market usually runs between $2-$4 depending on the berry. How many berries my bushes produce depends a lot on the plant, but most would pay for themselves in a couple of years provided you don't factor in the time required to pick the berries. Unfortunately, that time is the majority of the cost in the berries we buy, so it is not negligible.
Care: Berry bushes need pruning, sometimes staking and mostly protection from birds and other animals that want your berries even more than you do. I have lost the majority of my berry harvests to these critters in spite of efforts to protect them. I recently bought 3 great tents for protecting my bushes at $50/tent. So far they have worked well, but now I have another $150 to pay off with berry harvests.
Disease: My berry plants have not suffered extensively from disease.
No comments:
Post a Comment